Sustainability of what?
Chasing for sustainability is different for everyone. Is there any objective definition for it?
Sustainable, unsustainable and sustainability… These words are being used every day created from the word ‘sustain’. Do we really need to use these words that much?
Are you sustainable? I mean what do you think about yourself when it comes to being sustainable? We are in a search for everything we use, connect or manage to be sustainable.
But what about us?
I would like to use a different approach to answer these questions. What is sustainability really? How could someone or something be sustainable? These two questions will lead my approach.
In reality, sustainability is a feature belongs to someone or something which keeps its benefits for all. We, as human beings, would like to see the world as a constant and unchanging environment, so that we feel safe in all aspects. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of the reality. Environment around us is a continuous whole of processes. During these processes all the things are getting through, nothing could keep the same level of the same beneficial feature. While everything evolving, being sustainable is a kind of having slow motion aging.
As you can easily understand, sustainability is connected with entropy.
Me, as a person, can live a sustainable life. The meaning of sustainability for me is being alive and healthy. Because when you think about your body to be sustainable, it means your body will continue to act, react and be there for you. In this regard, everybody or let’s say most of the people would like to live a sustainable life. But this sustainable body could damage other beings in an unsustainable way. If this is the case, it is not the desired sustainability at all.
Sooner or later, every living being will lose its functionality. Actually this is also true for non-living beings, but generally at a lower speed. It seems that everything is unsustainable in the end. So, when we talk about sustainability of something, it should mean that it would be sustainable during the time it performs until the ability to perform totally ends.
If we turn back to the first questions in the beginning, we could say there is no objective definition valid for everyone or everything. Being sustainable alone is easy, and losing this preference is also easy because of the nature’s functioning system. The difficult thing is to be sustainable all together which is the real meaning we should be seeking of. All the beings in nature are in connection, and this connection finds its meaning in sustainability.
When a question arises asking of sustainability of something, we should also ask for the sustainability of the things it is closely related. That’s how we could understand if there is a sustainable environment around this something or is this something able to expand the sustainability around itself.