Green vs. Sustainable
Sustainability is very often confused with ‘Going-Green’, whereas the latter is but a slice to be adopted in the overall process towards Sustainability.
According to the EPA ‘Sustainability is based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment.’
I believe that prior to defining sustainability, we need to breakdown the ‘natural environment’ of the Modern Man; a natural environment for the 21st century has many essential factors that transcend nature and the organic, keywords such as Society, Economy and Environment have become the 3 crucial aspects of study in order to gauge a product’s sustainability level.
Eco-economist Herman Daly once asked, “What use is a sawmill without a forest?” A viewpoint that implies that the economy is a subsystem of society, which itself is a subsystem of the environment, and an increase in one area, is a loss from another.
Therefore, sustainability is perceived as a balance based on equilibrium of several factors, where each factor is equally responsible for the overall ‘health’ of society, and by consequence the biosphere altogether.
