Final Paper
A sustainable process or condition is one that can be maintained indefinitely without progressive diminution of valued qualities inside or outside the system in which the process operates or the condition prevails. (We exclude from consideration, in applying this definition, the depletion of available energy from the sun on a time scale of several billion years!) Such a definition may be logically appealing, but it is hardly sufficient for addressing the meaning of sustainability in the context of practical choices about how to maintain or improve the well-being of humans on this planet. What kinds of processes and conditions need to be sustained in the interest of maintaining or improving well-being? What are the sources and dimensions of the main threats to the sustainability of these? What places should be investigated and what should be measured to find out? Can sustainability be made compatible with -- or traded off against -- other desiderata relating to policy choices? (Consider, for example, sustainable development versus rapid development).
The proposition that particular human practices would prove unsustainable has cropped up in literature going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and somewhat more frequently and sweepingly in the two hundred years since the work of Malthus, above all in the period since World War II. Only in the past five years, however, has sustainability become a catchword capable of capturing the attention not only of environmental scientists and activists but also of (some) mainstream economists, other social scientists, and policymakers.
This enhanced salience presumably resulted from a suite of coincident factors. For one, the world community is no longer transfixed by the Cold War. A second factor is the reluctant appreciation of the severity of the debt crisis in the developing world. A third is the substantial