WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY? 
Sustainability is seeing things whole and acting accordingly.
Questions about what constitutes “the good life” are not new - nor is the concept of sustainability. Societies around the world have been asking what constitutes “quality of life” - and how to best organize themselves to pursue it - since antiquity, and our answers have always depended on how we view ourselves as citizens, communities, and, ultimately, as human beings.
What is relatively new, however, is that our collective actions now affect not only ourselves or even just our families and surrounding communities. Our actions affect everything and everyone - and often for generations. Over 6.6 billion people live on Earth today (1): humanity is a geologic force, and we have transformed our atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and cultures on a global scale. Our collective decisions on everything from energy production to materials consumption to healthcare to education to the arts reverberate around our networked globe.
What we continue to conclude is necessary for the “good life” impacts future generations and the planet as a whole on a dramatic scale. As a result, the need for all societies to embrace sustainability has never been more urgent - for the future of humanity and for many of the fellow species and systems that share the planet with us and support our survival.
Sustainability is...
Sustainability is seeing things whole and acting accordingly.
Sustainability itself has become a fragmented idea. Many equate sustainability with sustainable development, defined by the United Nations Brundtland Commission’s “Our Common Future” (1987) as “the ability to provide for the needs of the world's current population without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves" (2). Others equate sustainability with narrowly construed notions of the “environment” or “greening.” But sustainability is neither.
While it is strongly associated with the need to protect the natural environment and to provide for the needs of current populations without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves, sustainability is a framework for living that focuses on interconnections and requires us to act responsibly in light of them -- to make decisions informed by ethical reasoning that is grounded in a holistic perspective.
- Sustainability provides a systematic framework focused on maintaining the integrity of four foundational systems (biodiversity, climate, food, and culture) that sustain human communities.
- Sustainability is a social reform project that asks us to critically appraise our institutions, values, and knowledge.
- Sustainability promotes vibrant communities that are rooted in place and participation, celebrate diverse social and cultural landscapes, enrich learning, and stimulate both engaged scholarship and public discourse.
- Sustainability presents the inescapable questions of “what is the good life” and “how do we organize society to sustain a good life now and for generations to come, for everyone?” People have been asking these questions for thousands of years, and so sustainability is not a new concept. But when we talk about sustainability, most of the old, familiar rules no longer apply: this is the case not only for organizational boundaries, but for moral, ethical and intellectual boundaries as well.
- Through sustainability we weave together disparate ways of thinking, integrate knowledge from different disciplines, and connect issues and problems in ways that foster health and integrity over generations.
Why sustainability in higher education?
As with all our cultural institutions - from communities to businesses to our democracy - higher education patterns our lives and embodies our values. Large educational and research communities, colleges and universities exert significant ecological, economic, and cultural force in their immediate region and extended surroundings.
What’s more, through what it teaches, what it researches, and how it engages with those outside its ivory towers, higher education can help transform the unprecedented challenges we face today into opportunities.
Consider the following:
- Colleges and universities are communities, and the community teaches. Everything is curriculum, and everyone is an educator. Often students learn just as much from the other students, staff, and local community members with whom they interact on campus as they do from their professors. Education results from the community experience of learners, not simply what takes place in classrooms. Discussions in dorm rooms, in cafeterias, on buses, and on playing fields. Work study jobs, internships, and volunteer work. Extracurricular activities. Films, performances, and guest speakers. Even just walking across a campus itself and noticing the diversity of people and the elements of the campus landscape can inform and influence students, faculty, and staff in subtle yet profound ways. Imagine the impact, then, when a college or university integrates sustainability throughout its core mission and identity. From UNH’s Student Energy Waste Watch Challenge to its Organic Garden Club to its University-wide Dialogues on topics like energy and democracy, UNH is fostering out-of-the-classroom, experiential learning in sustainability, and opportunities to expand and integrate such learning are vast.
- Colleges and universities can serve as sustainable community models. Institutions of higher education are mini towns and cities often complete with their own power plants, dining areas, transportation and water systems, and healthcare services. From this perspective, core university functions that traditionally are viewed as providing logistical support for the academic mission become an active and intentional part of the curriculum. In this vein, UNH is continually transforming into a Sustainable Learning Community -- a land grant, sea grant, and space grant university that unites the spirit of discovery with the challenge of sustainability across its Curriculum, Operations, Research and Engagement (CORE) through four initiatives designed around four foundational systems of sustainability -- biodiversity, climate, food, and culture. When these interactions are integrated across the "CORE" of an institution like UNH, we move toward a Sustainable Learning Community (5).
- Colleges and universities can serve society with scholarship. As the UNH Democracy Imperative states, “As a community of practice, we work together to deepen our own knowledge and skills. As a national network, we serve as advocates and resources for colleges and universities interested in developing educational research and programs in understanding, practicing, and modeling deliberative democracy” (3).
- Colleges and universities can foster engaged citizenship. Colleges and universities can be places of “inclusive dialogue, public deliberation, and broad citizen participation” - “all essential to the continuing development of a healthy democratic society” and to sustainability more broadly (4). By fostering opportunities for reflection, deliberation, dialogue, study, growth, and change, colleges and universities can help transform us from consumers driven solely by convenience and price back into engaged citizens with the capacity to foster sustainability.
Education in our time can, should, and must promote sustainability.
References
- http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
- The Report of the Brundtland Commission, "Our Common Future (PDF)," and formally the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), was published by Oxford University Press in 1987. You can also find a copy here.
- UNH Democracy Imperative
- UNH Democracy Imperative
- Kelly, T. (November 2003). "Building a Sustainable Learning Community at the University of New Hampshire." Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, 6(2); and Kelly, T. (April 2003). "What is Sustainability?" NH Forum. (PDF)
More Information
- Learn more about our vision, mission and philosophy
- Learn more about UNH's varied successes in sustainability
- See how the principles and practices of sustainability map across the entire UNH Durham campus
- Read UNH President Mark Huddleston's "Embracing Sustainability" (April 2008)
- Download the UOS brochure (PDF)
- Learn more about sustainability and the United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development
