Defining Ecological and Social
Sustainability
(an ongoing draft).
It would not
be constructive to try to create yet more definitions of
"ecological and/or social sustainability", since there exists many
of those already. From the great number of those definitions it
could be concluded that to arrive at any precise definitions of
"ecological and/or social sustainability" would be difficult, due
to the great variety of subjective points of view of ecology and
social systems that might make a formulation of universally usable
definitions of those quite impossible.
However--what could be attempted is to try to make a few simple,
easily understandable "rules of thumb" that could be used by
generally any member of the society, not just by specialists only
in situations where it would have to decided what would be more
eco-socially sustainable and what would not be so. Basically,
applying the principle of "parsimony" would be most useful in such
situations.
When comparing a several solutions to an environmental and/or a
social problem, the solutions that are simpler and easier to
understand, even by a non-specialist, should generally be considered
more ecologically and/or socially sustainable, as long as there are
no participants who are involved in the problems under the
consideration whose well-being would be left out of the
considerations.
No such solutions should ever create more ecological and/or social
problems that would further worsen the overall ecological and
social sustainability of the what-so-ever system under
consideration.
A general observation pertaining to the sustainability of a
solution to problems of sustainability could be that simpler, less
complex social structure permits easier monitoring of processes
affecting the ecological conditions, and,vice versa, that simpler
solutions to ecological sustainability problems require a less
complex society to implement those.
© - "ModelEarth"; re-producing of
the above is permitted only without changing of the
content.
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