The ambiguity of sustainability

It’s one of those words that people keep bantering about --sustainability. And historically, it’s a fairly recent one, around the decade 1990 per my reckoning. I may be mistaken of course, but that’s when I noticed the word come into prominence in the discussions concerning development. The original meaning has been lost --that which “ensures that present acts or activities provide for the continuous support for future generations.” Nowadays, everyone ties the term to environmental protection.

Which is not wrong, per se, since sustaining the future generations has mostly a lot to do with protecting the environment. But along the way, it shifted its focus to simply that, protecting the environment, forgetting the reason we do in the first place --to sustain the future generation. To sustain mankind…to sustain man. The entire raison d'être of environmental protection is to sustain man. We protect the environment to serve man, not for itself.

I remember a seasoned mentor who explained this to me a long time ago, and he started with his statement: “Almost everything that man does invariably destroys or affects the environment.” You make a garden, and you destroy a lot of habitats of erstwhile happy resident organisms in the soil, destroying their environment. You build a house, and you change the landscape, usually clearing all plants and trees in that area. Do environmentalists object? Of course not. You are building a home for yourself and your family. You have to destroy some environment in the process. So did they when they built their homes. Everything that we do invariably affects the environment in some negative way to a certain extent.

How about clearing a small portion of a forest to build a solar power generating farm? Shall we stop one because the forest and many of its natural habitats will be degraded? What if a growing city needs to expand to house a burgeoning population but it is surrounded by farms? Do we tell the people to move somewhere else because the far area is off limits for development? Do we protest and stop an urban poor housing project proposed on farmland if it is the only available area? Tough choices.

At the end of the day, we find ourselves with conflicting priorities as to protecting the environment or protecting ourselves --people. The very reason we protect the environment in the first place is sustainability --that it will ensure that we provide food and all the needs of the future generations. Going beyond that already places the environment above the welfare of people. Christian theology tells us that the world, the earth, and all creation were made by God, for man and to sustain man and that man was made in the image of God and stands higher than all of the rest of God’s creation. There is no conflict and if there is, it's always in favor of human society.

Sustainability is of utmost importance but only in as much as it provides for people in this and future generations. We should all protect the environment but ensure we do so not at the expense of our children.