Sustainability
A philosophical concept, a lifestyle, an economic approach, a productive system.
The many domains which the word “sustainability” may apply to tells about its semantic depth, while revealing the unique goal that underlies all those options:
Developing human processes that may be accomplished and sustained.
With the progress of research and rising awareness of the limits of an unruly, uncontrolled exploitation of the natural resources, the concept of sustainability has become inextricably tied with the environmental domain until the 1987 UN Brundtland report defined it a “balance between the fulfilment of real requirements without compromising on the next generations’ chance to cope with its own”.
For the first time, such definition brings together the new need to evolve man’s living and acting on the planet into ways that respect the complexity of nature and that, as such, are harmonious with, not ‘ruling’ over, the ecosystems.
Over the next few decades, that first drive aroused increasingly deep reflections that connected sustainability with the need to minimise processing waste (and therefore the entropy of the system), down to next to nothing, and the use of non-renewable raw materials.
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