Sustainable Growth?

First, a few short definitions to get on the same page.

Sustainable (Adjective)

Able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; resources are renewed by the environment at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of consumption

Able to work in harmony with the environment as part of an ecosystem

Growth (Noun)

An increase in size, number, value, or strength

An increase in wealth, power, knowledge, or wisdom

Trees grow, people grow, businesses grow, societies grow, memes grow

Meme (Noun)

A shared idea that propagates through the medium of human communication (or observation)

Examples include philosophy, culture, religion, political stances, values, complex emotions

The spread of the idea of sustainability through human consciousness is a meme

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Sustainable Growth?

Most commonly sought forms of growth are not sustainable.

In Business, for example, sustainable growth in market share makes no sense at all as the total market size expressed as a share is and always will be exactly 100%. So if you reach 100% market share you cannot grow your share any more. You can grow the market but that is not sustainable either as the maximum potential market is finite (assuming we stick to the earth for now). This translates equally to revenue or profit. Growth in these things cannot be sustained indefinitely. Most people are thinking much shorter term than this; sustainability to them is often limited to the duration of their interest, role, position, responsibility.

In Energy, we are consuming natural resources like oil significantly faster than the environment is producing them. Any process that consumes resources faster than the environment produces them is not sustainable.

We plant certain kinds of trees because they can grow quickly and supply wood for manufacturing or fuel. This seems sustainable as the areas that are harvested are replanted. However, the more we use this "sustainable solution" the more space we need to use for planting trees. The products that can be created from a sustainable wood supply or the fires that can be fueled from it are limited by the rate of growth of the trees. Our rate of consumption is still growing. So actually its not a sustainable solution. Its halting the degradation of the environment for a while.

A Balanced view. Lets come at this from the other side for just a moment. The Earth, with or without humanity is not sustainable. Not strictly speaking. It will be uninhabitable in less than a billion years due to the expansion of the sun into a red giant. It will be totally engulfed (destroyed) shortly after that. So no earth bound process is sustainable by the strict definition of sustainability.

So here is the challenge. That is not a very useful definition as it has no place on earth where it can be applied. The language we are using is technically inadequate so people naturally adapt it because they want to communicate and they more or less know what they are trying to say despite not having the words to say it. People are using "sustainability" to mean different things. That's fine. There will be some confusion and meaningless debate but people are smart. They can make sense of this. So what are they all talking about? This is part of the challenge of communication. We need to use our common sense and feel our way towards meaningful discussion without getting drawn into irrelevant side-debates that are the result of talking cross-purposes.

For most purposes, proponents of sustainable solutions are talking about solutions that use renewable energy sources, meaning that the solution consumes resources from the environment at a slower rate than the environment is producing those resources. This seems like a very simple sustainability test. The trouble is the number of solutions and applications of those solutions - the overall complexity of what we are doing and the fact that the population is rising and increasing its use of such energy hungry solutions that creates the sustainability issue and makes it difficult to analyse or agree about. People have immediate needs and these are rarely going to take second place to long-termism.

As far as business is concerned, despite many organisations having strategies for sustainable growth, the only meaningful sustainability is success. The meaning of success of course changes with time, as the market changes, as the demands of the consumers or customers change, and as the nature of competition and collaboration changes.

Sustainable success makes sense. Sustainable success is more about creating and sustaining a meme or set of meme's around values. This is what drives behaviour. Your choice about who you work with then naturally becomes more about what they stand for and how this correlates to your values - your ability to sustain success, whatever that means to you. Collaboration based on values rather than profit yields success. Profit always has its place in an economically driven society, but economy as a tool rather than a driver is more likely to lead to real success... is more likely to be part of a sustainable way of being.

This blog collects together thoughts, ideas, solutions, commentary on sustainability.