1.1 Sustainability: Environments, Communities, & Economics (Read and Watch)

Defining sustainability

Sustainability comes from word "sustain" which means to maintain, support or to endure. People involved in sustainable agriculture are seeking to identify and solve problems in our current agriculture systems in order to provide food and fiber in a healthy environment for people over the long term. There’s no currently created “fully sustainable system” and most likely never will be. However, there are always more sustainable choices to be made.

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“Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.”

–Paul Hawken

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Sustainability has been described as the ability to provide for core societal needs in a manner than can be readily continued into the indefinite future without unwanted negative effects.

The "Three-legged Stool" of Sustainability

The concept of sustainability is a common term in much of our discourse in the present day, in many different settings from the coffee shop and classroom, to dinner tables and company boardrooms, to government offices. As we think about the increasingly obvious impacts of our food system on the global environment and on the social dynamics of global society, we are concerned that this food system needs to

• (a) be part of society and communities with adequate opportunities for all and just relationships among people and
• (b) not compromise the future productivity and health of earth's many different environments.

As part of the introductory work of this first module, we need to consider a definition of sustainability that is broad enough to encompass both human and natural systems, and geographic scales from communities to single farming communities to the worldwide reach of food production and transport in the modern global food system. We present below in Figure 1.0 a relatively common definition of sustainability as a "three legged stool".

 

In the model of the three-legged stool, environmental sustainability reflects protecting the future functioning, biodiversity, and overall health of earth's managed and wild ecosystems. Community and social sustainability reflect the maintenance or improvement of personal and community well-being into the future, versus relations of violence and injustice within and among communities. In the case of agriculture and food systems, this reflects especially the just distribution of food and food security among all sectors of society, the just treatment of food producers and the rights of consumers to healthy food, and the expression of cultural food preferences. Economic sustainability within food systems has often been conceptualized as relationships of financial and supply chains that support sufficient prosperity for food producers and the economic access of consumers to food at affordable prices.

Dividing the concepts of sustainability into three parts of an integrated whole allows us to think about food production practices or food distribution networks, for example, are sustainable in different aspects. Excessive water use or fossil fuel consumption, for example, are aspects of environmental sustainability challenges in food systems considered further on in this course. Meanwhile, issues of food access, poverty, and displacement from war, and their impacts on human communities and their food security are issues that combine social and economic sustainability, which will also be considered by this course. The three-legged stool is a simple, if sometimes imperfect, way to combine the considerations of sustainability into a unified whole.

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Video Explanation

The following video explains sustainability broadly, using a similar 3-pronged analogy for sustainability

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Learning objectives check

Before hitting the next button, check if you can do that following:

• Define sustainability and describe its relevance and application to agriculture. 

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Material on this page is adapted from “The Future of Food” hosted by InTeGrate Links to an external site., licensed under CC BY-SA Links to an external site..

Environment and Stop icons created by Freepik - Flaticon Links to an external site.

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