Ecosystems are outstanding examples of sustainable systems. We can borrow sustainability principles (I personally regard those principles as "sustainability mantra") from Mother Nature. They are (1) Reliance of clean & renewable energy (solar capital): No energy crisis or dirty play with pollution!, (2) Material (nutrient) cycling: No material crisis though living in a finite world!, (3) Biodiversity: Fountainhead of coexistence, cooperation,resilience, (4) Population control: In-built balance in nature controlled by inter-specific interactions (predator-prey, competitions, etc.), (5) Holism and harmony: Whole is more than the sum of parts! There's no waste, no pollution, no dearth of resources, no energy crunch in nature's world! No excess is anywhere, sufficiency and efficiency reign everywhere! Examples are abound. Adopting and implementing those sustainability principles we humans can guide our life styles, economic, industrial and developmental activities in order to usher in an environmental and sustainability revolution.
Be a part of this should-be-sustaining discussion and play a role in spreading nature's nature to promote sustainability in all spheres of our life - individual, industrial, social, local, glocal to global.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/EHS14-0013.1/pdf
http://www.zef.de/fileadmin/downloads/forum/docprog/Termpapers/2004_3b_Mensah_Castro.pdf
http://www.ies.unsw.edu.au/sites/all/files/CorpSust2000.pdf
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3940e.pdf
http://www.fao.org/ag/ca/CA-Publications/ICM19.pdf
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5499e.pdf
This is a really great question and one we consider in our Sustainability Science curriculum. Two points. First, the fields of biomimicry and industrial ecology attempt to design human systems that mimic ecosystem function, particularly so that the waste of one process becomes the resource of another. Second, humans don't do this very well. To have harmony with nature would require a sufficiency switch that would cause humans to recognize when we have "enough." This genetic "switch" appears to be missing in humans which may be related to the global economic growth paradigm (see attached paper by Rees). Clearly, economic growth favors the group at the expense of individuals, which is a characteristic of ultrasociality (see attached paper by Gowdy and Krall). We use the Raworth (2012) "doughnut economics" model as the basis for sustainability with the dual goals of raising the social foundation (access to education food security, etc) and lowering the environmental impact (environmental ceiling) at the same time to create a safe and just space for humanity. This would require a sufficiency ethic, a "shrink and share" approach, where the wealthiest 20% massively reduce consumption to sufficiency levels and share some of the remainder with those less well off. Even then, this "great transformation" (Haberl et al. 2011) may not be possible given the human population predicted for 2050.
So, how do we get there? Well, that is the emerging field of degrowth. Assuming we are in environmental overshoot (which is likely based on planetary boundary data and ecological footprint data), we need to degrow the current economy to a sustainable scale. Much research needs to be conducted on proper sustainability targets and potential pathways of degrowth. A very interesting field.
First, natural ecosystems should be fully described and precisely presented in the media, including new online media. Then, natural ecosystems should be actively and widely promoted as models of sustainable development, including models of sustainable economic development on a national and global level.
Sustainable development is very important in the context of the increasing use of resources and environmental pollution.
The basic issue that must be achieved within the framework of full sustainable development is the renewal of resources, reduction of economic growth to the optimal level ensuring renewable resources, reduction of environmental pollution, creation of biodegradable substitutes for fossil fuels, replacement of traditional energy based on mineral combustion for technological innovations in in the field of energy, including the development of energy based on renewable energy sources of renewable energy, etc. To this should be added a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to slow down the negative aspects of the oceogenic climate of the Earth. There is so much to do in these themes and, above all, a great deal to do in the 21st century so that it would not be too late.
To effectively carry out this process, it is necessary to develop universal, precise measures of sustainable development that will be used globally and will be recognized as the standards for assessing the process of achieving and achieving sustainable economic development in harmony with ecology.
But it is very difficult to establish precise measures for the sustainable development process. Sustainable economic development in correlation with ecology should be measured to determine if it is being implemented. It is necessary to define precise determinants that on one hand will determine the pace of economic development and on the other hand will take into account specific issues of ecology. It should be a set of quantified indicators based on selected measurable and quantitative data, so that the whole analytical process can be considered as a research objective method. The best solution will therefore be to develop an analytical scoring method, for which the basic components of this method will be defined economic and ecological quantitative indicators.
Please, answer, comments. I invite you to the discussion
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