Would ISO standards be relevant? For instance, https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:15392:ed-2:v1:en

The ISO series provides guidelines, standard frameworks for general principles, and operational life planning related to sustainable development's three economic, social, and environmental pillars.

It is significant that the more scholars speak whether about the complex or even holistic constitution of the ecological relations and, therefore, sustainability, nevertheless, the more they undo their discourse by increasingly abounding in classifications, categories and taxonomies that enforce into 'certain entities' of study what are the inexorable 'uncertain things' we live with.

Indeed, it might well be that science is launched along the wrong path into sustainability. For even its etymological roots might be telling us about the inadequate kind of gestures (all the more aggravated by the inextricable relations that science has with Industry, Finance and Politics) that it puts into play: The "assurance of knowledge, certitude or certainty"; from scire "to know"; originally "to separate one thing from another or to distinguish".

Therefore, to try to achieve and maintain in a world as becoming a sustainability that it is either of everything or it is nothing, thus, through the assertive Major Gestures of Science and Management (of definition, categorisation and prescription) as if we would inhabit a World as Being, might not just be ineffective but highly counterproductive; reinforcing the very dynamics that lead and perpetuate us into unsustainability.

As anthropologist Tim Ingold writes in his brand-new collection of essays Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence:

"Nothing, indeed, threatens sustainability more than the ambition of big science, and its political and financial sponsors, to engineer and regulate the earth and its peoples as if they were the components of a single, integrated system".

Thus, we should not just refuse to establish, as you Zhou Zhiwu consider, "a global classification standard" but, ultimately, ponder whether science as a matter of distinguishing, separating and extinguishing the entangling threads that endlessly weave the uncountable braids of ecology –or course (logos) of habitation (oikos)– is or is not the best way into the sustainability of everything.

I agree with Pedro N. Montero Gosálbez's point. Still, you don't have classification criteria (in other words: you don't have grading criteria for a student, how do you judge whether he is excellent or good). Global researchers are studying the issue of sustainable development. What is the final standard of actual, sustainable development (each country announced its own carbon emission goals in 2030, 2050, 2070 at the Paris Association)? To this How to assess it at the time node. According to the data reported by each country, can you determine whether you have completed the target (use the standard to assess you directly, how many points did you get?)?

To your questions, Zhou Zhiwu:

First, I think that education (as sustainability) should go beyond classifications. We are all too accustomed to a system of marking and ranking people by invariably biased professors. Who has not got extremely different marks on the same student essay by various professors of the same department?

If there is no need to rank people, thus, one would not carry on with the biases of a particular professor, department, university or, even, discipline. And, in this sense, there are already some experiences –from primary school to university level– in which no grades or degrees are given. Thus, rather than focusing on marking and ranking in regard to the assertive conclusions of professors, we could attend to the inquisitive openings of the students (wherever their paths might bring them into the future).

Secondly: How can we think about sustainability standards –and, therefore, fixations– in a world as becoming; along which our own very actions are part of the uncertain developments of ecology?

To call for standards in the Name of Sustainability –and, moreover, Sustainable Development–, we might not just be reducing our attention to factors (like GHGE, Income Distribution and the Growth of the GDP) that are far from following the complexities of ecology but that, ultimately, might reinforce the very gestures and dynamics of competition and power from which unsustainability emerges in the first place. The problem of Sustainability Management is that it promotes a, therefore, anti-pathic attention to definitions, categories and prescriptions, as if we would live among the Certain Entities –whether conceived as subjects or objects– of a World as Being; rather than nurture an em-pathic attention to the entanglements of the uncertain things of a world as becoming.

Then, both, education and sustainability, I think, are more a matter of enskillment in such em-pathic attention and care for the human and other-than-human becomings we live with, than setting up a bunch of standards. A matter, therefore, of transforming education into an invitation to lead out the students into the living world; as Jan Masschelein and Tim Ingold point when highlighting its alternative etymology of ex-ducere.

Thus, it might well be, ultimately, that neither Science nor Policy are prepared to lead us towards the sustainability of anything; let alone the sustainability of everything. In the end, we might not just have to patch up our current economic and political systems, but to change our way of habitation altogether.

Pedro N. Montero Gosálbez:

Your way of thinking has opened my eyes to a new paradigm of understanding sustainable development. It does require a sea change in thought and research. But the reality is cruel; carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, ecological damage, etc., are all overgrowing. Reality has taught us a hard lesson! Just face reality!!

Yes Zhou Zhiwu,

Where the world is heading, is devastating!

But I much doubt that through their assertive Major Gestures will Science and Policy be able to deliver their Promise of Salvation.

And, thus, although the minor gestures of indigenous people and other people (as I call them) in-the-genesis of things, will not preclude all hardships, harms and ultimately fatalities, at least, as I developed somewhere else:

Conference Paper That ain't the question: To be vaxxer or anti-vaxxer at the ...

they enable risks to remain near and continuously critical for them to attend, care and respect.

As you Zhou Zhiwu imply: No, there is not going to be an all-joyful escape from this; which, however, should not prevent us to enjoy life as much as we can, as we live this times. For only love and passion might keep us on track!

It's not hard to classify different aspects of sustainability. For example, economists generally look at System Management approaches. I'm interested in System Design approaches. Some people use criteria-based approaches (LEED, for example) while others use balance approaches (PSM II, for example). I would used units of sustainability and the rate equations between them derived from the community-scale data.

Ironically, sustainability research doesn't forward much beyond the narrow confines of developing the indicators as done in case of the SDGs. It is important that the qualitative aspects of the SDGs should also receive greater attention in sustainability research.

Dear Douglas Nuttall and P K Viswanathan,

I rather think that the main misunderstanding of much of the current so-called sustainability management, industry and marketing, is to conceive sustainability as amenable to be cut off from the currents of life into discrete dimensions for so-called experts to assess and implement. For, indeed, it is a false premise to understand life as divisible into clear-cut compartments; whether in regard to the kind of activity –economy, technology and policy– or relation –personal, social and ecological. To the contrary, the personal is just but a part of the social, as well as the social is just but a part of the environmental; thus, being sustainability either of everything or nothing.

To such an extent, approaches like LEED or SDGs (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) do ultimately little good. On the one hand, LEED assessments and qualifications mostly highlight and reward the use of technological devices that, as Ozzie Zehner remarks in his Green Illusions, do not just imply little GHGEs reduction but, furthermore, do nothing about the increasing consumerism removing and reversing the little GHGEs reduction such technological devices might have implied. The ultimate effect is the development of further industries, inflating the bubble of the Market in the competition for power. On the other hand, SDGs are conceived top-down, from the lives of the elites –whether in so-called developed or developing countries– that invariably and inevitably consume and contaminate the most (as Andreas Malm has plainly put it in his Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency), while remain senseless to the human and other-than-human relations of generation and regeneration for sustainability to occur and persist. The ultimate result is the development and establishment, as David Graeber highlighted in The Utopia of Rules, of further bureaucracy and policing, inflating the bubble of the national and international institutions of government in the competition for power.

All in all, most of the current theories and practices of sustainability, thus, naively ignore or hypocritically obviate, the processes triggered by them along the ongoing realisation of the world as becoming that we all inhabit. As an example of this, look to the GHGEs and the categories to assess them. As I put in...

Conference Paper That ain't the question: To be vaxxer or anti-vaxxer at the ...

... it is not just that although some attention is given to the footprint from the direct and indirect electricity use of human activities (or so-called Scopes 1 and 2), only little is put on the footprint from direct and indirect activities and purchases (or so-called Scopes 1, 2 and 3). Furthermore, GHGEs assessments take note of neither the rarely considered emissions of the bureaucracy and policing (or a Scope 4) nor the ever disregarded emissions of producing and reproducing the knowledge (or a Scope 5) needed both to run it all. And that is a negligence derived from the belief that life can be compartmentalised into separate aspects for experts to define, categorise and prescribe.

The economic and governmental competition inherent to all relations of power –which the etymology of economy, as the regulation (nomos) of habitation (oikos), shows as one and the same thing–, ultimately, leads to more management, industry and marketing in an inflationary spiral of violence, that further boosts the personal dissatisfaction, social inequity and environmental destruction that is driving us along a track of increasingly recurrent human epidemics (like that of the COVID-19) and climatic disruptions, in our way towards the dead end of catastrophe. And, as such, all Authoritative because Authoritarian attempts to achieve sustainability –and within which we can include the "Sustainability Marketing", "LEED" and the "SDGs 2030"– are, to my senses, inexorably doomed to fail. For they only aim to the symptoms and not the causes of the unsustainability inherent, ultimately, in the competition for power; finally, adding more fuel to the fire of the expansionist normativism and extractivism of an long-lasting and far-reaching dynamic of Authorisation (by which one claims to be in Authority) that consumes everything at its reach –neither just since the late Consumerist Capitalism that we live in nor the previous Colonialist Capitalism, but reaching out, at least, to the dawn of the Early States as the consolidation of that very dynamic of Authorisation.

I think I agree with you. It requires holistic, not reductionist, thinking, which is really hard with our current form of specialization in academia (well, in all professions)

Yes Douglas Nuttall...

That is why notions like un-disciplinarity or anti-disciplinarity (this last used by Tim Ingold in his Anthropology and/as Education) are so enticing to me. For even inter-disciplinarity does nothing but bringing together experts that remain within what it seems to be their sphere of expertise. In this sense, even inter-disciplinarity is complicit in setting up the very borders it is alleged to cross.

Furthermore, one could even say that the borders of disciplines are not set along the tangles of ongoing knowing but the fault lines of management and funding. These are made up by assertive Major Gestures of definition, categorisation and prescription that prevent us from the "holistic" research we need to find our way towards the sustainability of everything. However, if many managers and funders will further boost an inter-disciplinarity that would increase their profit and maximise their power is not because they are necessarily driven by greed, but just because it is what is thought to be the way for cutting-edge research and how the dynamics of profit and power perpetuate themselves.

We might have to begin acknowledging, then, that no one is ever an "expert" but only an ongoing "experienced" person amenable to making mistakes, taking risks and, therefore, able to explore further paths of inquiry; whatever the fault lines imposed by management and funding may say.

Rather than a classification system, I think we need something else.

The minimum threshold of Sustainability for a community is Needs Security (like food security, or water security, but extended across all needs). Once the community has defined that, one can test to see if any given construction method would support or hinder the community in achieving those needs.

Sustainability is defined by the community context - snow is a perfectly good insulation material if you live in Antartica, but bad in Cairo. While the needs of everyone are universal (food, water, shelter, sleep, love, etc), how those needs are met can be potentially unique in any setting (food is local).

So, I thing what is needed is a method for the communities to determine what their needs are and how they expect to meet them once over-consumed energy and ecological functions cease to be available, and then a test to determine if any given construction activity/method/material/etc makes it easier or harder for the community to meet their needs.