We are hearing the word sustainable in front of things now days, such as, sustainable forestry, sustainable ranching, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable development. What is it? Just a new buzz word? Does it have a definition?
Having spent a career in the Forest Service, I immediately thought of Sustained Yield, the by-word of multiple use. Is sustained yield different from sustainable development? To try to find an answer to this question, I stared off by looking for a definition of sustained yield and found one in a 1976 edition of "Resource Conservation Glossary" published by the Soil Conservation Society of America. It reads, "Sustained Yield: The yield that a renewable resource can produce continuously at a given intensity of management; implies a balance at the earliest practical time between increment (growth) and harvesting."
Being a relatively new term, a published definition of sustainable development was not as easy to find. In a booklet "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - A Guide to our Common Future" published in 1989 by The Global Tomorrow Coalition, Washington, D.C., I found the following. "Sustainable development means meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life... it implies acceptance of consumption standards that are within the bounds of ecological possibility and to which all can aspire." Further, "Sustainable development is best understood as a process of change in which the use of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change all enhance the potential to meet human needs both today and tomorrow." And, "sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising our ability to meet those of the future."
A summary of these extracts might lead to the definition "sustainable development: A continuing process of economic and social development, in both developing and industrialized nations, that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Not being a real deep thinker, I easily concluded that sustained yield and sustainable development have the same basic roots- that of a constant supply within the ecological limits of the system. But sustainable development goes beyond the concept of yield to that of a level of sustainability. The earth is not growing, but it is developing. Sustainable growth implies an eventual impossibility, while the term sustainable development does not. It is the development that can have the attribute of sustainability, not growth. What is being sustained in sustainable development is a level, not a rate of growth, of physical resource use. What is being developed is the qualitative capacity to convert that constant level of physical resource use to improved goods and services for satisfying human needs, without destroying the resource base upon which all human and non-human activity depends.
Sustainable development calls for the merging of environmental and economic concerns in decision-making. Compatibility of the two can only come through acceptance that "neither environmental protection nor economic development is sustainable without proper attention to both", as stated by William Ruckelshaus, former Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, in the 1989 report of the "World Commission on Environment and Development".
