Sustainability And Well-Being: A Human-Centered Concept

Sustainability is fundamental to the future well-being of families, communities, corporations, governments, and the world itself. Human well-being includes essentials such as security, food, shelter, and health. It also involves such things as opportunity, freedom of choice and action, and concern for the resources of the natural world.

Sustainability is a human-centered concept because it arises from our aspirations, goals, and hopes for the future. Human sustainability goals are diverse. They include the capacity of the earth’s natural resources to support human life, but may also include maintaining amenities such as pleasing landscapes or valued species. Other sustainability goals are possible, such as:

• businesses wishing to sustain (or grow) a profit level, a rate of return, a market share, or a level of innovation;

• government agencies or non-governmental organizations that want to maintain their capacity to deliver services;
• people in industrial democracies who want to sustain a way of life, or opportunity, or political freedom;
• people in rural communities who want to pass on their way of life to their children;
• people anywhere in the world who want to sustain their cultural traditions.

The partners of Sustainability International, LLC, have developed practical approaches to each of these sustainability goals and to others as well. We teach these approaches in our course offerings.

 

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