Sustainability FAQ: Answering Google’s 4 Most Search Questions

In this sustainability FAQ (frequently asked questions) video, I answer Google’s 4 most searched questions on sustainability in 4 minutes:

What is a simple definition of sustainability?

Sustainability is the capacity of our human society to continue indefinitely within Earth’s natural cycles.

What are the 3 pillars of sustainability?

Sustainability is often presented as having 3 pillars: economic, social and environmental.

Why is sustainability so important?

Being humans’ capacity to survive within Earth’s natural cycles, sustainability is important because it is the only alternative to human extinction.

How can we achieve sustainability?

Achieving sustainability is essentially about meeting human needs within ecological constraints. Using the metaphor of the funnel, sustainability can be achieved by ‘opening the funnel’ walls to create a resilient, fulfilling and accessible society that can thrive within nature’s limits. From a more scientific perspective, sustainability can be achieved by stopping our contribution to the 4 root causes of un-sustainability we mentioned earlier. I other words, to become a sustainable society, we must eliminate our contributions to… the systematic increase of concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust (for example heavy metals and fossil fuels) the systematic increase of concentrations of substances produced by society (for example plastics, dioxins, PCBs and DDT) the systematic physical degradation of nature and natural processes (for example over-harvesting forests, destroying habitat and overfishing); and… conditions that systematically undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on).

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