Green Curriculum: Home

"A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels"---
Albert Einstein

To define environmental sustainability we must first define sustainability.

Sustainability is the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely. To define what environmental sustainability is we turn to the experts.

Herman Daly, one of the early pioneers of ecological sustainability, looked at the problem from a maintenance of natural capital viewpoint. In 1990 he proposed that:

1. For renewable resources, the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of regeneration (sustainable yield);

2. [For pollution] The rates of waste generation from projects should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment (sustainable waste disposal); and

3. For nonrenewable resources the depletion of the nonrenewable resources should require comparable development of renewable substitutes for that resource.