Viability
In 2012, I met a grisly Detroiter in a coffee shop named Ivan who told me: "I can sustain a patient with life support, or I can help them foster their own resilience to a point that they can help others in need do the same. Which one is sustainability? Which is viability?"
I now see sustainability like security--it's the basis for surviving to the next day, but without the possibility of peace, it's not necessarily something that people thrive with and look forward to waking up to.
Since sustainability continues to gain traction in major circles of policy, community, business, and academia, I still use the term. Also, most of the challenges I tend to find still benefit from enacting principles of sustainability to begin with. Again, it's akin to security or survival: necessary for our existence. From a strategic perspective however, I believe we all want to move toward something better.
I want to understand the world to a point of emancipated personal and shared resillience. A world where we can live freely and fully confident that our genuine presence happens without creating negative expense to others. Viability goes beyond sustainability and protection. Viability focuses on the responsible cultivation and promotion to flourish life's processes.
In that sense, a desirable life becomes a creative endeavor, hence the final point I use to characterize sustainability as we tend to hear it:
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
In 2012, I met a grisly Detroiter in a coffee shop named Ivan who told me: "I can sustain a patient with life support, or I can help them foster their own resilience to a point that they can help others in need do the same. Which one is sustainability? Which is viability?"
I now see sustainability like security--it's the basis for surviving to the next day, but without the possibility of peace, it's not necessarily something that people thrive with and look forward to waking up to.
Since sustainability continues to gain traction in major circles of policy, community, business, and academia, I still use the term. Also, most of the challenges I tend to find still benefit from enacting principles of sustainability to begin with. Again, it's akin to security or survival: necessary for our existence. From a strategic perspective however, I believe we all want to move toward something better.
I want to understand the world to a point of emancipated personal and shared resillience. A world where we can live freely and fully confident that our genuine presence happens without creating negative expense to others. Viability goes beyond sustainability and protection. Viability focuses on the responsible cultivation and promotion to flourish life's processes.
In that sense, a desirable life becomes a creative endeavor, hence the final point I use to characterize sustainability as we tend to hear it:
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
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