Sustainability - - A Focus On Carbon

One key aspect of a sustainability focus is explicitly recognizing that decisions are driven by three somewhat competing objectives: Profit - People - Planet .  Another way to say this is choices are determined by examining their impact on the business, society, and the natural environment.  A term coined to describe this tripartite is The Triple Bottom Line .   A picture of The Triple bottom Line (T-B-L) appears here.  What I find critically important is in the overlap between any two and all three goals.  This is interesting to me since it will be the rare circumstance when all three goals - environmental, social, and economic - sustainability can equally be met. One implication of the T-B-L is that choice is no longer driven by economics alone.  The profitability of a particular decision is no longer the driving force behind the choice.  In one way. this is not path breaking news to real-world decision-makers.  For years now future leaders have been trained in multi-attribute dec

To some extent, this term suffers from the same problems as does the term - natural, or, better yet, "Green."  What is natural versus what isn't natural?  It's not defined in law, and as a result, to a large extent, what it means is in the eye of the beholder.  Here are some takes on it's meaning. The project in Sustainable Management of the Presidio Graduate School starts by stating the obvious "There are many ways to measure or define sustainability."  One particularly inciteful definition is "the property of being sustainable."  The AFSC defines it thus: "Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."   Scripps Colleg e for Women takes a similar approach - "Sustainability: Sustainability seeks to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future."  The NADA also takes this approach