Social Sustainability
Sustainability has been on the
forefront of innovation of scientific research for generations. An economy
cannot thrive unless it can sustain itself, and many of us think that the
things we use in our daily life must be made to sustain the health of our
environment with greener technologies, but how do you determine the
sustainability of a society, a culture, and a civilization? That is what Dr.
Nicole Peterson is trying to figure out through a grant that allows her to
further research this field.
On January 24th, I sat
in on a talk by Dr. Peterson in which she talked about an idea called “Social
Sustainability.”
Dr.
Peterson explained to us her definition of sustainability, which was maintaining
“the world in which we continue to live as humans without sacrificing the
ability of allowing future inhabitants to exist.” Her idea of sustainability was split into
three “legs” of a stool, in which two legs were Economic and Environmental
sustainability. Dr. Peterson identifies
the last leg to be the Social leg, or the leg that deals with the social aspect
of sustainability.
She then
used the example of a fishing village in Mexico and how this fishing village
was affected by a changing global economy and climate. Fishermen in this
village were starting to see a decrease in fish stocks in the surrounding
ocean. Fisherman blamed many things from the Colorado River no longer reaching
the Gulf of California, tourism, different fishing techniques, and large
industrial fishing. She points out the fact that the things affecting this
fishing village were both economic and environmental issues.
The three
“legs” of sustainability, she argues, are interrelated. The vitality of an
economy is reliant on healthy ecosystems, and as the recent recession
illustrated, economic and social integrity are also linked.
Despite its
interconnectedness, social sustainability is the least understood and defined.
If one were to try and explain it, it might be best explained as the
relationships, interactions, and institutions that affect and are affected by
social development. For example, the way a social protest can affect the place
it is focused on; a government can be hurt by a social protest, its stability
then loses integrity, and its economy takes a blow.
Dr.
Peterson also took her research home here to Charlotte, NC, with her project of
understanding food systems within the city. A project she was involved in and
studied, Mobile Markets, takes fresh produce from the gardens and other places
and sells it at the transit hub in uptown. This provides a place for people to
buy fresh produce in a location that
wouldn’t originally have it.
This
research, however, is just touching the beginning of understanding social
sustainability… if it can be understood at all.
In the
global community we live in, the means to achieve sustainability is dependent
on many different aspects. Geography, political systems, and culture can all
directly affect what a certain country may need to sustain itself.
In my
opinion, social sustainability should instead be used as a measure of overall
sustainability, and instead of seeing sustainability in three separate
segments, it can be be concluded that they are all, in fact, the same. Economic
sustainability IS environmental sustainability and ALSO social sustainability.
They are all interdependent and therefore wouldn’t exist without the other.
If we hope
to perfect one, we must perfect the other. So is perfection ever really
possible at all? What, then, is considered perfect sustainability, and can it
be really viewed as a blanket statement for all involved?
These are
the kind of questions that Dr. Peterson and the Integrated Network for Social
Sustainability (INSS) are trying to answer. You can even get updates from their
page at http://clas-pages.uncc.edu/inss/.
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