ABSTRACT
During the 2012 US presidential election, much of the conversation on spending in government revolved around the country’s ability to live within its means. Discussions about whether the US economy could fall over a fiscal cliff created stalemates among legislators and became a central concern for taxpayers. Americans and the global community are now facing another cliff – an ecological cliff. Some have called it the tipping point in referencing specific resources, but the sentiment is the same: we are not living within our ecological means. Globally, we are heading in the wrong direction with our natural resources and ecosystem services, and must avoid collapse by introducing new policies and practices. Sustainability as it has been conceived in the past two decades or so is not going to help keep us from falling off the cliff. A new understanding of sustainability must signal something more than the popular “business as usual plus” approach to sustaining our interconnected systems that has been employed time and again in recent years. A starting point would be to rethink what sustainability should aim to achieve.
