ABSTRACT
Defining and assessing sustainability is a challenge. The Sustainable Rangelands Roundtable sought to stimulate discussion around the social, economic, and ecological concepts surrounding rangeland sustainability. The traditional way to look at sustainability has been to use a Venn diagram approach with three circles with the overlapping area in the middle depicting a sustainable situation. While that is good conceptually, it does not help in placing a given county somewhere in the diagram. We developed a Sustainability Triangle whereby the ranking of each category for each geographic area is made to sum to one and displayed on a triangle. Areas of the triangle were given names depending on how balanced the social, economic, and ecological indicator ranks. Each county is then placed within the Sustainability Triangle and its location and opportunities can be a point of discussion.
