ABSTRACT
In the final chapter, the authors seek to redefine sustainability in more precise and unequivocal terms. Many of the efforts to define sustainability have focused on ensuring that future generations are at least as well off as we are today. These definitions focus on ensuring that we avoid passing along a smaller general stock of capital than we enjoy today because we cannot know the preferences of future communities. This is not encouraging as a goal for sustainability in an age when ecological, economic, and social capital is not particularly stable. To sustain the conditions we have now would violate intergenerational equity. New aspirations for an improved future are ultimately not achievable under current global economic, political, and social conditions, but a new conception of sustainability can help move us toward something more than simple perpetuation of existing conditions.
The authors offer a new concept that they call neo-sustainability. This understanding of sustainability rests on three rules: ecological limits, environmental primacy, and systems thinking. Neo-sustainability is then examined in the context of existing frameworks such as the spaceman economy, the natural step, environmental justice theory, the ecological footprint, and the cradle-to-cradle production model. We cannot continue to hope that people or planet will survive under current economic conditions; they will not. Employing a stricter interpretation of sustainability through neo-sustainability will not fix the damages of the past but will put us on a new trajectory that seeks well-being and sufficiency over malconsumption and inequity.
