On this 39th anniversary of Earth Day, it seems our appetite for all things sustainable is increasing faster than ever. Every company, industry, and product is being repackaged and redesigned with sustainability in mind, and every newspaper, magazine, and television station has a growing list of sustainable themed programs. In the food world, everyone from large agribusiness to corner markets are flaunting their sustainable credentials…no one wants to be left behind.

At the same time, despite claims to the contrary, many uses of the word are contradictory and misleading. Unfortunately, this confounds an understanding of its real meaning.This is nothing new; sustainability as a concept has been both misunderstood and misappropriated since its modern creation in the 1980’s.

What is sustainable?

I get asked this question all the time, and it’s not an easy one to answer. The first popular use of the word in its current form came from a late 1980’s report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, defining sustainability as the ability of a culture to meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The very name of the report highlights the twin aspects of sustainability theory – human actions (development) in the context of the environment. But the idea did not originate there. It can be found in the famous Iroquois law “In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” And in Europe the threats of un-sustainability were central to the ideas of Thomas Malthus when he wrote “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” back in 1798.

At the same time, it’s useful to look at the primary root of sustainable – sustain. In various contexts, sustain means: provide with nourishment, maintained at length without interruption or weakening, be the physical support of, carry the weight of.

Together these draw a picture of what sustainable should be: actions that provide nourishment and that can carry the weight of humanity, at length and without interruption.

This is a far cry from some current usage. A plastic water bottle, designed to be used once and discarded, is not sustainable simply because it uses 30% less plastic than a previous version.

Which brings us to a recent article in Scientific American Earth 3.0 Magazine “Top 10 Myths about Sustainability” by Michael Lemonick. His article, while well written and researched, is filled with circular reasoning and half-truths. For example, Lemonick’s “Myth 1” is that “nobody knows what sustainability really means.” He claims that the World Commission definition mentioned earlier should clear up all the confusion. We should simply not “take more than our share.” However, the futility of this argument is highlighted by his Myth 10, where he correctly points out that even if we accept this generic definition we can’t easily put these ideas into practice. In short, he concludes that he’s hitched his horse to a definition of sustainable that’s vague, incomplete, and all but unusable in daily practice.

A great example comes from a recent New York Times Magazine article on the Transition movement by Jon Mooallem, The End Is Near! (Yay!). Mooallem quotes the founder of the Transition movement, Rob Hopkins: “Sustainability is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.”

While this is one way that the word “sustainability” is used (particularly by corporate interests), this definition is not true to the words origins. In this quote, however, Hopkins has selected his definition to make his Transition movement sound novel, even revolutionary. In fact, Hopkins is simply advocating for a dramatic social form of the same age-old ideas.

Sustainability varies with time and place

One thing that is conspicuously missing from most discussions of sustainable actions is the acknowledgment that they are inherently time and place dependent. This is because sustainability is grounded in our environment, and our environment is cyclical in nature. The bottom line: anyone who tells you “this is sustainable” without specifying a time or place is engaging in blatant greenwashing. A sustainable farming practice for one acre of rainy Washington State might be completely unsustainable for a thousand acre farm, and certainly wrong for a farm of any size in the Arizona desert.

Another example: in her recent 60-minutes profile, Alice Waters served eggs cooked in a wood-fired oven. Unfortunately, while I’m sure those eggs were mighty tasty, that’s not a particularly sustainable practice for coastal California where she lives. Just think: where did the wood come from? Certainly not from the scrubby hills around her home. It’s fine if the practice is adopted by her and a few others – but just think what would happen if this practice was adopted en masse. We don’t have to speculate. Many rural regions of the world cook over wood primarily with disastrous environmental results. For our modern world, natural gas stoves are a much better alternative (Electric stoves are another matter, as electricity comes from so many different sources.)

However, in the African rainforest where I lived in the late 1990’s we had a fire going 24/7 in our camp and cooked over it daily. We never had to forage more than a few minutes to collect enough fallen wood for the day, and never had to cut down more trees to meet our needs. That said, I was living in a tiny rainforest camp that had a population of 15 people…this equation would quickly change if the population increased.

So there are no “one size fits all” solutions. We need to take the changing environment into account for each situation.

Sustainable Food

When it comes to food, the definition of sustainable is defined in the fantastic new book edited by Cheryl Baldwin Sustainability in the Food Industry (Wiley Blackwell, 2009). Unfortunately this is priced for an academic audience at $199 and so most people will probably never read it, which is a shame because it is well written and informative. In her introduction, Baldwin writes “A sustainable food supply would mean that food is produced and consumed in a way the supports the well-being of generations. The current food supply has demonstrated impacts that make it unsustainable.” She continues by listing some of the well-known negative impacts of our current food lifestyle and then writes “Benefits of sustainable practices include lower production costs, improved product function and quality, increased market share, improved environmental performance, improved relationships with stakeholders, and lower risks.”

The recent “Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability” at U.C. Davis discussed many of these topics. With its mix of participants from academia, industry, non-profits, and agriculture, the conversations and panels addressed the changes we would need to make to point us in the right direction. It was agreed that a sustainable food system would be more efficient, which would both raise profits and reduce environmental impacts. The issues surrounding resilience (system stability) were also raised, ensuring the welfare for our children and grandchildren.

Even in this educated company I heard at least five different definitions of sustainability during the morning sessions alone. Addressing a question on the topic, William Clark, Director of the Sustainable Science Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, put the topic in perspective by asking if we need a definition of the term at all. He suggested that sustainability was closer to something like “justice” or “freedom” – terms that most of us loosely understand but can’t precisely define. It is this flexibility, Clark said, that will allow these concepts to remain relevant as we move into the future.

Perhaps it is only fitting, in the end, if a word grounded in ecological variation is allowed some variation of its own.

Webcasts and white papers from the Davis Sustainability Symposium can be found here.

We live in a time where there is a seemingly endless parade of information streaming across our brains.  And increasingly, this information is ecological in scope – green, eco, natural and sustainable.

This is especially true when it comes to food, where the increased eco-awareness in the past year has been dramatic.  Oprah is now promoting the humane treatment of animals, and Safeway and Wal-mart are rapidly increasing their sales of organic products.

But, do we really understand what all this information means?  Do we, as a society, have the background to separate the truly green from the green-washed?

In our primary schools, teachers are still hobbled by restrictive No Child Left Behind regulations, forcing them to cut “electives” like classes on ecology and the environment.

And a sobering new study of over 1000 colleges and universities conducted by the National Wildlife Federation indicates, “There is a widening gap between where education actually is on teaching sustainability versus where it should be.”  There are fewer environmental courses and programs in our nation’s college campuses now than there were in 2001, the study found.

So as a nation, we are arguably receiving less environmental education than before at a time when we have to understand more environmental facts and details.

What is the solution to this growing dichotomy? We need to include Ecology in our discussion of all things green.  We need to return Eco- and Green back to their roots.  “Eco” comes from the ancient Greek word “oikos” which means “house” – the place where we live.  What this means, fundamentally, is that our ecology is the place where we live; we are not separate from it.

When it comes to an understanding of food, an integrated ecological context has significant implications.

Currently, most thinking about food is linear.  That is, people buy food, transport it home, prepare it, eat it and throw away the waste.  That’s the extent of our common awareness.

Even if we extend that discussion to organic foods, this simply extends this linear model one notch – moving the “beginning” from the store back to the organic farm.  And if we include local food in the mix, it simply makes the distances traveled smaller, and the number of steps fewer.

An alternative to this would be to recognize that food comes from a cyclical system. A circle has no beginning and no end, and neither does the food cycle.  To be sustainable, the entire food system needs to be in balance.  Therefore, we can’t pay attention to certain parts of the cycle, say organic farming, and then ignore the rest and pretend we are acting sustainably.

I hasten to clarify that I am not diminishing the importance of organic farms, or of supporting local food networks. On the contrary, they are vitally important. But they are no more important than supporting efficient compost and waste procedures, or streamlining our wholesale and retail operations.

These ideas can give valuable context to foster understanding of unfamiliar ideas. For example, if someone brings up “Vineyard Irrigation”, as mentioned in the New York Times Magazine Food Issue, then even if you don’t understand the specifics, you already know what part of the food cycle you are addressing, and what sustainability issues are addressed. A quite different set of issues arises when the conversation moves on to “Biofortification.”

More superficially, an integration of true ecological ideas into common understanding will help prevent a consumer backlash. If we continue on in the direction we’ve been going, Eco and Green will become completely meaningless, and people will start to distrust such labeling.  This will lead to a widespread rejection of all Sustainable minded products and companies, which will be understandable but disastrous.  We need truth in labeling, and an understanding of the issues. We simply can’t afford not to.

So I urge you all to become Ecotarians, to pay attention to the entire ecological cycle as you garden, shop, cook, eat, and compost. With this broader context in mind, we can begin to pave a path toward true sustainability.

Interested? Want to hear more? For our readers that live in the Los Angeles area, Aaron French will present “Eating Greener: The Ecology of Food and Why It Matters” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) on November 9. The presentation is a part of Sustainable Sundays, a new program at NHM, which allows visitors the opportunity to learn from museum scientists and guest researchers about international conservation issues. The presentation begins at 12:30 p.m. on November 9. Tickets can be purchased at the door; $9 for adults and $2 for kids. Conservation International’s Jen Morris will also be presenting information about investing in global pro-conservation, small- and medium-sized businesses at 2:30 p.m. For more information about Sustainable Sundays, please visit: http://www.nhm.org/calendar/ssundays.html