In order to live, people consume what nature offers. So, every one of us has an impact on our planet. This is not bad as long as we don't take more from the Earth than it has to offer. But are we taking more than we should?

        I think of sustainability as the ability of an ecosystem to exist in such a way that life-supporting processes can infinitely support all forms of life in a healthy, continuous way. In other words, the capacity of living in such a way as to allow others to meet their life needs now and in the future. I usually here debates about the limited availability of energy resources to satisfy our energy requirements, but rarely the focus is on another resource that is truly limited: the environment.

        The position seems to mainly be that any environmental consideration is superfluous to the energy debate. However, the most important things we should sustain are healthy, functioning ecosystems and their species. They do provide us with life-support services such as food, water and oxygen. Furthermore, they have their own right to exist without the threat of human destruction. However, most of us, especially those who spend our lives in cities and consume goods from all over the world, we tend to view nature as a collection of commodities or a place for recreation rather than the very source of our existence.

        The capacity of our planet to sustain life is being exhausted by the pressures of humankind and the market economy. The main cause of ecological degradation is that too many people use too many resources and inappropriate technologies, and create too much waste that the nature cannot absorb it. We know from the increasing loss of forests, soil erosion and contamination, fishery depletion, loss of species and the accumulation of greenhouse gases that our current overuse of nature is compromising our future well-being. So, at present, we are not living in a sustainable way, and our current global industrial society is rapidly destroying the environment foundation that supports it.

        The only way to restore and maintain the health of the Earth is to reduce human impact on the environment. In this sense, sustainability is a cultural process, which requires a serious evaluation of our values, our lifestyle and our patterns of consumption in order to make our place in the global environment more compatible with the rest of the global biosphere that supports human life.