Sustainability is the mother of all environmental terms. However, it is not a new concept; it has been around for a long, long time. Sustainability encompasses everything from using renewable resources, to recycling, even to organic farming. In essence it is living and evolving in harmony with your environment, using only what you need and wasting nothing while replenishing, or allowing nature to replenish, the stock of what you took, without doing any permanent harm to the ecology. As a whole this is a mighty tall order, even an impossible one considering today’s lifestyles.

      One of the oldest and purest examples of sustainability that comes to my mind is the relationship between Native Americans and the buffalo. When they would kill a buffalo they would use every part of it, from nose to tail. Nothing was wasted. Also, they also only killed enough to survive so they would not deplete the buffalo population.

      A more recent analogy is one comparing Earth to a self-sustaining spaceship, like something out of a sci-fi novel. The term Space-ship Earth was coined out of this comparison to show that we have to take care of our vessel if we want to keep floating around the sun. Like the spaceship we will only have enough air to breathe as the plants provide and only enough food to eat as resources allow. This can be the ultimate scare tactic, because we all know what happens when we run out of air and food.

      In today’s industrialized society complete sustainability would be impossible. That is until clean renewable energy is abundantly available. Let’s face it, I can build all the houses I want out of lumber from a renewable tree farm but until I can cut down and transport those trees without using any fossil fuels can I say my resource is truly renewable. This should not discourage any efforts though; every little step forward is a step in the right direction. All I’m saying is the pace of our progression as a society has dug us a huge hole of a problem environmentally.

      Sustainability is to live in tune with our environment, as if we were just one part of a symphony orchestra, playing in harmony with all that is around us. What it is not is trying to conduct the orchestra to follow a rhythm it doesn’t want to play, and then trying to cover it up with more cow bell, just to make the masses happy. Contrary to popular belief everything isn’t better with more cow bell.