The concept "sustainability" often motivates discussion of outcome manipulation, eg: "reduced food waste". Such outcomes are typically envisioned and sought after using unsustainable procedures. For a complex system (eg: a business, a person) to be sustainable it must maintain itself indefinitely, not just produce sustainable outcomes. “Sustainability” is therefore a state, not an endpoint. To maintain sustainability, the structure of a system must be comprised of self-stabilising internal mechanisms. For example, your computer is an unsustainable system since it cannot repair itself. Your eyes are sustainable systems since they can recover from superficial injury without intervention. In seeking to determine the preconditions for a sustainable global civilisation, I realised that my way of approaching the topic of sustainability was itself unsustainable. Since that realisation, I have been studying psychology. I seek to approach sustainability from the ground up. How is my way of thinking about sustainability itself sustainable? How can self-stabilising psychological techniques be applied to larger scale outcome-oriented sustainability endeavours? I then developed a psychological technique for practicing sustainability. Each day I list my sustainable activities and my unsustainable activities, with the added condition that each day must include more sustainability than the last. This technique gives my pursuit of sustainable outcomes viability, integrity, depth, reflectivity, originality, and versatility. My psychological and systems-oriented approach to sustainability could be applied to individuals, relationships, groups, businesses, organisations, and societies and could refine our collective pursuit of a sustainable world.
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Cheryl Tan | 11/19/2020 - 19:26
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