On Social Sustainability: Defining our Collective Identity as a Society
When kids grow up, they start asking questions. Many questions. And they can be adorable but also testing. So last night, my nephew — after quietly listening to a conversation I was having with my brother about a book I recently completed — presented this innocent (but of course nowadays, very loaded) curiosity: “What is sustainability?”. Myriads of possible answers instantly popped up in my mind — environmental, economic, corporate, social sustainability — only to fade away with proportional immediacy, for I felt that I did not have the perfectly linear reasoning to establish credible authority with kids. So, as I always do when I seek alignment, I decided to write about it.
In the current climate, we immediately associate ‘sustainability’ with environment. According to KWFinder, in the last month “environmental sustainability” has been looked up in search engines 22,000 times worldwide, the most out of all phrases associated with sustainability.
Environmental sustainability is a reactive trigger to the concept of climate change, a set of familiar and measurable phenomena that directly engages our senses. The extremely visible…