3.3 Core Ideas and Metaconcepts

Learning Objectives

  1. Identify the roles of carrying capacity and equity in the four key metaconcepts of sustainability.
  2. Compare and contrast the four key metaconcepts, including their assumptions, emphases, and implications.
  3. Apply the metaconcepts to identify sustainable business practices.

An educated entrepreneur or business leader interested in sustainability innovation should understand two core ideas. The first is that sustainability innovation ultimately contributes to preservation and restoration of nature's carrying capacity. Carrying capacity refers to the ability of the natural system to sustain demands placed upon it while still retaining the self-regenerative processes that preserve the system's viability indefinitely. Note that human bodies have carrying capacities, and thus we are included in this notion of natural carrying capacities. For example, similarly to groundwater supplies or coastal estuaries, children's bodies can be burdened with pollutants only up to a point, beyond which the system collapses into dysfunction and disease.

The second core idea is equity, leading to our discussion of environmental justice as the second metaconcept category. Prosperity achieved by preserving and restoring natural system carrying capacities that structurally exclude many people from realizing the benefits of that prosperity is not sustainable, practically or morally. Sustainability scholars have suggested that a "fortress" future lies ahead if equity issues are not considered core to sustainability goals. The wealthy will need to defend their wealth from gated communities, while the poor live with illness, pollution, and resource scarcity.

Sustainability innovations guided by the following approaches aim to sustain biological carrying capacities and healthy human communities that strive toward equity. The ideal is that we tap into every person's creativity and bring it to bear on how we learn to live on what scientists now call our "full Earth".

Each of our four key metaconcepts- sustainable development, environmental justice, earth systems engineering and management, and sustainability science- addresses ideas of equity and carrying capacity in a slightly different way. Earth Systems Engineering and management and sustainability science focus on technology and carrying capacity, while sustainable development and environmental justice emphasize social structures and equity. Yet each metaconcept realizes equity and carrying capacity are linked; humans have both social and material aspirations that must be met within the finite resources of the environment.