Sustainability is a word that gets tossed around in varying contexts. For example, one might call an action sustainable, and if that be the case the action may turn into a habit with no ill effect. However, if an unsustainable action may be if someone decides to visit a new continent every week. It may be repeatable, but after seven weeks (or six, depending on his/her definition of a continent with regards to Eurasia) he or she would be unable to continue. However, a sustainable action may be as simple as walking the dog every morning, as this will always be repeatable and could become a habit. This may seem like a strange way to think about sustainability, as it usually pertains to the environment, or promoting a “greener” lifestyle. One of the points that I’d like to make is that a sustainable process is not, in the fact that it is sustainable alone, beneficial for the environment. It may be more beneficial than a similar process that is not sustainable, but they are not the same thing. People often confuse these two ideas since they are almost always discussed in the same context. Just because something can be sustained for some period of time, (as nothing is sustainable forever), does not increase the well-being of the environment.

If sustainability is defined as “the capacity to endure” (Wikipedia’s definition), then surely that which is sustainable must only endure and survive for some undetermined period. Perhaps the system or product must need to endure for relatively long periods of time to be considered sustainable. Another crucial factor that must be considered is that certain systems and processes are designed with separate timelines in mind. Therefore, it is implied that the term is relative. To further complicate matters, the planet we live on is not sustainable. That is to say, once the sun burns out or an asteroid collides with the Earth or it eventually gets sucked into a black hole as it whizzes through the cosmos, the entire sustainable effort by its population, by its internal processes, will be trumped by a much larger chaotic uncertainty. However, in order for people to use sustainability, we must live within this illusion that some things can be sustained indefinitely despite the entropy all around us. In short, sustainability is an incredibly abstract concept that must be greatly simplified in order to be utilized.