Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Four Principles of Sustainability:
Copy Nature
We can develop more sustainable economies and
societies by mimicking the four major ways that
nature has adapted and sustained itself for several
billion years.
How can we live more sustainably? According to ecol-
ogists, we can find out how nature has survived and
adapted for several billion years and copy its strategy.
Figure 6-18 summarizes the four major ways in which
life on earth has survived and adapted for several bil-
lions of years. Figure 6-19 gives an expanded descrip-
tion of these principles (left side) and summarizes how
we can live more sustainably by mimicking these fun-
damental but amazingly simple lessons from nature in
designing our societies, products, and economies
(right side).
Figures 6-18 and 6-19 summarize the major
message of this topic. Study them carefully.
Biologists have used these lessons from their eco-
logical study of nature to formulate four guidelines for
developing more sustainable societies and lifestyles:
Solutions
Principles of Sustainability
How Nature Works
Lessons for Us
Runs on
renewable
solar energy.
Rely mostly on
renewable solar
energy.
Recycles
nutrients and
wastes. There
is little waste
in nature.
Prevent and reduce
pollution and
recycle and reuse
resources.
Uses
biodiversity to
maintain itself
and adapt to
new environ-
mental
conditions.
Preserve biodiversity
by protecting
ecosystem services
and habitats and
preventing
premature extinction
Controls a
species'
population size
and resource
use by
interactions
with its
environment
and other
species.
Reduce human
births and wasteful
resource use to
prevent environ-
mental overload
and depletion and
degradation of
resources.
■
Our lives, lifestyles, and economies are totally dependent
on the sun and the earth.
We need the earth, but the earth
does not need us. As a species, we are very expendable.
■
Everything is connected to, and interdependent with,
everything else.
The primary goal of ecology is to dis-
cover what connections in nature are the strongest,
most important, and most vulnerable to disruption for
us and other species.
Figure 6-19
Solutions:
implications of the four principles of
sustainability (left), derived from observing nature, for the long-
term sustainability of human societies (right). These four operat-
ing principles of nature are connected to one another. Failure of
any single principle can lead to temporary or long-term unsus-
tainability, and disruption of ecosystems and human economies
and societies.
■
We can never do just one thing.
Any human intrusion
into nature has unexpected and mostly unintended
side effects (Connections, p. 124). When we alter na-
ture, we need to ask, “Now what will happen?”
PRINCIPLES
OF
SUSTAINABILITY
■
We cannot indefinitely sustain a civilization that de-
pletes and degrades the earth's natural capital, but we can
sustain one that lives off the biological income provided by
the earth's natural capital.
Increasingly, environmental scientists and ecolo-
gists are urging that we base our efforts to prevent
damage to the earth's life-support system on the
pre-
cautionary principle:
When evidence indicates that an
activity can seriously harm human health or the envi-
ronment, we should take precautionary measures to
prevent or minimize such harm, even if some of the
cause-and-effect relationships have not been fully es-
Figure 6-18
Sustaining natural capital:
four interconnected
principles of sustainability derived from learning how nature
sustains itself. This diagram also appears on the bottom half of
this topic's back cover.
