Green Lingo

Not sure what we mean when by "sustainability?" Still unclear what exactly "green" means? The following terms are common speak to Imagine Green that you may not be as familiar with as you would like. Definitions provided below are courtesy of Wikipedia.

Greening

Greening involves the process of incorporating "green" products and processes into one's environment, such as the home work place, and general life style. These "green" qualities include but are not limited to reduced toxicity, re-usability, energy efficiency, responsible packaging, recycled content, intelligent design, responsible manufacturing techniques, and reduction of personal environmental hazards. Environmentally friendly companies like Green Home have developed a rigorous approval policy that allows consumers to qualify each product based upon these criteria as they apply to specific product categories.

Green Living

Green living is a life philosophy. Proponents of green living aim to conduct their lives in such a way that they have an all-encompassing awareness of earth and its processes. Each choice made under such a way of life requires a consideration of the consequences of the choice, and the way that the decision will affect the environment and all living things within it. Ecological consciousness and care for the earth are of paramount importance in the decision-making process.

By minimizing their "ecological footprints" — the extent to which they create an environmental impact — proponents of green living hope to preserve the earth for future generations of human beings and other life.

Environmentalism

Environmentalism is a concern for the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions. It often supports the struggles of indigenous peoples against the spread of globalization to their way of life, which is seen as less harmful to the environment. The study of practical environmentalism is split into two positions: the mainstream ‘anthropocentric’ or hierarchic, and the more radical ‘ecocentric’ or egalitarian.

The term environmentalism is associated with other modern terms such as greening, environmental management, resource efficiency and waste minimization, and environmental responsibility, ethics and justice.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. The term, in its environmental usage, refers to the potential longevity of vital human ecological support systems, such as the planet's climatic system, systems of agriculture, industry, forestry, and fisheries, and human communities in general and the various systems on which they depend.

In recent years an academic and public discourse has led to this use of the word sustainability in reference to how long human ecological systems can be expected to be usefully productive. Observers point out that in the past, complex human societies have died out, sometimes as a result of their own growth and associated impacts on ecological support systems. The implication is that modern industrial society, which continues to grow in scale and complexity, might also collapse.

The implied preference would be for systems to be productive indefinitely, or be 'sustainable." For instance, "sustainable agriculture" would require agricultural systems expected to last indefinitely, "sustainable development" would be development of economic systems that last indefinitely, and so on. A side discourse relates the term sustainability to longevity of natural ecosystems and reserves (set aside for other-than-human species), but the greatest emphasis has been on human systems and anthropogenic problems, such as anthropogenic climate change, or the obviously anthropogenic depletion of fossil fuel reserves.

The Natural Step/System Conditions of Sustainability

Following the Brundtland Commission's report, one of the first initiatives to bring scientific principles to the assessment of sustainability was by Swedish cancer scientist Karl-Henrik Robèrt. Robèrt coordinated a consensus process to define and operationalize sustainability. At the core of the process lies a consensus on what Robèrt came to call the natural step framework. The framework is based on a definition of sustainability, described as the system conditions of sustainability (as derived from System theory). In the natural step framework, a sustainable society is one which does not systematically increase concentrations of substances extracted from the earth's crust, or substances produced by society; that does not degrade the environment and in which people have the capacity to meet their needs worldwide.

Life Cycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment is a "composite measure of sustainability." It analyses the environmental performance of products and services through all phases of their life cycle: extracting and processing raw materials; manufacturing, transportation and distribution; use, re-use, maintenance; recycling, and final disposal.

Ecological Footprint

Ecological footprint analysis is an estimate of the amount of land area a human population, given prevailing technology, would need if the current resource consumption and pollution by the population is matched by the sustainable (renewable) resource production and waste assimilation by such a land area. The algorithms of the ecological footprint model have, on the one hand, been used in combination with the energy methodology (S. Zhao, Z. Li and W. Li 2005), and a sustainability index has been derived from the latter. They have also been combined with an index of quality of life (Marks et al, 2006), and the outcome christened the "(Un)Happy Planet Index" (HPI) shows data for 178 nations.

One of the striking conclusions to emerge from ecological footprint analyses is that it would be necessary to have 4 or 5 back-up planets engaged in nothing but agriculture for all those alive today to live a Western lifestyle.