The 12 Principles Of Sustainability

Millard Arterberry

• Publisher: Edenfinity LLC
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780578964416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The 12 Principles Of Sustainability is an easy to read essay on our species' relationship with our home planet. The book first recounts the author's journey to discovering the 12 principles, then goes over the principles in detail. Each principle is derived from the core definition of sustainability outlined in the first principle: that which contributes to the establishment and continuance of a symbiotic, regenerative, and indefinitely sustainable relationship between our species and our planet.

Principle #1

“Sustainable” is that which contributes to the establishment and continuance of a symbiotic, regenerative, and indefinitely sustainable relationship between our species and our planet.

“Green” and “sustainable” are commonly used interchangeably as catchall adjectives that describe a relatively broad range of ideas, practices, products, and services. While “green” for our purposes remains somewhat nebulous, “sustainable” has a far more specific meaning in relation to how we live on this planet.

 Sustainability is very easy to understand—it is rooted in our survival instinct, and it is our ability as a species to survive and thrive indefinitely on this planet.

Sustainability is NOT about saving this planet. What a complete fantasy. This planet can manage just fine without us saving her. If I saw humanity coming around the corner looking like it wanted to save me, I would turn around and run top speed the other way.

Sustainability is about saving ourselves from ourselves. We disobeyed the cardinal rule of nature, which is not to poop in your own nest. With 7.8 billion of us pooping away, we have made a terrible, terrible mess.

As such, sustainability is a species-wide challenge to modify our behavior so that, for all cities and regions on our planet, the sum of their activities maintain or enhance a given region’s ecological balance.

A system like this does not deplete the resources of a given region over time; it carefully calibrates human activity with resource availability and maintenance of native flora and fauna so that human activities can sustain themselves indefinitely over time.

Principle #2

Our World is a Living Being Inhabiting a Universe of Living Energy

Many of us can intuit this reality now, far more than in past decades. This is in large part thanks to our modern physicists, whose work has slowly and steadily trickled into our common consciousness. So many ideas most of us assumed to be true—materialism, the dumb and dead vacuum of space, an object-based reality—have long-since been eclipsed by far more interesting discoveries in astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Here are some highlights:

• The underlying substrate of the Universe is anythi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• The Path to the Principles
• Principle #1
• Principle #2
• Principle #3
• Principle #4
• Principle #5
• Principle #6
• Principle #7
• Principle #8
• Principle #9
• Principle #10
• Principle #11
• Principle #12
• Vision
• About The Author