Meeting Our Sustainability Challenges

Abstract

Our species stands at a fork in the road. One branch is paved with runaway climate change, rising seas, and the humanitarian crises likely to follow in their wake; the reduced soil fertility and loss of genetic diversity of crops associated with industrialized agriculture; life-threatening levels of air and water pollution, especially in the cities of rapidly industrializing, less developed countries; swirling mini-continents of plastic debris choking the world's oceans and the gullets of marine life; and a host of other unmet sustainability challenges that pose an existential threat to the well-being of human individuals, their communities, and their environments in developed and less developed countries alike. That branch of the road seems likely to lead us to a dead end, strewn with the bones of a failed civilization. The other branch is bright with the light of solar, wind, and other noncarbon-based energy sources; ecologically sensitive agricultural systems that nevertheless provide enough food and fiber for all; new business models that prioritize and incentivize greener and cleaner production; the proliferation of resource recovery and reuse practices and technologies in supply chains for common manufactured goods; and an emerging awareness of and interest in pursuing paths to a human future that does not merely perpetuate the unsustainable mistakes of the past. That branch of the road points the way to a world of sustainable human societies, which will qualify as such by having demonstrated a pervasive, ongoing capacity for facilitating, enhancing, and sustaining indefinitely in that facilitated or enhanced state the well-being of human individuals, their communities, and their environments [1]. Like the readership that we hope to attract, we at the Journal of Sustainability Research (JSR) choose to follow the second route, with a world of sustainable human societies as our goal. Toward that end, we seek to make the JSR a forum for the publication of scholarship likely to contribute to the realization of that vision. As the founding Editors-inChief of the JSR, we propose the following principles as essential to achieving that goal. First, the JSR should be as substantively inclusive as possible. As Editors-in-Chief, we wish to see the journal explore every angle of the multidimensional interface at which the most serious sustainability challenges emerge and must be met if the human enterprise is not merely to persist, but to thrive indefinitely on this planet. We also recognize, however, that we must approach those sustainability challenges holistically if they are to be met at all. Albert Einstein famously stated that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. The unsustainable path on which we now Open Access