Overview

For several decades, sustainability has been the organizing principle of the environmental design movement. The most widely cited definition, from the 1987 Brundtland Commission report, describes sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This is a worthy goal. It is also, at this point in history, insufficient.

We are not in a period of slow, steady resource depletion that better management practices can address. We are in a period of active ecological breakdown: accelerating species loss, collapsed fisheries, degraded soils, depleted aquifers, a destabilized climate, and mounting quantities of non-degradable waste accumulating in every ecosystem on earth. Against this backdrop, sustainability — the goal of doing less harm at a rate that does not exceed the planet’s regenerative capacity — is not a solution. It is a slower version of the same trajectory.

The design community needs a different question. Not “how do we reduce our impact?” but “how do we reverse it?”