Talk:Sustainability

Subpages

• FA Project; Latest Peer review
• Lead
• Definition
• History
• Description
• Measuring sustainability
• Environmental dimension
  • Application/Implementation Environmental management
  • Application/Implementation/consumption Management of consumption
• Social material
• Economic opportunity
• Talk:Sustainability/Transformation (was Talk:Sustainability/Barriers)
• "leftover" material from copyedit, unlinked references etc

17th to 19th centuries - fossil fuels?

"But it was the Western industrial revolution of the 17th to 19th centuries that tapped into the vast growth potential of the energy in fossil fuels to power sophisticated machinery technology.[28]"

The citation goes to a source about cholera, not fossil fuels. Also, 17th century? Seems at least one century too early for the Industrial Revolution. Scoopczar (talk) 20:26, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Will fix these.Granitethighs 09:58, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Business Connotations?

Pyramid Scheme links to this page and references the term in context of business/money. Was this intentional, and this page isn't complete, or is the link wrong in assuming that this page is also about that meaning of "sustainability?" Magicallydajesus (talk) 12:40, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

GA candidate?

I know that a tremendous amount of work has gone into this article, and that some editors had high hopes for it. Surely it would be worth nominating this article at WP:GAN? It would be great to see this article become a GA. Johnfos (talk) 21:53, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it would be a great opportunity to sharpen up the references and apply some fine-tuning to the editing. I'll certainly help.Granitethighs 22:37, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

The article is still a mess. It's overlong, polemical, and indiscriminate in its approach to the topic of sustainability. I think we need to seriously address those issues before this article is submitted for GA consideration. Uncle Dick (talk) 22:48, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Totally agree with the tag at the top of the article which says: "This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably" -- some content needs to be spun off into sub-articles per WP:Summary style, with a summary being left here. The "Environmental dimension" section is also tagged and so needs some work. Some inline tags need attending to in the "Consumption — population, technology, resources" section. Some copyediting is needed and I notice that this piece of random text, "[[File:control over the environment." appears in the History section. Once these changes are made I think the article would be ready for GAN... Johnfos (talk21 September 2010 (UTC)

Johnfos thanks for your suggestion. I see there are 240 watchers to this page ... which indicates to me both its popularity and its "controversiality". Not sure where we go from here but thanks for your positive and encouraging suggestion.Granitethighs 23:39, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, GT. I would think that cutting down the Sustainability measurement section should be a first step, as there is already an article on this which is linked to. Then decide what can be split from the article, leaving just a summary here. GAs do not need to be long, in fact reviewers are pleased to see WP:Summary style being used. Hope this helps. Johnfos (talk) 00:00, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I've done quite a bit of editing today and article is shorter now due to trimming and use of summary style, and it is easier to navigate and read due to the amalgamation of many single paragraph sections. Please see edit summaries for full details. I plan to submit the article at GAN tomorrow. Johnfos (talk) 03:15, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

That's much cleaner now JF. Thanks for doing all that. My only comment would be to do with the "transition" section that was removed. You were right that this was at least in part a "wrapping up": if Wikipedia does not do that ... then so be it. However, any positive suggestions for ways of achieving sustainability are extremely valuable in an article that has the potential to become very "gloomy". Is there no place for the sentence (or variation of) "There is a wealth of advice available to individuals wishing to reduce their personal impact on the environment through small, cheap and easily achievable steps. But the transition required to reduce global human consumption to within sustainable limits involves much larger changes, at all levels and contexts of society. The United Nations has recognised the central role of education, and have declared a decade of education for sustainable development, 2005–2014, which aims to "challenge us all to adopt new behaviours and practices to secure our future". The Worldwide Fund for Nature proposes a strategy for sustainability that goes beyond education to tackle underlying individualistic and materialistic societal values head-on and strengthen people's connections with the natural world." Much as I like the inclusion of Bookchin I think having him almost at the end is not appropriate (and Deep Ecology is also a bit much for the casual reader - it needs to be in, but not in the last sentence) - the idea that we need some sort of "transformation" to achieve sustainability is very important and should be clearly expressed in some positive way - preferably near the end. I think the above sentence (with added references) catches the right tone.Granitethighs 11:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks GT. I've swapped the order of the last two sections so the article ends on a more positive note, and have re-added the text you have suggested... Johnfos (talk) 01:00, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Sustainability/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Sasata (talk) 04:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Greetings, I've signed up for this review. I think it's fantastic this is at GAN, it's a subject I'm very interested in. I will read through carefully and make minor copyedits as I go along, and bring other stuff up for discussion here. The review will probably take me up to a week, as I have to balance my wikitime among several projects :) Sasata (talk) 04:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Sasata. Glad that you are able to do the review. Feel free to discuss things as you go along, as we have a number of editors who will be watching this page, and who should be able to help :) Johnfos (talk) 04:51, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for taking up the running with this Sasata - haven't we met somewhere before? J, I like what you have done and am not requesting change. I like the way you have saved the culled information. The following thoughts are to possibly tease out issues and better presentation of ideas only.

• The headings ‘environment’, ‘society’ and ‘economics’ reflect the “three pillars” of sustainability. Would it help either the understanding of the reader or editor presentation of these topics if they all had identical subheadings? So, since we have the subheadings “environmental management” and “management of human consumption” under Environmental dimension, why not “economic management” with “management of human consumption” under Economic dimension (or, vice-versa, have different subheadings under Environmental dimension?

• Similarly we have a Main sub-article “Sustainability and environmental management”, for consistency should we also have “Sustainability and economic/social management” sub-articles?

• We can worry about it later but the “Sustainability and environmental management” sub-article is currently rather illogically presented – and clearly a “dumping ground” for extraneous info – the headings don’t relate and the content is not intuitive. Most of it is actually in the current sustainability article so what is its purpose?

• We have removed the “Extinctions” section – but wouldn’t some argue that sustainability and irreversible loss of biodiversity are intimately connected. Do they have a point and should extinction at least get a mention?

• Various sources quote biological invasions as the third greatest impact on biodiversity after climate change and land clearing. Is this relevant to sustainability and if so perhaps some mention could be made of it in the article as the "Biological invasions" section has now been removed?

Granitethighs 11:17, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Sustainability is a huge topic and not everything about it can be included in a single WP article. So some material appears in sub-articles, and recently the sub-article Sustainability and environmental management was created. This was in response to a tag at the top of this article suggesting that the article was "too long" and that WP:Summary style should be used. As this main article expands other sub-articles may be spun off, but for now it is within WP length requirements, and so there is no need for more sub-articles at this stage.

When an article is spun off, and a summary left here, there is inevitably some loss of detailed information in the main article. And the loss of information relating to Extinctions and Biological invasions has been questioned. So I have added links to Extinction and Introduced species in the See also section. This gives these topics a mention in the main article but still helps to keep the "Environmental dimension" section manageable.

As for the "Economic dimension" and "Social dimension" sections they are not too long and are fine as they are. I don't see any advantage in making the sub-headings there follow those used in the "Environmental dimension" section. Johnfos (talk) 20:40, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

That's fine. The only remaining query is why most of the sub-article Sustainability and environmental management is the same as the section in the main article? Granitethighs 11:10, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The summary in the main Sustainability article (reproduced at User:Johnfos/Drafts) is 8,827 bytes long with a total of 16 references, whereas the Sustainability and environmental management sub-article is 20,809 bytes long with 36 references. So the sub-article is a lot (12k) longer than the summary section in the main article, which is the way it should be. And as the new sub-article expands that difference would get greater. Johnfos (talk) 16:14, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

I've read through the article and made a number of minor copyedits, feel free to revert anything you don't agree with. I thought the article was very well done—engaging prose, good use of summary style, amply cited. Here's a few thoughts I had: Sasata (talk) 16:14, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• why include a year in the captions to the images in the definition section? It's not vital information to understand the concepts presented, and readers can check the citation if they want to know when it was published.

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 01:59, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• in a few cases a citation was in the middle of a sentence when I thought it would do equally well at the end. For example,

• "But sustainability is also a call to action, a task in progress or “journey”[20] and therefore a political process, so some definitions set out common goals and values." here the placement of the cite indicates (to me) that emphasis is placed on showing the source of the quote word "journey". So is the remainder of the sentence OR, or is the idea also from the same source? If it is, then the cite should be placed at the end.

Fixed Granitethighs 21:43, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• "...because the number of children under age 15 in developing countries will decrease." How do we know for sure? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "...is predicted to decrease." ?

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 01:59, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Long-term estimates of global population suggest a peak at around 2070 of nine to ten billion people, and then a slow decrease to 8.4 billion by 2100." This is interesting, is there any explanation of why this (predicted) decrease will happen?

Readers can look up the cited article - the explanation would probably take up quite a lot of space and there are other large articles on WP about population - and the article does give links to these.Granitethighs 21:49, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• In the "Environmental dimension" section, it should be possible to discuss the two major ways of reducing human impact without having to indent paragraphs and dividing into a and b

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "At the local human scale, major sustainability benefits accrue from the pursuit of green cities and sustainable parks and gardens." benefits accrue from just pursuing them? I would have thought benefits would accrue from implementing them.

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The ideas of embodied resource use (the total resources needed to produce a product or service), resource intensity (the resources needed for each dollar spent on a good or service), and resource productivity (the amount of good or service produced for a given input of resource) are important tools for understanding the impacts of consumption with simple key resource categories indicating human needs being food, energy, materials and water." This long sentence seems a bit awkward to me.

Fixed Johnfos (talk) 18:56, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "... this percentage is likely to increase if climate change worsens ..." How are we defining "worsens"?

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:56, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Humans currently use 40–50% of the globally available freshwater" when is currently? Better to use "According to a 1998 estimate" or something similar that gives a date.

Fixed Granitethighs 21:56, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The World Health Organization has published a Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health which was endorsed" missing something like "... has published (a set of recommendations titled/a report) ..."

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 21:06, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "water-self-sufficient" should reword to avoid the consecutive hyphens

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 04:31, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The average human uses 45–85 tonnes of materials each year." Could this be clarified? What exactly does "use" imply here?

Removed this confusing statement. Johnfos (talk) 21:06, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "In the second half of the 20th century world population doubled, food production tripled, energy use quadrupled, and overall economic activity quintupled." Compared to what? The first half of the century?

Have removed this confusing sentence which added little. Johnfos (talk) 09:25, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

• "etc." should be used sparingly, and removed if possible. For example, in the sentence:

• "One approach to this dilemma has been the attempt to "internalise" these "externalities" by using market strategies like ecotaxes and incentives, tradeable permits for carbon, water and nitrogen use etc., and the encouragement of payment for ecosystem services."

Here the use of the word "like" before giving the list implies that it's only a reprentative sampling, and the etc. isn't really required. There's some other instances in the article that might be tweaked out. Also, is water and nitrogen use a "market strategy"?

Removed "water and nitrogen use etc." so sentence makes more sense. Johnfos (talk) 08:55, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Community currencies such as LETS... " should spell out the acronym (at least on first usage)

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 04:31, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• there are a few citations to books that don't have the page numbers
• citation formatting not completely consistent: most use templates, but some don't; listing of authors varies sometimes (e.g. compare Hawken, P, Lovins, A.B. & L.H. versus Devall, W. and G. Sessions); et al. should be in italics. It's not a huge deal for GA, but since we're here, we might as well clean them up a bit, no?

Have changed et al. to et al. Johnfos (talk) 20:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks for reviewing and for your help, Sasata. I hope enough improvements have been made to bring the article up to GA standard, but agree that more work on the citations would be needed if the article was to proceed to FA. Johnfos (talk) 20:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

We're pretty close... there's a few dabs that need to be fixed up, listed here. Sasata (talk) 15:51, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I've fixed the dabs - except for the "sustainability governance" thingy - not sure how to do this. At some time (too busy now) I will go systematically through all the references for consistency.Granitethighs 22:15, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• One more thing, the lead needs a bit of work, it's not really functioning as a summary of the article now as the MOS suggests. For an article this size, I'd expect it to be a full three or four paragraphs. Also, there shouldn't be quotes in the lead, especially those not in the article body. Should Wikipedia be giving such a prominent spotlight to a Californian environmentalist, in an important article that's viewed several thousand times daily? (no offence to Paul Hawken, btw, I just think the quote should be moved, not removed) Sasata (talk) 04:59, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Lead now provides a better summary of the article. Johnfos (talk) 06:16, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I think my job here is done. Thanks Johnfos and Granitethighs for your improvements to this article. Sasata (talk) 14:56, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Results of review

GA review (see here for criteria)

---

The article sustainability passes this review, and has been promoted to good article status. The article is found by the reviewing editor to be deserving of good article status based on the following criteria:

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   Prose is well-written, uses summary style; article complies with MOS. Reference formatting consistency sufficient for GA.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   Several references were checked, nothing was amiss.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   All images are PD or are appropriately licensed.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail: Pass

Sustainability template discussion

There is a discussion here concerning the suitability of Template:Sustainability, which watchers of this page may be interested in contributing to. --Epipelagic (talk) 08:38, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Sorry. I should have noted it here. Thanks. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:36, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

There is further discussion here about the scope and format of this currently rather messy template, which needs input from editors with some acquaintance with sustainability issues. --Epipelagic (talk) 21:36, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from Tenbrooks10, 26 November 2010

{{edit semi-protected}}

Just trying to help. Footnote 8 has a bad link for 60/1. 2005 World Summit Outcome. The correct one is:

http://data.unaids.org/Topics/UniversalAccess/worldsummitoutcome_resolution_24oct2005_en.pdf

Tenbrooks10 (talk) 23:45, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

 Done. Thank you for your contribution to Wikipedia. Intelligentsium 01:58, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

sustainable

I have looked up sustainability, and the answer there does not give me the information I am looking for. If anyone could give me any information about what SUSTAINABLE means then I would be very grateful. Thankyou for any info. --88.108.91.74 (talk) 06:09, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Tried Wiktionary? --Thrissel (talk) 16:35, 13 December 2010 (UTC)