Sustainability by Design

John R. Ehrenfeld

"I define sustainability as the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever. It’s a definition about as far from the central notion of sustainable development as night is from day. But, to me, it represents a truer idea about what sustainability is all about. Flourishing, like many other desirable qualities, is an emergent property. It has no thing-like character. It’s like health, or liberty, or freedom: It appears only when the whole system is functioning properly. And just like you can’t produce a Rembrandt from a paint-by-numbers kit, you can’t build a machine to produce flourishing, and you can’t measure it."

Lecture at TU Delft