Increasing numbers of organizations, religious and secular, are taking up concern for how our planet will endure beyond the next few decades. Each religious tradition recognizes the human responsibility for sustaining the earth’s resources as part of religious practice. Concern for sustainability is one of the areas where religious pluralists can work to make a difference for themselves as well as the global population. Few people disagree about the need; the challenge then is how to understand the differences in each religion on behalf of the common need.
The word sustainability is derived from the Latin “sustinere” (tenere, to hold; sus, up). Dictionaries provide more than ten meanings for sustain, the main ones being to “maintain,” “support,” or “endure.” Since the 1980s, however, sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability, that of the Bruntland Commission of the United Nations from March 20, 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” At the 2005 World Summit it was noted that this requires the reconciliation of environmental, social and economic demands - the “three pillars” of sustainability. This view has been expressed as an illustration using three overlapping ellipses indicating that the three pillars of sustainability are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually reinforcing.
