So What's the Big Deal Anyway?

The world's population currently sits at approximately 6.4 billion people. 800 million of these are malnourished; 2.4 billion have no sanitation; a third live in countries facing acute water shortages. About 80% of the world’s resources are being consumed by 20% of its population. With the tremendous economic growth of developing countries, and their alarming population growth rate, competition for global resources is reaching fever pitch as countries scramble to grab the last of the cheap resources.

You’ve heard these numbers thrown at you again and again. How did we get here?

The concept of sustainability is a broad, complex and highly controversial one. Sustainability, as the word suggests addresses the issue of the sustainability of human life on earth. Sustainable development has been defined, in the generally accepted definition, as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This is a fairly comprehensive definition, but a coherent understanding of the concept needs more to be said.

Sustainability requires us to understand the connections and dependencies that define our lives as a species on Earth. It requires us to understand the environment we live in, and the processes that make it work. It requires us to see systems as a whole, processes as interdependent structures, which cannot be taken and manipulated in isolation. We cannot, for instance, develop a system that takes in material and churns out a product, without answering questions like, "Where does the material input come from? How do we get it?” and, “Where do the products go?" It is the lack of such accountability that has left mountains of e-waste lining roadsides in poor communities in China. We need to address systems as a whole, understand the way our actions affect every aspect of the world around us.

Why do we need to care? Why must the effect of our lives on the world be checked and accounted for?

Quite simply answered, think of what would happen if we kept digging fossil fuels out of the earth, burning them for energy, and ultimately building our lives around this process. Designing transport around a ready availability of cheap fuel, making the systems that deliver food to our plates dependent on a huge amount of fuel, designing our heating, cooling, water, sanitation, around a non-renewable source of energy that was generated over million years of natural processes that cant be hurried, or reproduced any faster…

Which is precisely what has happened. The status of the world’s energy supply is a prime example of unsustainability. It is an exemplar of what we should not do. A sustainable community would have conceived of the effects of its actions on the future. That is what we’re trying to do now.

For us to develop sustainably into the future, we need to make radical changes in the way we live, do business and grow. We need to acknowledge that the way we’re living now is founded on inherently unsustainable principles, and a change will mean we all change, in every aspect of our lives..

Nexus seeks to make these changes by presenting the problems of sustainability in a fresh, new perspective. Students that are grounded in the principles of systems thinking, trained to view processes in their entirety, throughout their life cycles, are better equipped to design a more sustainable future.

Nexus hopes to make a fresh start, to make sustainable thinking a standard, in our community, in our nation, in our world. By providing an example of what can be achieved, we’re taking the first step in what we hope will be a long, successful journey. Walk with us.