Everyone is aware that sustainability is a very vague term. Unfortunately, rather than working on or with this quality, many people believe that, even though we do not yet know what sustainability is, we can and must nevertheless measure how sustainable our actions are.
An industry has emerged auditing every environmental factor possible in order to establish the baseline for any improvements we make. Some of the worst aspects of statistics and accounting are being enlisted to make sustainability into a determinable quantity. As with all such systems, what masquerades as measurable fact is inevitably highly relativistic — something that is evidenced by how easy it is to rort the system: measure X without reference to Y and it will appear to be more sustainable than Z.
It is strange that these days no-one believes that anything has been achieved unless that achievement is measurable. But if you can measure the extent of an improvement, then it has not been a very major transformation. The sort of changes now required to become more sustainable are so great that the qualitative difference between the before and after of how we live and work will make measurement impossible.
Auditing our work and home environments is however a useful way of beginning to turn those environments into sustainments, so long as you don't get too hung up about the factual results. Because the environments in which we live and work mostly withdraw into the background, concealing their infrastructure or appearing transparent before our activities, we often have little awareness of the relations that are sustaining us through those environments. By being forced to map those environments on the way to measuring them, we learn a lot about the interdependencies that make them up. There is no need to quantify it all: it is enough that how these environments sustain has now been made visible. With this understanding, you are halfway toward a sustainment already.
