(Mis)understanding sustainability

Re Skip Work, Save Jobs: The Climate Strike Is Also About Economic Stability (Sept. 25): It seems obvious that economic and social stability isn’t just linked to ecological stability, it’s embedded within it. It’s not as if the economy exists outside of an environment in some hypothetical Platonic sense.

Part of the problem is public perception and cultural myths. Sustainability is often misunderstood – even among those with the best of environmental intentions – as the centre of an overlapping Venn diagram, where people-planet-profit meet. But this is an incorrect model of reality: People and profit can’t exist independently of the planet.

Rather than a Venn diagram, we should think of concentric circles. In the centre, you have economics (profit), embedded within society (people), embedded within a global ecology (planet). How on Earth could it be otherwise?

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Note: This appeared as a letter to the editor in The Globe & Mail.