People talk a lot about sustainability, though rarely can people agree on a singular definition.
I argue in defense of sustainability — that the continued challenges and critiques sustainability is facing in society are not fundamental failings of the concept, but rather evidence of how fundamentally different the sustainability world view is from the mainstream, modern way of thinking.
To understand why, we need to talk about threshold concepts.
Threshold concepts describe the core set of concepts that anyone must master if they are to effectively think from within a new paradigm. To a newcomer, threshold concepts often seem counterintuitive, and learning them can be far more complicated than merely mastering certain facts or equations.
In my essay, I discuss five threshold concepts that are commonly emphasized in the sustainability literature: complexity, collaborative institutions, multiple ways of knowing, no panaceas, and adaptability.
These are concepts that, over the last decade of teaching sustainability, I have seen students struggle with as they try to explore the boundaries of this new way of seeing the world.
In each case, teaching these threshold concepts requires not just repeated explanation, but the creation of opportunities for students to move through the difficult transition between old and new ways of seeing the world.
Some see sustainability in growth. Others argue anything less than a total societal move away from growth is just greenwashing.
Some argue for newer and greener technologies. Others insist that humanity has had the means for living sustainably for millennia, while still others lament that humanity is simply unsustainable by nature.
Despite these debates and contestations, sustainability remains essential to contemporary discourse about issues like biodiversity loss, poverty, and climate change.
The challenge that we have faced in transitioning to sustainability thinking is that sustainability isn’t just a new concept that can be added to existing ways of thinking and managing.
It is a new paradigm altogether, one that seeks to correct multiple problematic aspects of the industrial and neoliberal world view.
To better understand the various challenges and debates surrounding sustainability, I introduce threshold concepts: an idea developed in education research for understanding a student’s success with learning a new way of thinking.
Moving from one paradigm to another can be very difficult. People often encounter several challenges, such as getting lost in the vastness of the new paradigm, underestimating complexity, over-moralizing concepts and their implications, and conceptual turf-staking.
Each of these challenges is on display in academic and public conversations on sustainability.
I offer the five threshold concepts not as a comprehensive set but as exemplars of the sustainability paradigm’s pluralistic nature, which contrasts starkly with the more rigid and easy to define neoliberal and industrial world view.
I conclude my essay with thoughts on how sustainability science, education, and practice can benefit from this framing.