Understanding
Introduction
How to understand the import of sustainability? As emergent understanding, it is likely humanity’s only important historical legacy. As a mortal threat and crucial challenge, it is probably humanity's last physical, intellectual, and spiritual frontier. As a development option, it may be the only remaining path where enduring economic security and prosperity are possible and highly probable.
Climate change is the front line in the larger sustainability challenge facing humanity, but it can only be addressed effectively as part of humanity’s larger response to the primary challenge--sustainability, where the required emergency measures to address climate change are harnessed to jump-start the transition to sustainability – that is, a prosperous, secure, and just global economy that reflects, leverages, and enhances the economic power and ecological integrity of the biosphere, the primary economy upon which the secondary human economy is utterly dependent.
