Axioms of Sustainability

(after Richard Heinberg)

A sustainable society can continue its activities into the forseeable future and beyond.

Sustainability means "essentially forever."

Conditions on a sustainable society:

1. Renewable resources can only be consumed at a rate less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment. 
(Loggers have to wait for the forest to grow.  Users of well water have to allow the water table to refill.  Farmers have to replenish the soil's fertility or wait).

2. Non-renewable resources can only be consumed  at a decreasing rate.  This rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.
(You stop using it faster than it runs out).
The rate of depletion is the amount extracted and used in a year as a percentage of the amount left to extract.

3. All waste products from human activity must become harmless to the biosphere more quickly than they are produced.
(pollutants and CO₂ don't keep accumulating)

4.  Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained indefinitely. 
There is no such thing as "sustainable growth".

5.  Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
Critical resources are those essential to the maintenance of life and basic social functions—including (but not necessarily limited to) water and the resources necessary to produce food and usable energy.

If leaders and societies do not begin to abide by these conditions then society as a whole, or some aspects of it, will assuredly collapse. 

It's only a matter of time.