In this website, I will introduce the many differing ideologies and pathways to this idea of sustainability through the utilization of concept maps. This first section, “What is Sustainability?“, explains four individual beliefs for the path to a sustainable future. The second page, “Lessons from the Past“, analyzes the environmental impacts of colonialism to this day, as well as a more specific and modern case study on the increasing reliance on automobiles. The last section, “Envisioning the Future“, provides my view of how to achieve sustainability with cooperation across scales, along with a case study on an education system intended to contribute to more sustainable future generations one student at a time. Each page is assisted with a visual concept map, designed to integrate all the various perspectives and relationships of sustainability to provide a more comprehensive view.
So what is sustainability?
The idea of sustainability is generally separated into four major worldviews: market liberals, social greens, institutionalists, and bioenvironmentalists. Each group has a different opinion of the causes of the modern world’s consumption and solutions towards achievable sustainability.
This concept map color coordinates the worldviews through four general categories: economic (red), social (purple), political (blue), and environmental (green). Each worldview falls best under a separate category, though the middle row and columns, in the shape of a cross, explain similarities and differences between the beliefs of the adjacent two worldviews. The color coordinated cross and check marks show controversial points from the worldviews. My personal worldview incorporates separate ideas from each ideology, and the comparing and contrasting of all four worldviews prove that there is no right or wrong answer to reaching this slippery concept of sustainability, and each path has it’s strengths and weaknesses.
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