You may be asked this question, or be trying to better define it for yourself. Here is a short video produced by Stanford that explains four major principles of sustainability and gives examples with a coral reef ecosystem.There is also a short video describing each of these four principles in more depth:

1. Productivity is the growth rate of the organisms living in an ecosystem. It determines how fast we can use an ecosystem’s resources. When we take them faster than they are produced, the ecosystem loses biomass, diversity and productivity. We can maintain sustainable ecosystems by balancing the rate we take resources with the rate they are made.
2. Diversity (or biodiversity) is the variation within and between living things. It is measured on many levels; from genetic variation to differences between individuals within populations to differences among species and among ecosystems.
3. Disturbance upsets the normal structure and function of an ecosystem. This happens on both the large and small scale, from both natural events and human-induced disruptions.
4. Resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to resist or recover from these events. Resilience preserves ecosystem diversity, productivity and sustainability. Disturbance has more impact on ecosystems that have lost diversity.

Please add your thoughts to the discussion: are these the principles that we think of when we talk about USU becoming more sustainable?


Here's something inspiring (and maybe controversial, since he says 99% of the personal actions we take will make no difference in solving the real problems) regarding entrepreneurism and renewable energy:

• Toss the old notions of environmentalism into the recycling bin. In a talk he calls The Black Swans of Energy Invention, renowned investor Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures shatters conventional wisdom of energy reduction, and instead encourages entrepreneurs to solve environmental problems via cost-effective, innovative, and scalable engineering.