Sustainability

[Isabella Erickson]

I have only ever thought of sustainability when thinking of fish, specifically salmon. My definition of sustainability would be making sure that something can continue on, or making sure that we do not kill something off. I had never thought about it in as broad of terms as Solow does, as making it so the future generations have the same amount of resources as the current generation. It seems like he is making the case that sustainability is making sure that humans can continue on. However, he also adds another layer in that we need to make sure that humans can continue without diminished resources, and we need to do that by spending our current resources wisely.
I can see his point about substituting resources being important under his definition of sustainability. However, I can see there being problems if the substitute is inferior to the original. This is my main concern about aquaculture fish possibly “sustaining’ wild caught fish. From Solow’s definition this would be the perfect example of sustainability, but what if the aquaculture fish are inferior to wild fish in some way. Would this then be sustainable? In my opinion it would not be. There will even be problems even if the substitute is not inferior and simply different. An extremely simplified example may be, if we eat all of the salmon and decide to substitute it with shellfish there will be many who could not eat this because they are allergic. You cannot actually substitute something in for another and expect the end result to be equal to what it would have been because it is different. I think that Solow’s definition of sustainability is interesting, but too broad to be really effective because he leaves too many variables.

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