What is Sustainability?

I read the article "What is Sustainability?" by Richard Heinberg. The basics of the Article was that there are 5 Axioms of sustainability. 

The Five Axioms of Sustainability

The First: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.

Critical resources are resources that are essential to the maintenance of life like water and ones necessary to produce food and usable energy. Not using these critical resources necessary for human survival wisely is what can cause a society to collapse.


The Second: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

Human population growth has been sustained until now, but simple arithmetic can be used to show that even small growth can add up dramatically, and consumption of resources add up until our limited resources aren’t enough to provide for billions of people.


The Third: To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

To be sustainable, people should be using resources that they have. If people are using more wood than they can cut in the same period of time, it isn’t sustainable and will run out eventually.


The Fourth: To be sustainable, the use of nonrenewable resources must proceed at the rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.

If the rate of use is declining faster than the rate of depletion then it means we are decreasing our dependence on the resource and will eventually become sustainable.


The Fifth: Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

If the 2nd, 3rd and 4th axioms are followed the chance of pollution entering the atmosphere is reduced, but it still requires humans to minimize the amount of pollution and substances released into the environment to reduce chances of collapse.

My take on this:
I believe everything here to be true. Our current society is struggling to understand the consequences of what we're doing to our environment. The article talked about the 5 axioms being flexible and the basics is that to be sustainable, we have to acknowledge the fact that we are destroying our environment and we need to make changes if we want to keep our world livable.