"Sustainability" is applied to a growing list of human activities. The Brundtland Commission defined "sustainable development," but now we hear also of "sustainable resource management," "sustainable economies," "sustainable agriculture," "sustainable forestry," "sustainable tourism," "sustainable communities," etc. Sustainability is now almost universally regarded as a morally necessary feature of social systems. However, "sustainability" means different things in different contexts. Everyone agrees that a social system is sustainable only if it is structured in a way that can be maintained into the indefinite future, but the scales of time and system description vary. What counts as "the system," and how long is "the indefinite future"? More fundamentally, however, sustainability always includes, implicitly if not explicitly, a normative component. This normative component consists of a value commitment that allows the user of the term "sustainability" to choose among or prioritize various systems that are each maintainable into the indefinite future. Environmental ethics provides a template for understanding sustainability, because the various value commitments of environmental ethicists map onto the value commitments behind different visions of sustainability.

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