The Meaning of Sustainability
BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS
Sustainable small family farms for crops, sheep, and olive trees for olive oil. Village of Machairas, Central Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.
Prologue
I remember sometimes in 1980, the last year of the Jimmy Carter administration, when a couple of economists from the US Department of agriculture visited a few of my colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency. They wanted to discuss the costs of transforming conventional agriculture to sustainable farming.
This shocked me. Costs, I said, what costs? After all, there are only benefits, no costs, to doing good. I had the impression that sustainability meant more than maintaining an idea or a business unchanged. I thought that sustainable agriculture, for example, was agriculture in the ...










