Is agricultural sustainability a useful concept?

This paper examines conceptual and methodological barriers to using sustainability as a criterion for guiding change in agriculture and proposes elements necessary for approaches to characterizing sustainability to be generally useful. Two broad interpretations of agricultural sustainability have emerged with different underlying goals: sustainability interpreted as an approach to agriculture developed in response to concerns about impacts of agriculture, with motivating adherence to sustainable ideologies and practices as its goal; and sustainability interpreted as a property of agriculture developed in response to concerns about threats to agriculture, with the goal of using it as a criterion for guiding agriculture as it responds to change. Interpreting sustainability as an approach has been useful for motivating change. However, usefulness of this interpretation as a criterion for guiding change is hindered by a lack of generality of prescribed approaches, a distorted view of conventional agriculture and circular logic. Although interpreting sustainability as a system property is logically more consistent, conceptual and practical problems with its characterization have limited its usefulness as a criterion for guiding change. In order for sustainability to be a useful criterion for guiding change in agriculture, its characterization should be literal, system-oriented,quantitative, predictive, stochastic and diagnostic.