Residential Landscape Sustainability: A Checklist Tool

摘要

Sustainability is a challenging concept both in its definition and in its realization, for even were an ultimate definition of the term ever to be attained and agreed-upon, the prospect of attaining sustainability would likely be remote. Yet these are not the only difficulties facing sustainability: concepts, once defined, may prove to be difficult to measure as well, making attainment a matter of assertion as much as science. The very fact that sustainability is considered by the government of the UK to include not only "social progress" but the "prudent use of resources" as well as "high and stable levels of economic growth" (HM Government, 1999, noted on p. 8 of the volume under review) indicates the challenges inherent in attempting to measure the attainment of sustainability. Given these difficulties one would not be unreasonable to consider sustainability an ethos whose purpose is to guide environmentally virtuous behaviour, as much as a series of benchmarks which once reached would confer environmental virtue. For who can quantify virtue?