In any attempt to provide specific guidelines for the development of sustainable man-made settings, the essence of sustainability must be clearly defined. The following is an attempt to do this by enunciating certain principles, each of which encompasses one essential ingredient, the violation of which would be sufficient by itself to cause systemic decay. These principles should be the basis for evaluating possible design "solution concepts" in a given location. There are a standard to be achieved by any entity or process aspiring to secure tenure in the biosphere.

These principles of sustainability are:

1. The Principle of Minimal Heat Drainage: which requires the reduction of energy and material flow-through: the reduction entropy.
2. The Principle of Simple Re-Production: which requires the affiliation with systems capable of replenishing initial stocks.
3. The Principle of Graceful Failure: which requires properties of resilience and adaptability as effective resistance to sudden, total, and catastrophic failure.
4. The Principle of Rational Transparency: which requires the diffusion of control and responsibility, and maximum opportunity for personal creativity. It advocates direct rather than vicarious experiences of life.
5. The Principle of Common Heritage: which concerns issues of fairness, equity, communication, and cultural enrichment.
6. The Principle of Natural Order: which requires a tangible aesthetic quality.
7. The Principle of Sacred Situation: which requires a harmony with geomantic forces.

Introduction
Some basic human needs are those for energy, food, and water. In serving these needs, the pattern of a high-energy society has been to increase the scale of operation; to centralize services; and to eliminate human labor in favor of more powerful converters. These practices have brought benefits of greater disease control and increased convenience of living, but hey are also proving to be particularly damaging to the natural resource base and the human psyche.

The human social and environmentally debilitating effects of a high-energy society have been argued extensively in recent times. The U.N. conference in Stockholm in 1972 was a major forum of world concern. Concurrent expressions from such as Barry Commoner and Lester Brown in the U.S. and Edward Goldsmith et al in Britain in the early 1970's advanced the view that, in the words of the latter, "...the principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable". More recently Eric Eckholm, reviewing the state of the global environment 10 years after the Stockholm conference, finds that while "...public understanding of environmental imperatives has increased over the last decade, ... many of the social, economic, and technical forces that underlie environmental difficulties have scarcely been checked". Most recently the September 1989 issue of Scientific American devoted itself entirely to the subject of "Managing Planet Earth" revealing that ever more problems had surfaced. With this background of chronic despoilation we are prompted to ask:
• What is the nature of a sustainable society?
• What essential characteristics must it possess?
• How must it differ from present society?

What follows is an attempt to define the essential attributes of sustainable settlement in terms of seven principles.

Principle of minimal heat drainage
In any real process involving the accomplishment of work, useful potential energy becomes lost. It is the inescapable condition explained by the Second Law of Thermodynamics known as increasing entropy.

Entropy describes the fate of energy. It is the process of transformation of available, "free" energy to unavailable, "bound" energy. Energy is not lost upon completion of work. It is, however, degraded to a lower order of usefulness, and ultimately to heat at the ambient temperature of the surrounding. Jeremy Rifkin provides a full-blown view of entropy as the irreversible progress toward oblivion, "...the creation of islands of order at the expense of seas of disorder". Within our current view of the physical universe, and without being an alarmist, it is a fact of life. It is, as Howard Odum explains, "...the energy tax necessary for the operation". It is the heat drainage without which the process simply will not work.

Human activity is increasing entropy at ... Click to download entire article as a PDF.

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