The basic understanding of the term “environmental sustainability” set forth in this paper essentially expands our common perception of human activity so as to more clearly connect it with the ecological concept of interdependence, thus delineating the boundaries of this use of “sustainability” to correspond to the overlay of human activity upon the functioning of the supporting ecosystem. Environmental sustainability, then, is limited to and, in fact, becomes a subset of ecological sustainability. Broadly speaking, this concept of “environmental sustainability” might be seen as adding depth to a portion of the meaning of the most common definition of sustainable development, i.e., “meeting the needs of the current
generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs,” by taking on the general definition “meeting the resource and services needs of current and future generations without compromising the health of the ecosystems that provide them,” (“Our Common Future”).