Therefore, sustainability must get into the economic and social trenches where most of us spend our everyday lives. I'm a forester and a personnel manager in a large company. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt given my limited perspective. At the same time, this isn't something I'm just making up. I think sustainability requires an adaptive management strategy.
Adaptive management requires continuous learning.
This means social learning as well as scientific learning. In fact, I think progress towards sustainability will require much more social learning than scientific learning. When I talk about social learning, I don't mean the sort of passing-down of knowledge from a more informed person to a less informed person, such as we associate with the learning that occurs in school. It's piecemeal information. I'm not sure I can name even one model of long-standing significance.