What Does "Sustainable" Mean?

Have you ever wondered what it means when a winery calls itself "sustainable"? We want to be "sustainable" when we build our winery and buildings on our site, and I've always had vague ideas about what sustainability is, so I was very interested in an article I chanced upon when I was rereading the stack of Vineyard & Winery Management magazines that we have. I came across this article in the January/February 2010 issue called Defining 'Sustainable' written by Bruce Zoecklein. Zoecklein gives the following bullets from a talk on the subject given by Joe Chauncey at the 2008 Wineries Unlimited conference:

• Ecologically responsive
• Economically viable
• Good neighbor
• Bioregional
• Healthy and sensible
• Operationally efficient

More to the point, sustainble practices for wineries include the following:

• LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
• Use of eco-friendly building materials
• Earth-sheltered buildings
• Green roofs
• Building orientation/insulation
• Sun baffles or solar blocks
• Alternative energy, including geothermal, solar and wind
• Energy/heat capture and recovery
• Carbon dioxide capture
• Natural lighting and venting
• Rainwater collection
• Water recycling
• Materials recycling

This article advocates the establishment of benchmarks to evaluate progress in environmental and ecological sustainability. Later on in the article, Zoecklein writes: The link between economic sustainability and environmental sustainability will strengthen only through technology and the implementation of technology through education.
That statement gave me pause. I tranlated that to mean that faster is cheaper and better. Not that I am a Luddite, but I'm not at all certain that technology is the answer to economic and environmental sustainability.