Elements of a Holistic Theory to Meet the Sustainability Challenge

Sustainable development needs a holistic theory to justify setting priorities constrained by trade‐offs among environmental, social and economic criteria. Five elements of a holistic theory for sustainability address fundamental philosophical, scientific, psychological and ethical implications for the dominant sustainability paradigm. The elements are openness/closure, thermodynamic basis for economy, universality of organismal experience, cognitive formation of consciousness in humans and possibly machines and narrative legitimacy of each person. Holism entails reciprocal relationships between system parts and the whole. This finds quantitative expression in an empirical scaling relation that connects numbers of people in 195 countries to the sizes of ecological footprints and biocapacities. Patterns of resource allocation support the axiom that the global system allocates resources primarily among individuals whose interactions via networks are at the root of resource capture and distribution. A holistic theory may anticipate how technological and social trends in coming decades will influence the sustainability project. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.