Reflective Journal

Reflective Journal

This paper consists of three reflective journals. The first journal entry covers the topic of sustainability. The second journal entry covers the topic of professionals, while the third and final journal entry covers the career plan for the professionals.

Journal Entry 1: Sustainability

Sustainability refers to the long-term viability of a community, set of social institutions, or societal practice. The idea rose to prominence with the modern environmental movement, which rebuked the unsustainable character of contemporary societies where patterns of resource use, growth, and consumption threaten the integrity of ecosystems and the well-being of future generations. Sustainability is presented as an alternative to short-term, myopic, and wasteful behavior.

As far as my personal opinion is concerned, sustainability serves as a standard against which existing institutions are to be judged and assessed and as an objective toward which society should move forward. As far as governance goes, it implies an interrogation of existing modes of social organization to determine the extent to which they encourage destructive practices as well as a conscious effort to transform the status quo to promote the development of more sustainable patterns of activity.

Here I would like to elaborate my opinion that sustainability often serves as a synonym for sustainable development. On other occasions, it is associated more exclusively with environmental constraints or environmental performance, and the expression environmental sustainability is used to emphasize this point.

In my view, nevertheless, corporate sustainability is another common usage, which relates both to my survivability and corporation for which I work. An individual like me can make a broader sustainability agenda. For me the notion of the triple bottom line— that businesses should pay attention to social and environmental performance as well as to financial returns. And there are connections to debates about reforming corporate governance, encouraging corporate responsibility, and designing alternative (sustainable, green, or ethical) investment vehicles.

For me, sustainability can be classified into four main types: human, social, economic, and environmental.

Human sustainability means maintaining human capital, which is a private good of individuals rather than between individuals or societies. Health, education, skills, knowledge, leadership, and access to services constitute human capital. Investments in education, health, and nutrition of individuals have become accepted as part of economic development.

Social sustainability covers political, cultural, and all people-centered issues, except economics. It demands that the basic conditions for the life of an individual like me exist within society. These conditions include social justice, human well-being, strong social capital, advanced social interaction, and cultural richness. Social sustainability is related to how I can make choices that affect other humans in our global community. In my opinion, social sustainability emphasizes protecting the vulnerable and respecting social diversity. It involves systematic community participation and strong civil society and relates to the distribution of wealth within and between generations (that is, intra- and intergenerational equity) as well as the distribution of rights to use environmental services contained within a given ecosystem. Social sustainability is also related to my basic needs of happiness, safety, freedom, dignity, and ...