The quest to find and implement paths of societal change toward sustainable human use of the environment has proven intransigent, while environmental destruction mounts higher (Ripple et al. 2017). The scientific community has not provided a solution to the sustainability problem in part because scientists are struggling to define the problem and its solutions. In general, sustainability science lacks generalizability and predictive capacity (Levin and Clark 2010). One way to improve sustainability research is to develop general, discipline-agnostic theory in clear, non-disciplinary language.

I propose that evolution provides one of the most general crosscutting theories uniting the social sciences, environmental sciences and biology, and that an evolutionary theory of sustainability (Waring et al. 2015) may help to overcome these issues and accelerate our collective efforts to achieve a stable human-natural system.