Growing up in the Eastern Cape, we knew only one destination for our annual holiday: the beautiful Wild Coast. It was a magical place for children, and we dreaded the day of our homeward journey. As the end of the holiday drew closer, my mother, hoping to ease our pain, would say, : “Remember, all good things must come to an end.”
Many years later, I learnt that it was a proverb dating back some 700 years to the English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer. Perhaps he, too, was trying to placate his children at the end of a holiday!
Later in life, I worked with a colleague and mentor who, whenever I bemoaned a change I considered regressive, would say with gravity and a twinkle in his eye, “Don’t forget, Peter, nothing lasts forever.”
Subject to these influences in my formative years, I was not well prepared to give a sympathetic reception to ‘sustainability’, especially in a business, which seeks to make ‘all good things last forever’. I simply did not understand it, and soon discovered I wasn’t alone.
THE ESSENCE OF SUSTAINABILITY
Esta historia es de la edición Farmers Weekly 4 October 2019 de Farmer's Weekly.
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Esta historia es de la edición Farmers Weekly 4 October 2019 de Farmer's Weekly.
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