The term sustainability has found its way to the top of the academic and political rhetorical ladder. The term is used so much that it has lost its sense of challenge at a time when hard questions need to be asked, and even harder choices need to be made.

What are our social goals in balancing the resources we need for daily living with the resources we share with other people, other living things and generations ahead? Beyond saying, "Yes, I want to recycle," what deeply entrenched attitudes must change? Not just for the noble few, but for everyone. And when we realign attitudes, how do we prioritize plans, take action and honestly evaluate results so we can make improvements?

In the interest of transparency, I write this as a 60-year-old layman who has ridden the sustainability roller coaster.

I lived for four years in a subsistence economy, where I made $90 a month and fished three times a week for food. I built and installed my own solar water heater 30 years ago on the Big Island. I served a governor who tried with only some success to develop geothermal energy as a firm source for power and introduced demand-side energy management as state policy. And I worked for the local electric company, where the challenge was simultaneously maintaining reliable service, reducing island consumption of oil and keeping the rates reasonable.

One lesson learned on the roller coaster is that the closer a well-intended concept gets to implementation, the more opposition it engenders. This is not always a bad thing, but it is a real thing. The following five precepts for sustainability are offered, unvarnished, with the hope that we can better ground our attitudes, plans and actions in the utilization and balancing of precious resources.

First, the public needs a large and dynamic model for sustainability right here. This sustainability model should be the total development of the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu. The campus must reflect architecture and engineering, transportation feeders, campus energy use, research and development and a curriculum that inspires sustainability. If we cannot live what we believe at a university, then it is not what we believe.

The university's Natural Energy Institute, schools of architecture and engineering and Office of Sustainability have talented people who should be brought into the design of what is built and learned at the new campus. It may take more money and more time, but let's have a place that looks like and speaks to the future we want.

Second, there is no silver-bullet renewable energy choice, but within the mix, we need a firm and large energy source based on a proven technology. As a participant on a steering committee to the Kohala Task Force 35 years ago, I observed the disassembling of large-scale agriculture in Hawai'i, a business that at the time made us one of the most energy selfsufficient states in the country.

Today, with fresh eyes and new technologies, ag-energy is our best hope if we are fully committed to homegrown renewable energy. It will take recognition that there will be substantial dollar costs to the public, conflicts over land use and lifestyle issues and the need to retrain the work force. State government will have to be actively committed to this priority and weigh in early and on a timely basis in the delicate role of advocate/mediator. And the private sector will have to deliver with extraordinary sensitivity to surrounding communities.

Ag-energy may not be the ideal answer, but we cannot let the perfect be enemy of the good.

Third, for Hawai'i and indeed the globe, we must find better ways to limit population growth. This is a delicate issue given the U.S. Constitution, deeply held religious beliefs and the reprehensible practices of other countries that use extreme measures in the name of population control. Nonetheless, just on a local basis, the no-growth and slow-growth advocates make a good case when we look at the impacts of rampant growth on environment, infrastructure and social order on our relatively small islands. Densities are strangling us.

Fourth and directly related to population growth is what economist Paul Brewbaker calls "Infrastructure: the Looming Menace." Not a new subject for Brewbaker — you can Google his most recent presentation, which, with some surprising humor, notes the dearth of public spending on infrastructure and how it affects affordable housing and, ultimately, quality of life. Our choices are to improve public infrastructure, manage population or to employ some rational combination of each.

Before us is the single largest public infrastructure project in our state's history, the rapid transit system. It would be a mistake to judge the project solely on whether it pencils out financially; it probably won't. Rapid transit must be examined from the standpoint of moving people from one dense population site to another to work, to go to school or to receive needed services — making mobility a critical function in their lives. People in these circumstances should not be less mobile because they have less money.

Nor is mass transit purely about removing cars from the road. It speaks to helping family members who have neither the wheels nor the money to pay huge urban parking fees and for whom the workday deeply cuts into the quality of family life. We have a history in Hawai'i of enabling and sustaining all families, even when it is not our immediate family.

Fifth, given the crisis that is building, we need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for sustainability that defines the core issues and clarifies roles and resources for critical actions. Hawai'i 2050 and the university's Sustainable Hawai'i are excellent frameworks for information sharing, policy education and social action. But our congressional delegation, the state administration and the four counties should consider a collaborative planning dynamic that absorbs business and community opinion and lays out the big picture with agreed-upon priorities, actions and clear points of accountability. This would elevate sustainability beyond rhetoric, from catch phrase to cause, where it rightfully belongs.

Chuck Freedman was communications chief for former Gov. John Waihee and former vice president of corporate relations for Hawaiian Electric Co. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.