At the same time, it's important to stand back and ask ourselves where all these crises fit into the big picture.  Our civilization depends on the Earth's biosphere, which supplies us with the ecosystem services we need to survive.  Environmental sustainability is about building a society that doesn't systematically degrade that support system.  

To do that we need to figure out the specific ways we are degrading the biosphere, and move away from those practices.  If you look at the problems from a bird's eye view, you can see that we are subjecting the biosphere to: 1. increasing concentrations of materials from the Earth's crust (this includes fossil fuels and rare metals such as cadmium and lead) 2. increasing concentrations of man-made substances and 3. direct degradation of the biosphere.  In addition, and maybe most importantly, we are undermining people's ability to meet their own needs, robbing them of basic human dignity and indirectly increasing environmental degradation.

Climate change mitigation and the cradle to cradle concept are important pieces of the puzzle and help us cut down on our contribution to all of these problems.  In concert with these efforts to cut down on energy and resource use, we also need to focus on which materials we use in production, what we produce, and how much we produce.

Most importantly, we need to keep the big picture in mind, and base our decisions on whether they take us in the right direction and give us the flexibility to change course if necessary.

And now I've written a novel.  Hope this is at least food for thought.