Sustainability: Encyclopedia II - Sustainability - Concepts and issues

Sustainability - Concepts and issues

The modern concept of environmental sustainability goes back to the post-World War II period, when a utopian view of technology-driven economic growth gave way to a perception that the quality of the environment was linked closely to economic development. Interest grew sharply during the environmental movements of the 1960s, when popular books such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) and The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1968) raised public awareness.

There are two related categories of thought on environmental sustainability. In 1968 the Club of Rome, a group of European economists and scientists, was formed. In 1972 they published Limits to Growth. Criticized by economists of the time, the report predicted dire consequences because humans were using up the Earth's resources and it advocated as one solution the abandonment of economic development. There followed the formation of groups sympathetic to the general premise that human society was growing too quickly and/or using up its resources, including the founding of the Worldwatch Institute in 1975. In a different category, other groups formed to focus less on population—growth control and slowing economic development and more on establishing environmental standards and enforcement. In retrospect, while some of the predictions made in Limits to Growth have proved to have been unfounded or premature, the warning it sounded is regarded as valid by many today.[2]

There is also a positive way to view sustainability: though values vary greatly in detail within and between cultures, at the heart of the concept of sustainability there is a fundamental, immutable value set that is best stated as 'parallel care and respect for the ecosystem and for the people within.' From this value set emerges the goal of sustainability: to achieve human and ecosystem well-being together. It follows that the 'result' against which the success of any project or design should be judged is the achievement of, or the contribution to, human and ecosystem well-being together. Seen in this way, the concept of sustainability is much more than environmental protection in another guise. It is a positive concept that has as much to do with achieving well-being for people and ecosystems as it has to do with reducing stress or impacts.

Many people have pointed to various practices and philosophies in the world today as being inimical to sustainability. For instance, critics of American society state that the philosophy of infinite economic growth and infinite growth in consumption are completely unsustainable and will cause great harm to human civilization in the future. In recognition that the Earth is finite, there has been a growing awareness that there must be limits to certain kinds of human activity if life on the planet is to survive indefinitely. In order to distinguish which activities are destructive and which are benign or beneficial, various models have been developed. Such models include: life cycle assessment, ecological footprint analysis and The Natural Step.

One of the critically important issues in sustainability is that of human overpopulation. A number of studies have suggested that the current population of the Earth, already over six billion, is too many people for our planet to support sustainably. A number of organizations are working to try to reduce population growth, but some fear that it may already be too late.

Critics of such efforts, on the other hand, fear that efforts to reduce population growth may lead to human rights violations such as involuntary sterilization and the abandoning of infants to die. Some human-rights watchers report that this is already taking place in China, as a result of its one child per family policy.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, founded in 1995, has formulated the business case for sustainable development and argues that "sustainable development is good for business and business is good for sustainable development".

Some organizations which have attempted to incorporate sustainability values into the global economy are International Council on Mining and Metals and the Global Mining Initiative.

Another application of sustainability has been in the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, developed on conceptual work by Amartya Sen, and the UK's Institute for Development Studies (IDS). This was championed by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), UNDP, FAO as well as NGOs such as CARE, OXFAM and Khanya. Key concepts include the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) Framework, a holistic way of understanding livelihoods, the SL principles, as well as 6 governance issues developed by Khanya. There is a website dedicated to the SL approach at www.livelihoods.org.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Concepts and issues", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki