ENVS 101 WW & WX & WY- Objective Three

Unit 1: Introduction To Environmental Science

Objective Three: To summarize the principal concepts of "Sustainable Development".

3.0 Sustainable Development

To respond to the various impacts that environmental change and pollution have had on the natural environment at local, urban, regional, national and global scales, a new mode of human existence has been suggested. This new mode seeks to provide for the needs of the current generation of humans without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and is known as sustainable development. As described in the 1987 publication "Our Common Future", sustainable development is "a process of change in which policy and institutional adjustments, technological development, and the direction of investments are harmonized with the exploitation of resources".

Sustainable development is based upon the following set of assumptions:

1. environmental stresses are interconnected - deforestation not only destroys natural habitats, but threatens the global atmosphere and increases runoff and accelerates soil erosion and siltation of rivers and lakes;
2. Ecological and economic concerns are interdependent, therefore environment and economics must be integrated from the start;
3. environmental and economic problems are linked to many social and political factors, and;
4. ecological impacts do not respect political boundaries.

3.1 When Is, and When Isn't, Sustainable Development Sustainable?

Activities are sustainable when they:

1. use materials in continuous cycles;
2. use continuously reliable sources of energy, and;
3. come mainly from the potential of being human - communication, creativity, coordination, appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual development.

Activities are not sustainable when they:

1. require continual input of non-renewable resources;
2. use renewable resources faster than their rate of renewal;
3. cause cumulative degradation of the environment;
4. require resources in quantities that could never be available for people everywhere, and;
5. lead to the extinction of other life forms.

Sustainable development is difficult to fully conceptualize, understand and put into everyday practice. It may help to think of sustainable development as a direction, like north, for example. You can point to it, there may be many ways to get there, you can see how far you've come, and you have some idea of how far you've got to go.