MORE IN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

According to the United Nations commission that first coined the term, sustainable development is broadly, economic and social growth "that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

As the world's human population grows, so does its demand for the Earth's finite resources: oil, water, land. Sustainable development seeks to ensure the long-term availability of those resources while attending to people's current needs for energy, clean water, work and housing, both in developing nations and the First World. Given these parameters, current global growth patterns are clearly unsustainable. According to Redefining Progress, a sustainability collective, the ecological footprint – that is, the amount of land and water we need to produce what we use and discard – of America's human population exceeds what is theoretically available by some 30 percent. If everyone around the world lived like Americans do, we'd need four more planets to support us.

Sustainable development policies encourage a particular focus on the needs of the world's poor, envisioning an approach in which economic growth, social equality, and environmental protection are interdependent and mutually reinforcing components. For instance, increasing Central American food production without razing its rainforests, and putting control of that farmland in the hands of local farmers.

History

The term was formally defined in "Our Common Future," a 1987 report by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development – also known as the Brundtland Commission – which called for strategies to integrate economic development with environmental preservation and restoration. Subsequent UN conferences have further defined and broadened those strategies, encouraging sustainable practices to be applied to economic aid programs as well as social welfare and public works programs, globally as well as at local levels.

Such grand ideological projects are not only the province of nongovernmental organizations and green-leaning think tanks. The grassroots approach is just as vital. In the 1970s, a Kenyan woman named Wangari Maathai began organizing poor women to plant indigenous trees as a way of restoring their supply of wood used for cooking fuel while simultaneously discouraging soil erosion and deforestation and giving women work outside the home. Since then, tens of millions of trees have been planted, and tens of thousands of women have been trained in sustainable trades like beekeeping and forestry. Maathai’s project, the Green Belt Movement, has grown to include efforts to preserve biodiversity, to educate people about their environment and to promote the rights of women and girls, particularly in Africa. (Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her decades of work.)

Context

Given the limit on natural resources, and given humanity’s propensity to keep procreating, turning back the clock on environmental degradation and economic inequality seems to many to be an impossible task. Critics of the concept contend that the words "sustainable" and "development" are mutually exclusive, that we can have either protection of the environment or economic development, social betterment or jobs, but rarely (or never) both. However, sustainable development's proponents argue that technological and conceptual advances – for example, closed-loop or “cradle-to-cradle” manufacturing models, in which the products made either have infinite use or can be returned without harm to the ecosystem – will make it easier to provide for growing populations while restoring the Earth.

External Links:

Wikipedia - Sustainable Development

Real Goods Solar

UN Division for Sustainable Development

The Sustainable Development Gateway

Further Reading:

The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems, by Gwendolyn Hallsmith

Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins