Sustainability

No concept associated with environmental protection has enjoyed more widespread public legitimacy than sustainability, something scientists and social activists alike have long advocated in an attempt to encourage careful use of resources. The premises for sustainability are that care for the environment is essential to social and economic development; that natural resources are the base of industry, including agriculture; and that only by sustaining that base can humanity sustain development. It is a systemic concept for suggesting how society might enable all beings to meet their needs and express themselves while preserving diversity, both within the human species and beyond it. The idea of sustainability is likely to remain prominent in public discourse surrounding the interaction of environment and economic development.

The concept is complicated by its intrinsic combination of systemic science and normative values. During the last decade of the 20th century, this concept gained substantial traction within both the public and private sectors. With the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, the idea was imported into the popular lexicon via the term sustainable development (SD). An explosion in publications utilizing the term soon followed. It became a centerpiece for global development policy following the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and continued in that role during the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Develop ment in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Although the current notion of sustainability is only a few decades old, the overall concept has been applied at one time or another throughout human history. Research on tribal cultures indicates a widespread human capacity to determine, and live safely within, limits of sustainability characteristic of the ecosystems that they occupy. Hunter-gatherer cultures are a case in point, with controls on population levels and a nomadic lifestyle that enables rejuvenation of resources when groups move to the next hunting ground. Yet human societies appear to have drawn on that capacity only rarely. Although the need to achieve sustainability in the use of land and biotic resources has been referred to in writings dating back at least to ancient Greece, human civilizations appear to have been plagued by environmental collapse.