Sustainable Development

Philosophical and Ethical Foundations

Central to the perspectives that ESD should develop is what Hartmann (1998) terms a social-ecological theory of reality and the values that stem from it. Rather than regarding nature and society as separate realms (modern dualism), we should acknowledge that reality is always the product of both ecological (biophysical) and social relations and processes. The phenomena of global warming illustrates how the relations between objects in the bio-physical and social worlds enable ecological and social processes, how these processes affect one another constantly, and how our understanding of such phenomena can never be entirely neutral or objective because it is always partly a product of those social or power relations it needs to explain. The politics of sustainability is about the relations that humans are in with other human and non-human agents, how we understand these relations, and what we can do to ensure that they are more sustainable.

Hartmann argues that for a society to be sustainable (capable of evolving indefinitely alongside the rest of nature) three sets of relations have to be maintained:

• 1.
  Social relations amongst humans based on mutual respect and tolerance. These require equitable access to basic needs, freedom of thought and expression, and democratic forms of decision making and governance in all spheres of life including that of economic production and distribution.
• 2.
  Environmental relations between humans and their bio-physical environment that ensure the survival and well-being of other species (biodiversity) and their continued evolution alongside people.
• 3.
  Ecological relations between organisms (including humans) and their environment that ensure similar environmental conditions and opportunities (climate, water availability, soil fertility, radioactivity levels, etc.) to those that have prevailed throughout most of human history.

The question then arises, what form of ethics, politics, and governance should regulate social and environmental relations and their impact on ecological relations?

As regards ethics, a socio-ecological theory or reality, based in dialectical materialism (Harvey, 1996) or the new physical and life sciences and systems theory (Capra, 2003), recognizes that people are part of ecological relations (members of a biological species, dependent on ecological resources and services to supply their needs), yet partly independent of such relations as part of social relations (they have powers of language and technology that enable them to transform their own nature and that which surrounds them). In finding sustainable ways to live they have to balance ecology and society centred values or an ecocentric perspective that finds intrinsic values in the non-human world, with an anthropocentric or technocentric perspective that suggests the only value of this world lies in its usefulness to people.

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