Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to move to a sustainable future, but it requires fundamental changes to our
values and social institutions. There is hope in that human systems can
change radically very quickly. There is growing global recognition of the
need for change. The serious obstacle is the dominant mind-set of decision-
makers who don't recognise the problem, or see the possible solutions as
threatening their short-term interests. While UNEP said that doing nothing
about the huge problems we face is not an option, it remains the most
common response of decision-makers today.
Reconciliation
As a first and fundamental issue, we have no prospect of being a sustainable
society until we recognise the injustice done by our forebears to the Indige-
nous people of Australia. Their land was acquired by a process that can only
be described as robbery with violence, their lifestyles and cultures have been
systematically destroyed and their living conditions today shame us as a civ-
ilised nation. We cannot restore what we have taken, but we must acknowl-
edge our debt. We should work with representatives of Indigenous
Australian peoples to develop institutions that will allow us to share this
country and build a sustainable future.
Resources
A sustainable society will not erode its resource base. Our most serious
medium-term resource problem is oil. Our entire transport system is based
around petroleum fuels that are cheaper than any other liquid except tap
water. We pay more per litre for beer, cask wine, milk, orange juice and even
bottled water than we do for petrol. Optimists think the peak of world oil
production may be 15 years away, while the pessimists believe it was in the
year 2000. However, the age of plentiful cheap petroleum fuels will end soon.
There are technical alternatives, most obviously fuel cells using hydrogen
produced by splitting water with solar electricity, but they are at present
expensive. We should be planning now for the post-petroleum age - as the
forward-looking oil companies are.
There are other resource issues. Humans now use about half of all the
world's available fresh water directly or indirectly, but 1.2 billion people do
not have clean drinking water. Our forests, our fisheries, our agricultural
soils and our grazing lands have not been used sustainably. We have to
reduce resource use so that we use the income of natural systems; our
