Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
implications for the sustainability of good health in current and future
human populations.
Since human experience - that is, happiness, fulfilment, well-being and
health - is actually the bottom line of 'sustainability', it is important to
understand the ways in which impairment of both environmental and social
sustainability affects human experience (McMichael 2002). In this chapter I
concentrate on how non-sustainable structures and practices will affect risks
to health, and consider the basic strategies we must develop to lessen those
risks to population health.
This perspective is not yet widely appreciated. Much of the current dis-
course about sustainability refers to more obvious, readily tangible, entities -
economic indicators, infrastructural assets, recreational facilities, stocks of
species, and so on. But, from a human-centred viewpoint, these are not
ends
;
they are
to human experiential ends. We actually organise societies,
run economies and build infrastructure to make life better, healthier and
longer for humans.
Such an understanding will not come easily. Most of us (particularly the
older generations of Australians) are hampered by conceptual blinkers. The
education system that most of us passed through during the latter half of the
20th century was systemically blind to the fundamental dependence of
human societies on their natural resource base. The dominant scientific dis-
ciplines at school and university were those that had underpinned the indus-
trial revolution - physics, chemistry and mathematics. Biology was also
taught, but as an empirical science with little reference to the principles of
evolution or ecology. It is little wonder that, today, we have scant apprecia-
tion of the interconnectedness, the ecological processes and the limits of the
biosphere.
This non-receptiveness to ideas of ecological interconnectedness, of
limits to 'growth', and of sustainability in general, characterises many of the
key research disciplines that bear on social planning, environmental man-
agement and policy making. Consider that neither mainstream economics
nor demography incorporate any real appreciation of environmental con-
straints into their thinking. Rather, both disciplines view the world as if it
were an open system, within which their discipline-specific processes occur
freely. Although economists have broadened their perspectives in recent
years, many still use a conceptual framework that excludes consideration of
both human influence and human dependence on ecosystems. Contempo-
means
