Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Towards sustainable
development
The aim of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of globalization and sustainable
development, indicating the complex and often contested nature of various debates,
actions and practices that have occurred in recent years. The significance of some
key international agreements will be discussed, as will the criticisms and comments
they have stimulated. Sustainable development has emerged through political and
environmental struggles, through a business, citizen and governmental engagement
with the complexity of contemporary ecological and other problems, and a vast
array of perspectives, values and interests that have been applied in seeking to
understand and deal with them. The chapter ends with the suggestion that sustainable
development is perhaps best understood as a 'dialogue of values' - a way of
encouraging people to learn, to discover and to evaluate.
The road to sustainable development
Until the industrialization of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, wood was the
primary material used for fuel, construction, smelting and shipbuilding. World trade
and the great navies relied on a ready and what some believed to be an inexhaustible
supply of timber. However, these people were wrong. Although timber is a renewable
resource, European nations were harvesting more trees than were being planted and
nurtured to maturity. Governments in Britain, France and particularly Germany
slowly recognized that such a rate of timber consumption was becoming unsustainable.
As Ulrich Grober (2012: 88) writes in Sustainability: A Cultural History , a number
of foresters and enlightened government ministers such as Johan Wolfgang von
Goethe of Weimar, believed that 'the true capacities of the forests' should become
the basis for their use and exploitation. The science of ecology, the concept of
sustainability and the practice of sustainable development was emerging. Closely
aligned to its sister concept, namely conservation, sustainability became a key term
for a growing body of environmentalists in the new and the old worlds. For Aldo
Leopold, an American citizen of German descent and a key figure in the environmental
movement in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, land use was far more
than an economic problem. It was a moral and ecological issue too. 'A thing is right
when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise', he wrote (Leopold, 1970: 262). Some years
later in the mid-twentieth century, the publication of Rachel Carson's (Carson, 2000)
Silent Spring in 1962, which forensically, but with great emotion and sensitivity,
analysed the devastating ecological impact chemical pesticides had on the American
countryside, marked the beginning of what become known as Earth Politics and the
modern environmental movement.
 
 
 
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