Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
development', no easy reformist solution to poverty and that, contrary to dominant
practice, development 'ought to be what human communities do to themselves'
rather than what is done to them by states, bankers, experts, agencies, centralizing
planners and others. A 'green development' is required for which there can be no
clear blueprints or managerial strategies because of the overwhelming need to be
open-ended, open-minded and democratic. Green development is about who has the
power and how it is managed. It is about empowerment and self-determination.
Ignacy Sachs's (1999) concern with social sustainability is a reaction to the
dominance of the economic discourse in many international organizations' approach
to sustainable development. Social sustainability encompasses the absence of war or
serious violence, state oppression of its citizenry and lack of meaning in one's social
being. For Amartya Sen (1999), realizing human capabilities in a sustainable society
means equity, democracy, human and civil rights and a continuing enhancement of
people's ability to do what they have good reason to value. It means being able
to conceive of alternatives, and to act and think differently, and having the
capacity and opportunity to do so. It means protecting biodiversity because society
is closely interwoven in a co-evolutionary relationship with the biosphere. It means
conceiving and practising development holistically and systemically not one-
dimensionally, not simply economically or socially, politically or anthropocentrically.
Development must be synonymous with substantive and instrumental freedoms,
including those relating to:
•
political expression, dialogue and organization;
•
economics and income sufficiency;
•
social opportunity such as health and education;
•
transparency and openness in government and social interaction;
•
security understood in terms of welfare, food sufficiency and employment.
For Norgaard (1994), Western science, the environment and material resources
are connected within mutually interactive co-evolving systems where one does not
control any of the others. In nineteenth-century Europe, the application of scientific
knowledge facilitated the use of coal and hydrocarbons, which in turn directed and
intensified scientific activity, agricultural, technological and industrial development,
and the emergence of a new social, moral and political order. Urbanization, class
division, multinational business, global trade and bureaucratic management systems
helped concentrate economic and political power, and the strategy of imposing this
Western practice and ideology of development on non-Western others. Consequently,
correcting the unsustainability of development is not simply a matter of choosing
different technologies for intervening in the environment. The mechanisms of
perceiving, choosing, and using technologies are embedded in social structures
which are themselves products of modern technologies.
(Norgaard, 1994: 29)
This co-evolutionary approach to historical explanation offers tremendous insights
but does not lend itself to predicting the future, for in this theory there are no simple
cause-and-effect relationships, so prediction becomes rather dangerous. However,
Norgaard identifies five lessons from this understanding:
