Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
What is needed, and what the creative ambiguity surrounding 'sustainability' can
offer, is the possibility of integration, synthesis and synergy - of a social learning
process that bridges the divisions between the social and ecological, the scientific
and spiritual, the economic and the political. In practice, technical fixes are necessary
but not sufficient if ecological, economic and social imperatives are to be reconciled.
For Robinson, this cannot be done scientifically, only politically - in dialogue and
in partnership, making sustainability 'the emergent property of a conversation about
what kind of world we collectively want to live in now and in the future'. Robinson
concludes that within the field of sustainability multiple conflicting views exist that
cannot always be reconciled.
In other words, no single approach will, or indeed should be, seen as the correct
one. This is not a matter of finding out what the truth of sustainability is by
more sophisticated applications of expert understanding (the compass and ruler).
Instead we are inescapably involved in a world in which there exist multiple
conflicting values, moral positions and belief systems that speak to the issue of
sustainability. While it is crucial to identify points of empirical disagreement
and to resolve those with better research and analysis, the ultimate questions
are not susceptible to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. What is needed,
therefore, is a process by which these views can be expressed and evaluated,
ultimately as a political act for any given community or jurisdiction.
(2004: 382)
In this way, 'sustainable development' and 'sustainability' may productively function
as a heuristic, in other words a learning process by which people are enabled to find
things out for themselves and to fully appreciate the contested nature of knowledge,
the environment and sustainability (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and the impact
human actions have on the Earth (Marten, 2001). Indeed, in the twenty plus years
since the first Rio Earth Summit much work on sustainability has been characterized
by a commitment to multidimensionality and a multi-criteria assessment, including
governance, of the progress or otherwise of the sustainable development process
(Hamdouch and Zuindeau, 2010).
Understanding sustainable development and the noosphere
in Russia
The government of the Russian Federation declared 2013 to be the year of
environmental protection, but, asked Angelina Davydova (2013), is anyone really
interested? In the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century 'sustainable'
has generally been equated with continuing economic success understood as constant
GDP growth. In the Soviet era industrialization meant conquering nature, building
massive industrial plants, dams and the like, although the ecologically destructive
industrialization around Lake Baikal led to an environmental awakening in the 1960s,
which was again supplemented by a new concern for the environment following the
Chernobyl disaster in 1986 (Whitehead, 2010). Not surprisingly perhaps, the conserva-
tion and sustainable management of forestry resources was an important element of
Stalin's economic and environmental policy (Brain, 2010). Nonetheless, the growth
of an albeit fragile civil society movement in Russia, including a Greenpeace office
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search