Sustainability: Humanity Perspective - Bioprocess Engineering: Kinetics, Biosystems, Sustainability and Reactor Design - page 745

2). Environmental management

Mutual

Benign

Sustainable

Comfortable

FIGURE 15.3 The three major approaches to reduce negative impacts of human activities and enhance
ecosystem services.

and economic requirements. In this chapter, the second approach is focused, while the third
approach is out of the scope of this text.
Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of
economic activity. Sustainability economics involves ecological economics where social,
cultural, health-related, and monetary/financial aspects are integrated. Moving toward
sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban plan-
ning and transport, local and individual lifestyles, and ethical consumerism. Ways of living
more sustainably can take many forms from reorganizing living conditions (e.g. ecovillages,
eco-municipalities, and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture,
green building, and sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture),
using science to develop new technologies (green technologies and renewable energy), to
adjustments in individual lifestyles that be renewably and minimize or conserve nonrenew-
able natural resources.
The awareness of sustainability can be drawn from human-dominated ecological systems
from the earliest civilizations to the present. The increased regional success of a particular
society, followed by crises that were either resolved, producing sustainability, or not, leading
to decline.
Sustainable state is not unique and improved sustainable state is continually being sought
either intelligently or inadvertently in the past. In early human history, the use of fire and
desire for specific foods may have altered the natural composition of plant and animal
communities. Between 8000 and 10,000 years ago, Agrarian communities emerged which
depended largely on their environment and the creation of a “structure of permanence”.
Agriculture is the dominant process to supply the food for human societies today. The
ecosystem is completely altered with the advent of agriculture.
The western industrial revolution of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries tapped into
the vast growth potential of the energy in fossil fuels. Coal was used to power ever more effi-
cient engines and later to generate electricity. Modern sanitation systems and advances in
medicine protected large populations from disease. In the mid-twentieth century, a gathering