Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
absorb and store carbon dioxide. The result is that Gaia advocates have shown that
the earth is a living ecological system composed of a series of mutually interacting
and self-regulating systems, with complex inputs and outputs that help to maintain
life. These increasingly large impacts of human activity on the planet led the cli-
mate scientist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer
2000
) to suggest that our post-glacial Holocene period may be giving way to a new
Anthropocene era, in which human activity has become one of the most dominant
ecological processes in the landscape. Unfortunately many of our ecological ef-
fects are destructive, altering these interacting systems in negative ways. This has
convinced many people that humans should create new developmental practices,
ones that
sustain
life on earth in all its forms, rather than degrading or even raping
the planet through current practices. Without such changes many believe there is a
danger of our civilization being degraded, or even collapsing, paralleling the fate of
some societies in the past that destroyed their environment and over-used their re-
sources, although Diamond (
2005
) noted that there are many other reasons for such
collapses. Even without such apocalyptic beliefs there is a pressing common-sense
need to find ways of at least reducing the negative economic and life-style processes
that our current prosperity is built upon, by adopting new policies to achieve a more
sustainable future, based on practices that use more renewable resources and which
have less deleterious effects on our environment and other life-forms.
Many of the new policies designed to attain this type of more sustainable fu-
ture will come from national governments and corporations. But some will come
from actions at an urban level, given the huge resource demands and the negative
externalities that urban centres produce, and from individual choices to be more
sustainable. Indeed, it is worth noting that even though the world urban population
accounts for just over 50 % of the total population, these centres currently consume
over two-thirds of the estimated world energy production and most of the carbon
dioxide emissions: 70 % according to the influential World Energy Outlook (IEA
2008
, p. 179), with a WWF report (
2010
) claiming it is as high as 80 %. The Inter-
national Energy Agency estimated the urban emissions proportions will increase to
73 and 76 % respectively by 2030 if we pursue the current development path.
Many signs of a change towards greater sustainability, by individuals, busi-
nesses, national and urban governments, surround us. A recent polemical topic has
described the various actions as contributing to a fundamental 'sustainability leap',
arguing, in a pungent phrase, that such change is vital as
“the norms of twentieth-
century prosperity have become the instruments of twenty-first century collapse”
(Turner
2011
, p. 1). Yet despite the encouraging examples in Turner's topic of the
way that many new policies and technologies are creating more sustainable prac-
tices, we need to be cautious about the extent of change that has actually taken place
to date, especially given the great increase in pollution in China and other industri-
alizing countries, and an expected future world population growth based on medium
variant estimates to 9.6 billion by 2050, compared to 7.2 billion in 2013 and only
2.5 billion in 1950 according to U.N. World Population forecasts (UN
2013
). To
achieve a real change in the character of settlements and the sources of energy on
which they function will involve the development of a new 'sustainability culture'
