Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the international policy arena. The second section provides an overview of academic
responses to this global politics. The strength of sustainability is that it bridges the
social and the ecological both materially (sustainability as the search for 'win-win'
solutions) and conceptually (sustainability as a way of thinking about how nature
and society are interconnected). The central weakness is that much of the sustain-
ability literature undermines this promise by making sustainability a technical issue.
Subsequent sections demonstrate these strengths and weaknesses in three fi elds to
which geographers contribute: conservation biology, sustainability science, and
geography more generally.
Sustainability in Global Environmental Politics
Sustainability as it is used today usually references the term 'sustainable develop-
ment', an idea that became enshrined in global policy discussion in the 1980s. The
concept has much deeper roots in Twentieth Century resource management, which
used calculations of 'maximum sustained yield' to regulate use of renewable resources
such as fi sh and trees (Larkin, 1977). Sustainability is the level of use that matches
the long-term rate of regeneration; using less is wasteful because resources go
unused, while using more depletes the resource. The concept has been criticised
from many angles (Larkin, 1977, in geography, see, e.g., Demeritt, 2001; Prudham,
2005), and explicit use of this approach was waning just as the term sustainability
was coming into prominence in the context of sustainable development.
It was the 1987 UN-commissioned report
Our common future
(the 'Brundtland
report') that launched sustainability into everyday use, defi ning sustainable develop-
ment as 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. The aim of the 1992 UN
Conference on Environment and Development (the 'Earth Summit', held in Rio de
Janeiro) was to implement sustainable development as it had been defi ned in the
Brundtland report (see Adams, 2001; Mansfi eld, 2008). Sustainable development
represented a shift regarding issues of environment and development, which until
then had been considered to be largely separate. This shift represents a major victory
for governments of the global South who had argued for decades that environmental
concerns could not be considered separately from concerns about economic growth
and equity. For them, the causes of environmental degradation are the same as those
of Third World poverty: exploitative behaviour of governments and corporations
from the North in the past and present. Further, attempts to get countries of the
South to forgo development in the name of conservation were seen largely as neo-
colonial efforts to control resources of the South for the benefi t of the North. The
concept of sustainable development, then, refl ected North-South politics in policy
discussions, and it refl ected the realities of power relations between the North
and South.
What is fascinating, however, is how the term 'sustainable development' managed
to subvert politics at the very moment politics seemed to erupt most explicitly. It
does so by entrenching the idea that economic growth is good for people and the
environment. In the 1970s, conservationists considered the major causes of envi-
ronmental problems to be economic growth through industrialisation (largely in the
North) and population growth (largely in the South). In the Brundtland report and
at the Earth Summit, policymakers maintained their focus on population but reversed
