Week 2 2.0

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Week 2: Sustainable Development and the Environment

The word ‘sustainability’ was spoken of this

week as, unsurprisingly, a contested term. Its ambiguity is comparable to light

cigarettes, diet cola, and low fat potato chips; all evoke a perception of the

product as offering a beneficial alternative to an otherwise

health-compromising indulgence. Likewise, a ‘sustainable’ product or

development method is more marketable to a generation of increasingly

environmentally conscious and ‘globally aware’ population, thus its overuse

causes a loss of meaning. However, the Brundtland Commission defined the term

in 1987 as “development that meets the needs of the present without

compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”(Redclift,

279). Issues with this definition is that it does not answer how needs are

defined in different cultures and generations, and how a course of action can

be deemed sustainable when its impacts can not be fully known at the time of

action (Redclift, 279). To lessen the complicated nature of sustainability, the

simplistic definition of sustainability as a set of conditions which can

reasonably continue indefinitely will be adopted.

To consider

the value of sustainability in development more critically one can consider

what areas of life it has implications on, specifically what is society trying

to preserve? I noticed the tension between the pursuits of preserving the

environment, preserving an expanding human population and preserving our current

culture of consumption. All these preservation pursuits are interconnected in

numerous ways. Our need to sustain ecological systems is due ultimately due to

our dependency on the earth for our survival, our ever-enlarging population

means that we need to better manage our use of the environment, and our culture

of consumption is allowing for greater innovation in producing products and

methods of production which have smaller impacts on our base of support, the

environment.

However, Susie

Jacobs better addresses the first question posed by the complex nature of

sustainability in her essay “Livelihood Strategies and their Environmental

Impacts”, the question being how needs are defined in different cultures and

generations. This reading as well as class discussion revolved around how

different cultures engage with living in a way that supports them while

maintaining a respect for nature. Many indigenous cultures practice hunting and

gathering, swidden agriculture or permanent agriculture, which reflect their

belief systems of revering nature (Jacobs, 335). This is contrasted with how the

global North’s domination of resources, and represents how unequal North and

South power dynamics are enormously consequential for the environment (Jacobs,

335), “the process through which we enlarge our choices, and reduce those of

others, is largely invisible to people in their daily lives”(Redclift, 280).

Once again highlighting the interconnectedness of the varying pursuits of

sustainability, yet the detachment that society tends to have with the

consequences our cultural indulgences and ‘standard of living’ we presume. The

most significant articulation of the importance of true sustainability in our

approaches to environmental and cultural development was said by the German

economist Jurgen Habermas, “can civilization afford to surrender itself

entirely to the…deriving force of just one of its subsystems- namely, the pull

of a dynamic…recursively closed, economic system which can only function and

remain stable by taking all relevant information, translating it into, and

processing it in, the language of economic value?”(Redclift, 280).

Works Cited

Jacobs, Susie. “Livelihood Strategies and

Their Environmental Impacts”. The

Companion to Development Studies. Ed. Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter. 2

ed.

London: Hodder Arnold Group, 2008. Print. 334-339.

Redclift, Michael. “Sustainable Development”. The Companion to Development Studies. Ed.

Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter. 2 ed. London: Hodder Arnold Group, 2008. Print.

279-282.