Holistic Planetary Sustainable Development.pdf (original) (raw)

Toward a Holistic Approach to the Ideal of Sustainability

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 1997

The concept of sustainable development has evolved considerably since first arising during the 1980s. The different currents of social, political, economic and ecological thinking, as described earlier, have been isolated efforts to define the content and scope of the notion of sustainability, each from its distinct perspective. Nevertheless, these efforts have not led to an integrated, holistic conception of sustainability capable of incorporating in one sole vision all of the social relations, the human-nature relation, and all of the axiological and ideological suprastructure that supports such a vision. On certain occasions, as in neoclassical theory, sustainability is simply an appendix to the old conceptual tenets of the predominant economic model, used at the level of discourse but incapable of stimulating a true practice of sustainability.

The requirements of a sustainable planetary system: [Paper in: Global Ethics. Preston, Noel (ed.).]

Social alternatives, 2007

Living biological and social systems are sustainable as long as they are able to manage and adapt to change. Sustainability is a function of a system's ability to meet its needs and maintain health, wholeness and resilience. Because the global system is now environmentally and socially unsustainable, it will collapse in the coming decades. It is unsustainable because it is based on destructive views and values that promote competition, exploitation, inequality, fear, violence and waste. For a global system to be sustainable, it must be based on constructive values that enable environmental, social and individual needs to be fully met. Since societies are organized by culture, a sustainable system will require a paradigm shift to an integral (holistic) worldview capable of organizing a functional system with congruent values, social structures and economic processes. Global events are being shaped by two trends: the dominant trend towards collapse and the emerging trend towards societal transformation. While the key elements of a sustainable system have begun to emerge, they are still very fragmented. We need to support their development through presenting a clear and unifying vision of a sustainable alternative. The Earth Charter is the cornerstone of this vision.

Enabling a Flourishing Earth: Challenges for the Green Economy, Opportunities for Global Governance

Review of European Community & International Environmental Law, 2012

1 The Earth Charter is a civil society ethical framework. It has been widely endorsed and used by communities, organisations, businesses, and governments at all levels, including UNESCO and the IUCN. The Charter comprises a Preamble, 77 principles organised under four themes, and a concluding statement entitled The Way Forward. Each principle can be viewed as an ethical imperative, a policy guide, or a para-legal principle, depending on the context and application. The Charter is widely used in education for sustainable development and as a framework for sustainability planning and reporting. See generally Bosselmann K. and Engel R. (eds). , The Earth Charter: A framework for global governance (Amsterdam: KIT Publ., 2010) Engel

New Visions for Addressing Sustainability (published in Science, 2003)

Attaining sustainability will require concerted interactive efforts among disciplines, many of which have not yet recognized, and internalized, the relevance of environmental issues to their main intellectual discourse. The inability of key scientific disciplines to engage interactively is an obstacle to the actual attainment of sustainability. For example, in the list of Millennium Development Goals from the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, 2002, the seventh of the eight goals, to " ensure environmental sustainability, " is presented separately from the parallel goals of reducing fertility and poverty, improving gains in equity, improving material conditions, and enhancing population health. A more integrated and consilient approach to sustainability is urgently needed. For human populations, sustainability means transforming our ways of living to maximize the chances that environmental and social conditions will indefinitely support human security, wellbeing, and health. In particular, the flow of nonsubstitutable goods and services from ecosystems must be sustained. The contemporary stimulus for exploring sustainability is the accruing evidence that humankind is jeopardizing its own longer term interests by living beyond Earth's means, thereby changing atmospheric composition and depleting biodiversity, soil fertility, ocean fisheries, and freshwater supplies (1). Much early discussion about sustainability has focused on readily measurable intermediate outcomes such as increased economic performance, greater energy efficiency, better urban design, improved transport systems, better conservation of recreational amenities, and so on. However, such changes in technologies, behaviors, amenities, and equity are only the means to attaining desired human experiential outcomes, including autonomy, opportunity, security, and health. These are the true ends of sustainability—and there has been some recognition that their attainment, and their sharing, will be optimized by reducing the rich-poor divide (2). Some reasons for the failure to achieve a collective vision of how to attain sustainability lie in the limitations of, and disjunction between, disciplines we think should be central to our understanding of sustainability: demography, economics, ecology, and epidemiology. These disciplines bear on the size and economic activities of the human population, how the population relates to the natural world, and the health consequences of ecologically injudicious behavior. Sustainability issues are of course not limited to these four disciplines, but require the engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration of other social and natural sciences, engineering, and the humanities (3). Neither mainstream demography nor economics, for the most part, incorporates sufficient appreciation of environmental criticalities into their thinking. They implictly assume that the world is an open, steady-state system within which discipline-specific processes can be studied. Although

The Requirements of a Sustainable Planetary System

Living biological and social systems are sustainable as long as they are able to manage and adapt to change. Sustainability is a function of a system’s ability to meet its needs and maintain health, wholeness and resilience. Because the global system is now environmentally and socially unsustainable, it will collapse in the coming decades. It is unsustainable because it is based on destructive views and values that promote competition, exploitation, inequality, fear, violence and waste. For a global system to be sustainable, it must be based on constructive values that enable environmental, social and individual needs to be fully met. Since societies are organized by culture, a sustainable system will require a paradigm shift to an integral (holistic) worldview capable of organizing a functional system with congruent values, social structures and economic processes. Global events are being shaped by two trends: the dominant trend towards collapse and the emerging trend towards societal transformation. While the key elements of a sustainable system have begun to emerge, they are still very fragmented. We need to support their development through presenting a clear and unifying vision of a sustainable alternative. The Earth Charter is the cornerstone of this vision.

Wide Web of Sustainable Development

IJMRS, 2013

This article attempts at a critical evaluation of a variety of definitions of sustainable development that have emerged in recent human history. One is overwhelmed by the plethora of definitions and is interested to account for burgeoning numbers. Why there are so many definitions for the concept of sustainable development? Answering it one encounters the content of these definitions and finds that the concept of sustainable development generates passionate debates that make the concept all the more attractive and contestable as well. As a result the various definitions are evaluated for their relative merit. The critical engagement, with definitions of sustainable development, consciously or unconsciously, generates some hierarchy by ordering the definitions of sustainable development in terms of their intrinsic value for humanity. The innumerable debates, that take place over the meaning of the term sustainable development, take an interesting turn and one wonders whether there will ever be an agreement on one definition of sustainable development.