Sustainability and sustainable development: philosophical distinctions and practical implications

The long term viability of modern civilization has emerged as one of the major issues if not the major challenge of the twenty-first century. The awakening of the emerging economies of China, India and other developing nations, and their embrace of consumption- and export-led forms of capitalism, have raised awareness of the potential consequences of achieving levels of consumption similar to those of developed nations, such as the USA, the countries of Europe and Japan. The global problems of climate change, poverty and inequity, resource scarcity and environmental degradation can all be linked to the underlying economic paradigm of unfettered growth. The global financial crisis of the last several years has brought these issues into stark relief.1In the last 40 years, there has been a growing awareness of the impact of economic growth and globalization on the world environment. In 1972, the publication of the Club of Rome report ‘The Limits to Growth’ (Meadows and Meadows, 1972) drew attention to the challenge of providing for an ever-increasing global population. This was followed by several UN conferences, and, in 1987, the Brundtland Commission report entitled ‘Our Common Future’ made the connection between environmental problems and poverty in developing nations and made explicit the need to consider issues of intergenerational equity (Brundtland, 1987). It argued that the path to reducing environmental degradation lay in addressing poverty in the developing world in sustainable ways. Since then, the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’, in the senses used in that report, have emerged as important criteria in many con-texts, and are often used interchangeably. Subsequent UN conferences have laid out paths and action plans based on the foundations of the Brundtland report (UNDFSD, 1993; Ehrlich and Holdren, 1971; Sachs, 2005). It has been held that sustainability (which, in its strongest form, has been described as ‘absurdly strong sustainability’) is an end-state in which the needs of humankind and the needs of nature are both satisfied within some form of dynamic equilibrium; while sustainable development (a process-oriented approach that emerged as a consequence of the Brundtland report) is the means or process by which sustainability might be achieved (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996; Basiago, 1995; Loorbach and Rotmans, 2006; Bagheri and Hjorth, 2007; Waas et al., 2012; Lozano, 2008). However, it is argued here that this is the wrong way to look at it. Although, in the last 50 years or so, there have been various ways of thinking about nature and the environment (see, for example, Macnaghten and Urry, 1998, for an outline), it is argued here that the notion of sustainability was in fact strongly influenced by the Romantic movement of the eighteenth century. Its under-lying philosophical position is that nature has a more-than-utilitarian, even sacral, significance, and that humankind, which has no special moral privilege, should live in harmony with nature. This has been called a ‘deep-ecology’ position, but the term used here is ‘environmental-preservationist’, recognizing the broader notion that the natural world ought to be preserved and must not be allowed to deteriorate or disappear. The philosophical standpoint implicit in the notion of sustainable development is typically quite different, having its origins in conservationism (for example, Pinchot, 1910) – it might be called a ‘prudentially conservationist’ position – and argues that, as a matter of prudence, environmental resources should be conserved so that they do not run out and are available for future generations of humankind. Of particular note is that in a sustainable-development paradigm, it is assumed that humankind has a special moral status that places humans above the rest of nature, and that nature should be ‘looked after’ only to the extent that it is in human interests to do so. A central claim of this paper is that the process of sustainable development cannot lead to the sustainability equilibrium outlined above unless ‘human interests’ are taken to be so broad as to recognize the inter-dependence of all planetary species. This distinction is important, because it places at the heart of this dilemma the issues of beliefs, values and moral interests.

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278189565_Sustainability_and_Sustainable_Development_Philosophical_Distinctions_and_Practical_Implications