Sustainability Is Good, But Not Enough; Let’s Aim For Satisfiability

“SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT” makes good sense as a concept. This term was definitely coined to draw attention to the dangers inherent in unrestrained “development”, in a world where all countries have ambitions of becoming “developed”.

We cannot, for practical and moral reasons, stop any country from wishing to become developed, but the inherent ecological cost of allowing every country to develop without restrain would be unacceptable. This is the great paradox of our time. It could mean the destruction of Mother Earth’s life-sustaining ecologies, and the very ecosystems within which the human species came into being and thrived. We are now clever enough to observe and describe how human activities in recent centuries have actually disrupted the circularity—the sustainability—of Earth’s basic processes. Should the resulting fluctuations become too large or unpredictable, then human life itself is threatened, not to mention that of countless other species.