NOT SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Our Common Future, the Bruntland Report, is often credited as the origin of the most widely accepted definition of sustainable development:
'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations.'
Many people have pointed out the many ways in which this is indefinite: what is a need? whose present needs? what will the future's needs be? when is the ability to service a need compromised?
The ambiguity has allowed many plainly unsustainable initiatives (eg ecotourism resorts) to be called 'sustainable developments'.
'Sustainable development' has since become a term used in the discourse of globalisation, referring to technology transfers between more developed and less developed nations. At best, the aim is to leap-frog developing nations into more sustainable economies, avoiding the ecological impacts of industrialisation. These 'sustainable developments' in nations with laxer environmental regulations financed by trans-national corporations of developed nations, are currently being promoted as 'flexibility mechanisms', that is, ways in which companies can be seen to be making a contribution to sustainability without changing their domestic practices and whilst still engaging in the expansion of their resource consuming operations. As a result, the term 'sustainable development' is losing its meaning.
There are two ways in which the term might be meaningful:
1) A 'sustainable development' would not involve development as conventionally understood. In other words, it would not be a 'growth'. It would rather by a 'de-envelopment', an unfolding. The emphasis falls more on change than on 'improvement'. An 'apple' is not an improvement on a 'blossom', nor is 'composting fruit' not an improvement on an 'apple'. Sustainments are environments designed to sustain the temporary unfolding of different activities.
2) The EcoDesign Foundation argued in the early 1990s that the objective should not be 'sustainable development' but 'the development of sustainability'. This replaces a relativistic descriptor with a more tangible task, able to occur simultaneously at the level of conception and implementation. Sustainments are the provisional achievements of that task, each implementation prompting a reappraisal of our understanding of sustainability, in turn prompting renewed implementations, and so on.
