What is Sustainable Development?

The most common definition of sustainable development is “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. (http://www.iisd.org/sd/) There are many other definitions but this is the most commonly used and can be expanded upon in many ways. Sustainable development is figuratively represented as an equal balance between the environment, society and the economy as represented in the image below.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/05/23091323/4

I do not believe that this definition fully gets the point of “what sustainable development is” across. It is important to realize when referring to sustainable development it is not just considering physical development such as buildings, but any sort of development such as physical development, social development, cultural development, etc. One reason I don’t agree with the current definition is that future generations are going to have needs that differ greatly from the needs that our generation has now (just as we have different needs compared to our parents when they were young). There is no way that we can predict what the needs of future generations will be, so how can we develop in a way that will ensure those needs are met??

This current definition of sustainable development only really referrs to future human generations, but what about the future plant animal generations? When creating and undergoing a sustainable development the future generations of all living things should be considered. If a certain development is going to cause another species to go extinct then it is not allowing that species to fulfill its needs.

The figurative representation of sustainable development shows an equilibrium between economy, society and environment. In reality this is rarely satisfied as the economy, more often than not, comes first. This occurs for many reasons, one main reason being the difficulty of putting economic value on environmental aspects, such as putting a price tag on a river or stream. There are many other models of sustainable development available. One is referred to as the bullseye model and is represented by the image below.

When I first saw this image of the bullseye model I was confused as to how it represented that the environment was the most important aspect. Normally with a bullseye you aim for the middle, therefore I thought that this would make more sense to represent the economy as the most important. After discussion with my classmates I realize that it was meant to represent the fact that the environment encompasses society and economy (and society also encompasses the economy) but I feel there are better ways to illustrate this relationship.   

I do agree with the message this model is trying to get across (environment should be most important). Without the environment we would not have a society to sustain or an economy to sustain. The economy is based on industries that produce goods and services created from the environment such as the oil & gas industry, agriculture industry, forestry industry, etc. Without the environment, the other two would not be possible and therefore it should be seen as the most important. If we do not sustain the environment we will lack the goods to sustain the economy and to sustain society.

Sustainable development is very difficult to define, but here’s a short list of some of the aspects that I think should be considered when defining it:

Ø  Effects on future generations of all living things

Ø  Methods of appropriately estimating the price of the environment

Ø  Ensuring that the economy does not come before the environment when new developments occur

Ø  Current needs of all living organisms

Ø  The list goes on.....

Shedding some light on the topic:

http://forums.treehugger.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5565