Sustainability: A practitioner's reflection

This article presents a practitioner's reflections on sustainability. What is most striking about sustainability and sustainable development is the speed with which these concepts have been seized upon and have changed the intellectual environment. The explanation for this lies in the history of the environmental movement between the time it came of age in 1970 and when sustainability emerged, in the late eighties and early nineties. This was a period of clash between environmental and economic interests that ended in a stalemate, with the environmentalists establishing that the environmental crisis was real, but environmental opponents blocking action that would have addressed it at the cost of sacrificing economic growth and the elimination of poverty. Sustainability offered a way around that stalemate and opened up a new era of innovative discussion by providing a formula that legitimized for each side the other's fundamental interest, conceding the need to both meet human needs while not sacrificing the environmental resources future generations will need. This transformation of the environmental dialogue is a positive and important event that will hopefully produce a new period of environmental productivity much like the seventies even though, if the logic of sustainability is applied to problems like the loss of biodiversity, the use of petroleum resources and global warming, sustainability seems to be an impossible goal. In truth, sustainability is likely to be much more immediately productive in areas of pollution management and resource consumption than in areas like biodiversity where species and resources are irrevocably lost. But until the potential of the concept is exhausted, it offers the best path forward for both environmental and economic interests.