ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY

Ecological sustainability is a value concept that measures the degree to which life forms, particularly the human species, sustain the Earth. It considers the appropriateness of the practices which determine how humans use and exploit the Earth’s resources and affect her life-supporting processes. For these practices to be sustainable, natural resources should not be exhausted, nor should the Earth’s life supporting processes suffer irreversible or even serious harm. Rather their integrity should be ensured so that all living beings, human, plant, and animal, may survive and thrive in the present and in the future. Ecological sustainability is a value concept which opposes and aims to undo the violence wrought upon the Earth Community and to provide the context essential to achieving a nonviolent culture. It is a notion that has evolved from a growing awareness of the unsustainability of the model of economic development used by the industrialized world in the North and some industrializing countries in the South. To reverse the consequences of such development, the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) and the United Nations Conferences on Environment and Development (1992, 1997 & 2002) have advocated ecologically sustainable development though, more recently, the terms “ecologically sustainable societies” or “an ecologically sustaining future” are viewed as preferable to “development” which carries with it the ideology of growthism.

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