Sustainable Development: A 21st Century American Vision?

As I watched E.O. Wilson speak on BookTV today I was reminded once again of how finite the world's resources are for ourselves and future generations. If every human consumed at equal rates to Americans, it would require four Earths to sustain it. This somber statistic persuaded me to post this snippet I read during a recent BART ride.

Excerpts from:
Learning from History: U.S. Environmental Politics, Policies, and the Common Good
November 2006 -- By Richard N.L. Andrews, Environment

In 2005, the United Nations commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that over the past 50 years, rapid and extensive change in human ecosystems has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, and water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have doubled since 1960. Since 1750, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming, has increased, with 60 percent of that increase happening between 1959 and the present. Fifty percent of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used has been applied since 1985; flows of biologically available nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems have doubled since 1960 and may increase by two-thirds more by 2050. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.

These changes have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development at growing costs to the essential services that ecosystems provide to human societies: providing food, water, fuel, wood, and fiber, supporting and regulating natural processes that are necessary for human life and health (nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, the climate system, and the control of disease organisms), and providing spiritual and recreational values. These damaging trends are substantially reducing the availability of these services for future use.

U.S. environmental policies have been prominent causes of these damaging trends and must be part of any solution. Throughout American history, the United States' dominant policies have been to promote the economic exploitation of natural resources, first nationally and now globally...

At times throughout this history, U.S. environmental policies also have included initiatives to manage and protect the natural environment...

The net effect of these policies has been to provide unprecedented levels of material comfort to many people and extraordinary affluence to a few and to reduce and even repair some environmental damage.

It would be a mistake to attribute the vast environmental changes in the United States entirely to public policies. Policies tend to lag behind economic and social trends, because government typically acts only in response to a buildup of pressure for collective action...

The enduring challenge for U.S. environmental policy is to build, maintain, and constantly renew public support for effective environmental governance, at home and worldwide. To meet that need, U.S. environmental policy today must recover an essential missing element: a broadly shared vision of the common environmental good. Such visions have emerged at several points in the past. Examples include the sanitation movement of the nineteenth century; the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s; the Progressive civic reform and conservation movements that followed it; the New Deal vision of combining ecological, social, and economic recovery; and the vision of a modern society in harmony with its natural environment that was articulated in NEPA and widely voiced by the American public on Earth Day in 1970...

The closest current approximation to such a vision is perhaps the idea of sustainable development, as articulated by the United Nations' World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987 and in the Agenda 21 document endorsed by the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The commission envisioned sustainable development as a pattern of development that would meet the needs of human communities today without jeopardizing those of the future, and its vision specifically included economic development, ecological sustainability, and social equity as essential and interdependent elements...

Barring some new defining crisis or leadership commitment, the future of U.S. environmental policy will be shaped by the reemergence--or failure to emerge--of a new broad-based national coalition for an ecologically sustainable economy and inclusive and democratic society.