Sustainable development is bull

Discussion in 'Debate Corner' started by Styx, May 27, 2010.

  1. Styx That's me inside your head.

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2008
    319
    I'm studying it right now. Have an exam about it tomorrow.
    One of the major milestones in the history of sustainable development was "Our Common Future" (aka "The Brundtland Report").
    Basically for the first time sustainable development became a massive issue, appearing on the international agenda, along with this key statement:

    In other words, development is important, but we cannot let it happen at the cost of our future generations. The environment where our children and their children will live in will have a great influence on their welfare, and thus must be preserved. That's the gist of it.

    ====

    I think it's bull. Seriously. Humanity's awareness for the environment, and for sustainable development, has never been this high and a lot of people start taking measures. But to what avail?

    Sustainable development means creating strong, durable bonds between planet, people and profit. This, as I'm learning today but already knew before, is incredibly difficult. This is shown by the miserably failed gathering at Copenhagen. Aside from the many dilemmas we're bound to encounter along the road, some countries just plainly have an attitude problem. This is a blatant case of pondering over a Gordian knot if I've ever seen one.

    Why do we stretch humanity's life span, and how far do we plan to go?
    We won't have it any better at the time of the apocalypse, the eradication of the planet by whatever astrophysical means is chronologically the first (black hole, sun turning into a red giant, whatever) than that we have it now, if (and that's a very big if) we even make it that far.

    I predict that bending over backwards for generations to come (can't picture them being grateful to us by the way) and crawling through various narrow holes in order to save up for later will only end up prolonging a battle that we'll eventually lose. This is the rational and pragmatic aspect of my argument; this is not just an easy way out, this is ceasing to fight something we can't beat. There's no shame in aborting a mission that serves no purpose.

    Our alternative? We squander. We put the long-term thinking in the background or even get rid of it completely, in favor of a short-term thinking pattern. This will lead to an early (but either way inevitable) death of mankind's welfare, but quite possibly with an intenser and more satisfactory final spasm. "It's better to burn out than do fade away.", Neil Young sang, and Kurt pulled the trigger on himself. I don't think we can burn out per se, but we can try to do the closest thing to it.

    I, as a future biologist, will admit to start caring less about the environment. Unless of course the members of KHV can find a flaw in my rationale. Care to give your views?