Essay on Sustainability and Development
PART A : INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH ESSAY #657660
The human civilisation has in several decades considerably changed the face of the Earth. Glaciers are melting, in Patagonia and on Mount Kilimanjaro; satellite image reveals the destruction and plundering of tropical forests, in Borneo and Amazonia; lakes and rivers have shrank – even disappeared - in Middle East and the Ural. The exploitation of finite resources and the lack of consciousness regarding the complex systems in which we live in have resulted in an impoverishment of the Earth’s ecosystem for the sole sake of our modern lifestyle and consuming societies. In order to clarify why humanity is slowly, since the middle of the 20th century, integrating the notions of sustainability to preserve and protect the natural environment, this essay will first discuss the fundamental principle that makes human and their environment interdependent: the unity of the living. Further, it will expose the prosperous future that sustainability represents as an alternative lifestyle and new model of development.
Before all, we must recognize that humans interact with their environment more than any other living beings on the planet and that this interaction often results in the ever-growing man made environment “crushing” onto the natural environment. Thereby, can humans still be considered natural? Even though humans are irrevocably a product of nature, “their ability to radically and consciously modifying the Earth and its biological systems” (Low et al, 2005) has raised a doubtful paradox in man being part of nature. As explained by Cronon there is a “dualistic vision” embodied in the concept of wilderness, nature at its most pristine and untouched state, in which humans are dissociated from the natural environment because they could lead to its fall (Cronon, 1995). However, any living being at any scale also interacts with their environment and in some way reshapes it. We build houses for our habitats just like
The human civilisation has in several decades considerably changed the face of the Earth. Glaciers are melting, in Patagonia and on Mount Kilimanjaro; satellite image reveals the destruction and plundering of tropical forests, in Borneo and Amazonia; lakes and rivers have shrank – even disappeared - in Middle East and the Ural. The exploitation of finite resources and the lack of consciousness regarding the complex systems in which we live in have resulted in an impoverishment of the Earth’s ecosystem for the sole sake of our modern lifestyle and consuming societies. In order to clarify why humanity is slowly, since the middle of the 20th century, integrating the notions of sustainability to preserve and protect the natural environment, this essay will first discuss the fundamental principle that makes human and their environment interdependent: the unity of the living. Further, it will expose the prosperous future that sustainability represents as an alternative lifestyle and new model of development.
Before all, we must recognize that humans interact with their environment more than any other living beings on the planet and that this interaction often results in the ever-growing man made environment “crushing” onto the natural environment. Thereby, can humans still be considered natural? Even though humans are irrevocably a product of nature, “their ability to radically and consciously modifying the Earth and its biological systems” (Low et al, 2005) has raised a doubtful paradox in man being part of nature. As explained by Cronon there is a “dualistic vision” embodied in the concept of wilderness, nature at its most pristine and untouched state, in which humans are dissociated from the natural environment because they could lead to its fall (Cronon, 1995). However, any living being at any scale also interacts with their environment and in some way reshapes it. We build houses for our habitats just like