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Sustainability and the built environment
SECTIOn 1 InTrODUCInG SUSTaInaBILITY
This section aims to define sustainability and sustainable development,
and to explore the history and theory behind these important issues.
1.1 What is sustainability?
If you have a regular income, you will know that the amount of money it represents
is fixed. The more you withdraw from it, the more your funds deplete. You may
even reduce your balance to zero and be forced to go into debt to ensure your own
survival. So it is with us and the Earth’s natural resources. If we continue to take from
the limited stock of the planet’s commodities, eventually we will exhaust the supply
and potentially end up with a deficit.
Sustainability is living within our means, learning to live comfortably within the Earth’s
natural environmental limits without having to sacrifice our wealth and happiness. It is
‘the ability to live long term with the resources that are available to us’.
UK sustainable development organisation Forum for the Future defines sustainable
development as ‘a dynamic process which enables all people to realise their potential
and improve their quality of life in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the
Earth’s life support systems’.
Whilst both terms are often used interchangeably, ‘sustainability’ can be viewed as the
fundamental goal, and ‘sustainable development’ as the path towards it.
1.2 Why is it important?
Increases over the last 40 years in the speed with which we are destroying our
environment have led UN driven Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to conclude that
‘[human activity is] putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability
of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted’.
Other authoritative publications, such as the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the
World and the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Reports, contain similarly damning
evidence. According to the WWF ‘a third of the Earth’s natural wealth has been
destroyed since 1972 [including] our wildlife, forests, rivers and seas. Much, if not
all, of this destruction results from human consumption – which is now completely
unsustainable, and is posing a serious threat not only to the natural world, but to all of
us’. To continue our earlier financial analogy, prominent ecological economist Herman
Daly once said, ‘[t]here is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it
was a business in liquidation’.
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