Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development
By Aaron Schwartz

Nowadays a lot of attraction is paid to ecological situation in the world. And its reasons are well understood. The reasons to speak about it are not necessary to be named. Everybody knows them quite well. The human progress together with the development of technology is causing a great influence of the global ecosystem, changing it forever.

As the Mornington Peninsula and Western Port Biosphere Project e-bulletin states in it’s beginning: “The global rate of resource consumption exceeds the level the planet can sustain by 20 per cent, according to an analysis published on the weekend by the US National Academy of Sciences.” (Second Edition April 2003)

There are not that many virgin lands on the earth where people can definitely say how that areas had looked before, because the influence of human on world system of nature has changed many places to no possibility of being recognized: “These unprecedented rates of growth, which could have alarming effects on the environment and the life support system of the planet, have renewed the debate about the future prospects for human societies. The high rates of economic and industrial development that accompanied population growth in the twentieth century fed fears about depletion of resources and fouling of the land, air, biota, and water in nearly all parts of the globe.” (Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States (2001) National Academy of Sciences, p.1)

Even knowing the serious out-comes of the realities of modern time people still try no think about these problems, and find a lot of reasons for escaping for the core of this question: “Most people on the planet worry only about their own families and some close friends, and only for a short period. A few people think about problems of their city or country. D. Meadows expects that more than 90 percent do not think about future millenniums. Billions of people wish to satisfy their requirements immediately and behave on the Earth as if the future does not concern them. They readily waste natural resources, pollute the natural environment, and are hostile to each other.” (The Role of Environmental NGOs--Russian Challenges, American Lessons: Proceedings of a Workshop (2001), p.2) At the curtain point of development the world authorities began to think about what is going to be in future, and may be there will come a day when society will realize that there is not that much they can do to preserve and keep at least rare example of virgin nature, as the example of nature’s harmony and symbiosis.

The biggest achievement had been reached in 1992, when in Rio de Janeiro the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development brought these issues and concerns to the attention of the world’s leaders. The Conventions on Biological Diversity, Global Climate changes and desert expansion had been agreed to show the anxiety about environment, nature protection issues, social policy that will reflect the respect for the rural communities and will give them more opportunities for development as well as more cooperation on ecologically related issues. All these were lately named by the term “sustainable development”. As the past years have shown the conception of :sustainable develop” is opening new horizons in the activity of the mankind and his symbiosis with environment, as by the facts of the last years we see that care about environment also generates the alarm for future generations that will have to use the resources left after ourselves. The foundation of Biosphere Reserves goes far back to 1968, when a “biosphere conference” was organized by UNESCO, to discuss the coming global problems of natural resources exploitation and future development of ecological monitoring. This was the first attempt to establish Biosphere reserves in the regions of high ecological importance for the global community.