Philosophy of sustainability Реферат

Sustainability is a broad discipline, giving insights into most aspects of the human world from business to technology to environment and the social sciences. Sustainability draws on politics, economics and, philosophy and other social sciences as well as the hard sciences. Sustainability skills and environmental awareness is a priority in many corporate jobs as businesses seek to adhere to new legislation. 

Sustainability is one the newest degree subjects that attempts to bridge social science with civic engineering and environmental science with the technology of the future. When we hear the word “sustainability”, we tend to think of renewable fuel sources, reducing carbon emissions, protecting environments and a way of keeping the delicate ecosystems of our planet in balance. In short, sustainability looks to protect our natural environment, human and ecological health, while driving innovation and not compromising our way of life. 

The definition of “sustainability” is the study of how natural systems function, remain diverse and produce everything it needs for the ecology to remain in balance. It also acknowledges that human civilization takes resources to sustain modern way of life [1]. 

There are countless examples throughout human history where a civilization has damaged its own environment and seriously affected its own survival chances. Sustainability takes into account how we might live in harmony with the natural world around us, protecting it from damage and destruction.

We now live in a modern, consumerist and largely urban existence throughout the developed world and we consume a lot of natural resources every day. In our urban centres, we consume more power than those who live in rural settings and urban centres use a lot more power than average, keeping our streets and civic buildings lit, to power our appliances, our heating and other public and household power requirements. That's not to say that sustainable living should only focus on people who live in urban centres though, there are improvements to be made everywhere - it is estimated that we use about 40% more resources every year than we can put back and that needs to change. 

Against the backdrop of a divided world where with just over 6 billion people, some 1,1 billion have no access to drinking water, 2 billion have no electricity, 2,4 billion live without proper sanitation, as many as 4 billion live without sound waste water disposal system. One can realize the deeper significance of one of Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite aphorisms, that “there is enough in this world for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed”. To quote Gandhi: “Economics that hurt the moral wellbeing of an individual or a nation are immoral and sinful. Economic pursuits that commit one country to prey upon another are grossly immoral”. Gandhi is the first advocate of the thesis of sustainable development. “Nature produces enough for our wants and if everyone took enough for himself and nothing more; there would be no pauperism and consumerism“, ”which is to him another name for ‘economic slavery [5]. 

Advocating the thesis of sustainable development, Gandhi once posed the question ‘how much a person can consume’, or ‘how much a person should consume’. Prior to Gandhi, Aristotle introduced the concept of welfare ethics in all areas including business and economy, since the very ‘character of the economy is a life conductive and life serving one.’ “This is a view inspired by Protagoras, according to which the purpose of the economy is to cater to authentic human needs, to enable humans to develop their full capabilities”. In “Nichomachean Ethics”, Aristotle highlighted material benefits that wealth can bestow on us as a means to an end: ‘wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else’.

Wealth is conducive to something else, and this something else is there, because we can make a choice between what is desirable to us and what is not so desirable. Choice implies responsibility and it is a basic postulate of morality. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were concerned with human freedom, so are many modern day economists including the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. What this alternate model of development that accommodated sustainability into the growth model aimed at becomes relevant when we re-visit the growth model of developments and re-examine some of its contents and discontents.

It is said that: “Sustainable development, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; it therefore promises something for everyone”. Economist Lester Thurow believes that mainly upper middle class people who have gained economic security and now want to improve the quality of their lives further by reducing environmental pollutants are supporting environment movement. Environment protection in the North came to be viewed as a part of the great growth model of development when nature too was seen as one of the precious goods that satisfies man’s taste for an altogether different quality of life which also satisfies man’s urge for ‘a sense of beauty and solitude’, ‘a sense of the sacred’, as well. The popular support for the protection of wilderness in the North reflected this taste for solitude at the heart of a machine world. This taste is also the gift of technology and development to some extent as the virgin wild nature is also made accessible to human admirers only because the car opened up the wild to all. “Thus in a curious paradox, the car “the most modern creation of industry “, becomes the vehicle of anti-industrial impulses, taking one to distant adventures, to “homely little towns, enchanting fairytale forests, far from stale routine, functional ugliness or the dictates of the clock” [7]. 

For others, exploding numbers seem at fault with environment degradation, countries such as India and specially Bangladesh were commonly blamed. In his book Paul Ehrlich, describes his emotional experience of population explosion when he had this particular experience in one stinking night in Delhi a couple of years ago: ”As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating .People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people.”

Environment and sustainability remained debatable issues especially from the Third World perspective as well. Greatly inspired by Gandhian philosophy of deeper interrelationship between man, nature and environment, different forms of environmental movements, cropped up. Drawing heavily on the teachings of Gandhi shared common ideas with Gandhi that science and technology has its limitations and intuition is a source of knowledge that provides the missing gap. Deep ecological elements are prevalent in Gandhi’s environmental philosophy as well. Gandhi believed that nature could exist without humans, a prospect that fascinated and frightened him, which eventually prompted him to focus on the relation between human beings and the environment. “I need no inspiration other than Nature’s. She has never failed me yet. She mystifies me, bewilders me, and sends me to ecstasies.”

However, Gandhian position on environmentalism is more akin to human centric shallow ecology than bio centric deep ecology. The basic difference between deep and shallow ecology is that the latter takes an anthropocentric (human-centred) view of the world, whereas deep ecology is eco-centric, placing equal value on non-human organisms and, indeed, physical features. If we go by the ideas generated by the environmental movement in India, which is strongly influenced by Gandhi, these are also human welfare centric besides accommodating larger interest of all life into its fold. The strength of human ecology, and also of Gandhian philosophy, lies in its ability to see human beings and their environment as mutually interlinked, as part of an integrated whole [3].

Unlike in the West, almost all the Indian environmental movements also paved way for sustainable development in a Gandhian way. These reflected worries and apprehensions of the ecosystem people who share natural and spiritual bond with nature. For these tribes, fisher folk, other underprivileged section of the society, forest preservation or river preservation became synonymous with a movement for safeguarding their own local, ethnic and marginal identity that faces threat of extinction along with the forest, river, and the mother earth, who sustains them all.