Sustainability

Getting to One-Planet Living

We have had instances in our history when societies were not sustainable enough thus they destroyed themselves as a society shortly after they destroyed their natural environment. The Easter Island society is a great example for that self-destruction. Although, that process has been caused by several factors, the main problem was the lack of balance between population and nature.

In the ideal case we should learn enough from our earlier mistakes in order to prevent a similar or even worse mistake again. Apparently, human behavior works on a different way because we make the same mistakes over and over again by destroying our natural environment despite the bad experiences in the past. ‘’ What are North Americans thinking today as they strip the boreal forest to get at tar-sands crude or jeopardize already shrinking water supplies by “fracking” oil-shales for natural gas and petroleum, even as burning the stuff threatens to push the global climate system over the brink? And what are Brazilians, Congolese, Malaysians, and Indonesians thinking as they harvest the world’s great rainforests for short-term economic gain (through rare tropical hardwoods, cattle farms, soy production, or oil-palm plantations, for instance)?’’

Ecological Footprints estimate the productive ecosystem area required, on a continuous basis, by any specified population to produce the renewable resources it consumes and to assimilate its (mostly carbon) wastes. Ecological Footprint studies reveal that the world is in ecological overshoot by as much as 50 percent. To achieve sustainability - that is, to live within the ecological carrying capacity of Earth - on average, people would have to live on the biologically productive and assimilative capacity of just 1.7 gha per capita. (A global hectare represents a hectare of global average biological productivity.) Well-developed countries such as the U.S. have three times the average and poor countries in Africa...