Oldal 19 [19]
What can I know
(if trust in knowledge has been lost)?
1. From development to sustainability
I believe that it is with good reason that we use the term development
for the changes in living systems if, as a result, they can, with time, provide
an ever more complex, flexible and diverse answer to the challenge of the
environment, thus increasing their independence and improving their
chances of survival and reproduction. It follows from this that we can
talk about development only if the improvement of performance goes
together with an increase in the available resources. If the improvement
of performance goes hand in hand with the consumption of the resources
integral to the renewal of the system, or if those become inaccessible for
further use, then we should not talk about development, but rather of a
loss of balance, crisis or decline. The expression “sustainable development”
was born of the ideologically driven muddling together of two terms that
are meaningful in themselves. It was meant to fill the mental vacuum
created by the collapse of faith in the development of civilisation and the
admission of the alarming signs of decline and is intended to delay
recognition of the latter.
‘The expression’ that spread following the Brundtland Report became
the slogan of the relativisation of the ecological crisis. It suggests that
saving the planet (“environmental protection”) is reconcilable with the
continuance of the current social order, one based on waste and the
! The word sustainability within its current context was first used by the Meadows
couple in their 1972 Report The Limits to Growth, written for the Club of Rome. It was
presumably due to its influence that the expression “sustainable development” found its
way into the title of a 1980 document of the World Conservation Union and hence into
the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. This was presented
to the UN General Assembly by a committee led by former Norwegian Prime Minister
Gro Harlem Bruntland and was then published in 1987.
17