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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
