Antecedents of sustainability

Hardly a day passes without media reference to ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’. The three interlocked economic, social and environmental factors that sustain the earth, its population and its biosphere are familiar to many people working in both the natural and human sciences. The philosophy of sustainable development is usually expressed in phrases such as ‘being able to meet the needs of the present without compromising those of the future’ or ‘maintaining an ecological balance by avoiding the depletion of natural resources’.The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations are clearly articulated, and they also form the national agenda for policy and action in many individual countries. This includes South Africa that has an official National Framework for Sustainable Development.It is often assumed that the idea of sustainable development emerged in the 1980s with the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, three times Prime Minister of Norway and Director-General of the World Health Organization (1998–2003). The Commission, and its report Our Common Future, rode the wave of environmentalism triggered by disappointment in the technological promise of the post-war world, the impact of writers like Rachel Carson2, events such as the first Earth Day (1970), a growing appreciation of the gap between rich and poor and, particularly, as the report expressed it, the danger ‘of creating a planet our ancestors would not recognise’3. The ideas in Our Common Future were reinforced with fanfare by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro and by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.