How can we meet human needs while protecting, even improving, the environment?

That’s the definition of sustainable development, and Robert Kates, a geographer in Maine, is an expert on the subject. In the 1990s, he and his colleagues began to talk about what a sustainable world would be like.

Robert Kates: Early on, we recognized that there’s no such thing as a sustainable world. A sustainable world is composed of sustainable places. And those places are often very unique and very different and they have very different problems . . .

So, for example, in the U.S., one big concern is energy consumption. But Kates recently visited a city in southwest Nigeria called Ijebu-ode. The people there identified poverty as their biggest sustainability issue.

Robert Kates: The Ijebu-ode actually bottle fruit drinks. But they imported the fruit from elsewhere . . . So they decided to, well why don’t we raise our own pineapples for our fruit drinks and make another local industry and bring some money into the community?

Scientists helped local farmers choose which kinds of pineapples were most suitable. And indeed cooperation between scientists and local practitioners has been recognized as a key for sustainability everywhere on Earth in this century.

Our thanks to the National Science Foundation.

Our thanks to:
Dr. Robert Kates
Co-Convener
Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability, United States
Trenton, ME