Earthsky Interviews
William C. Clark: ‘Sustainability isn’t a new concept’
01-04-2010 - Human World
William C. Clark: Sustainability, or sustainable development, is a concept that’s been around since the first farmers or hunters.
EarthSky asked Dr. Clark for the current definition of ’sustainable development.’
William C. Clark: A view that humanity couldn’t be advanced over the long run without treating the environment carefully enough that you didn’t undermine the very productive base of your activity. Reciprocally, that you couldn’t do environmental protection unless you recognize the needs of people to advance their well-being and livelihoods and economies while conserving the environment.
Clark said the concept has immediate relevance in the developing world.
William C. Clark: Two billion people have their livelihoods just immediately connected to how well they do farming, pastoralism, or fishing. In other words, sustainability issues are right in the frontier of their activities. And when they fail, they go hungry or they die. In that sense, sustainability is direct and immediate. It’s not a long term, distant global phenomenon.
Clark’s research focuses on how societies can use science and technology to learn to live sustainably. He said access to useful technology like remote sensing data can help farmers and land managers in the developing world maintain the balances of sustainability.
For most of human existence, “sustainability” has not even been considered. Look at the history. Easter Island comes to mind. Folks consumed themselves out of existence. It takes a rich society indeed to even worry about such things. It seems that “sustainability” is always considered in the environmental paradigm. Maybe sometime folks might try looking at it from a rational economic point of view. What is passing for “sustainability” and environmentalism will cause the death of millions of humans and a drastic drop in quality of life for the survivors. Please understand: humans are not a pathogen.
Evolution and survival is a more basic concept and need the form of the bio-organism and the environment including atmosphere and land and sea and all the mechanical, electrical utilities but in proper concentrations as a blend with weather and cataclysms.
The idea of money as a capital boson price and exchange particle is important and the money helps to improve or otherwise the orbitals which we can make and need for our path of life.
We must not think of atoms alone as the Great Creator made all in special plasmoid objects that can be given the Epicurean base with Damocles’s Sword on bigger scales and smaller. Epics is a useful concept word and all the Bosons, spirit type, are needed with the fermions or particle types.Polarisations of limited concepts seem to lead to big trouble in human society and the populations of similar Epics becomes a very big question of survival level on Earth.
If only the human community could become as deeply curious and openly communicative about what the human species is doing in the world we inhabit as we are about the activities of wealthy and powerful people. Formidable human-induced global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health are just as evident as the conspicuous behaviors of the most greedy among us. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity (likely signifying nothing).
Still I believe in remaining engaged in this worthwhile struggle, one in which so many human beings with feet of clay have been involved for a lifetime. For me, the first fifty years of life were lived, as you might imagine, as if in a dream world, the one devised by the greed-mongering Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness that a single adamant generation would irreversibly degrade Earth’s environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere.
At least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate greed-driven circumstances, even though they are discomforting and unwelcome, and in the process educate one another. Like many in the Earth & Sky community have already reported, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form; but it seems our conscious denial of, and willful refusal to openly acknowledge, “what could somehow be real” means that the requirements of practical “reality” cannot be reasonably addressed and sensibly overcome. A colossal ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of our abject failure, I suppose, to respond courageously and ably to the looming global challenges that appear to have emerged robustly and converged rapidly in our time.
Despite every effort to appear reasonable and sensible, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us approach economic and ecologic problems in patently unsustainable ways by adamantly advocating and recklessly pursuing greed-driven schemes that will lead humanity to precipitate, however inadvertently and soon, the destruction of life as we know it and the Earth as a fit place for human habitation, I suppose.
If the human community is in a race against time, even at this late hour when pathological arrogance, greed-mongering and elective mutism rule the world, is it ever too late to speak of what is true to you or to do the right thing, as best we can?
Dr. Clark,
Given a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth, could you or someone else comment on the global limitations of Earth’s capacity to sustain the overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species in our time?
Massive endemic fraud and wanton unbridled greed are ruling the world and ruining the Creation in our time. Willful blindness, hysterical deafness and elective mutism prevail over speaking truth to the wealthy and powerful. What is to become of the children?
There is a path to a good enough future for the children, I suppose, but it is not be found by recklessly pursuing the patently unsustainable path of Charles Ponzi, the path so adamantly advocated by the greed-mongering bankstas and other Masters of the Universe among us who profanely proclaim that they are the ones doing \”God\’s work\”.
But let\’s not talk about such things. Shhhhh!