0.12 Natural capital & Sustainable development introduction  (Page 2/12)

The author’s preferred definition of sustainable development See Malcolm Gillis, Dwight Perkins, Michael Roemer and Donald Snodgrass, Economics of Development , Third Edition, 1996, p.524. is as follows.

Economic development that maximizes the long-term net benefits to human kind, taking into account the very real costs of environmental degradation and natural resource depletion.

These benefits include:

1. Income gains
2. Reduction in poverty and unemployment
3. Healthier living conditions, longer lives

Costs include:

1. Those associated with pollution of all kinds (water, air, soils etc.)
2. Those associated with resource depletion

Sustainable development stresses the need to develop sensibly , in order to be better able to conserve it makes conservation the handmaiden of economic growth, while protecting the interests of unborn, future generations.

Seen this way, conservation and preservation are not valued for their own sake, but what they can do for welfare of both present and future generations.

We have in fact progressed. Decades ago few cared when federal officials called the incredibly polluted Houston Ship channel “too thick to drink, and too thin to plow.”

By 2008 fully 85% of the American public believed that global climate change was a serious issue. Sometimes moral arguments are offered for sustainability. For example Christians speak of “sins of omission.” Perhaps pollution is best seen as a sin of emission.

In any case, growing concern over the environment has been accompanied by a heightened search for moral foundations for environmental ethics. This search is not going all that well at present. Should this concern us? Yes. But not to the point that we are distracted from three other very important tasks.

The first of these tasks is to improve not only environmental policies and environmental management and to improve non-environmenta l policies impacting the environment. As it happens, many of the most pressing environmental issues in affluent counties are caused by affluence. They are much more often management issues, rather than moral issues. That is, while moral considerations may cause most of us to agree that the humpback whale, the whooping crane, the grizzly bear and the bald eagle should all be saved, we have a very limited number of proven programs to assure survival of these endangered and/or threatened species.

What is the second task? To cause people to understand that in most of the rest of the world, outside of the U.S., Europe, or Japan, the most serious environmental issues are caused not by affluence, but by poverty . If one wants to save the snow leopard in Nepal, the tropical forest in Indonesia, the panda in China, and the rhino in Africa one has to understand that efforts to protect endangered species in poor nations will be fruitless unless and until something is done to give poor, rural families a stake in preserving these animals and their habitats. Differences in environmental issues as between rich and poor nations are well illustrated in Figure 15-1.

The third task is to craft sensible measures and policies for mitigating or resolving serious environmental threats. These tasks are daunting; but they are tractable if approached with the requisite degree of humble optimism.