Transcript

PRESENTER: Now this week we are looking at sustainability which might seem simple enough, but it is a word bedevilled by controversy and interpretation. Sustainable is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘capable of being maintained or continued at a certain rate or level’. But sustainability first entered everyday speech as recently as 1965 just at the point when it was becoming apparent that modern life was unsustainable. Environmentalists are now telling us with increasing urgency that we are living beyond our means, especially in the West, and that’s with the seven billion people on Earth today, let alone the nine billion that it will rise to by 2050. Ecologists are telling us that we are using natural goods and services faster than they can be replenished, and in doing so depleting not only vital resources like oil and water, metals and minerals but devastating the natural world as well. And conservationists are telling us that we are creating a mass extinction event as other life finds it impossible to find enough space or habitat to survive. Now, this isn't just a liberal indulgent anxiety but clearly a matter of life and death, because if we destroy the ecosystem of the planet then we destroy the very stuff we rely on to survive. It’s simple. Clean water, fresh air, fertile soils, pollinated crops are all provided by nature. Destroy nature and we destroy ourselves. So are we heading for disaster? Certainly the only way for humanity to survive is to find ways to live within the Earth’s capacity to support us. In other words, become sustainable.

With me in the studio is Kelvin Boot, the Shared Planet correspondent. Now Kelvin, first of all the word itself. It’s loaded. Is it generally accepted by environmental organisations, politicians and the general public in fact?

KELVIN BOOTH: Well, in some ways it seems that it’s a word that’s still not quite grown up and it does mean different things to different people. Now you can't really argue against the idea of a world where we continue to grow economies and develop whilst balancing the social and environmental issues. And it is something that politicians do appear to back. There have been many high level international meetings where sustainability has been the focus, the recent Rio Summit in 2012 for example. But there's another phrase as well and that is ‘sustainable development’, and that’s first introduced as a concept as recently as 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development, and it seems that it is the stated political agenda for this century. But when it comes to putting the rhetoric into practice, we don’t seem to be very sure what it all actually means, and we certainly don’t seem to have moved much in the direction of sustaining our environment while continuing to develop economically. Now in these austere economic times, sustainable development appears to mean quite literally sustaining development, ensuring business and economies have a future. When it comes to the environment, there's a strong feeling that the term sustainable development is an oxymoron. Intrigued, I typed this into a search engine and found that a hundred and eighty four thousand sites agree with me. The two words contradict each other, serving only to confuse or at least paper over other issues, and of course that makes it difficult for the public to understand what it means. James Lovelock had an interesting take. He came up with the Gaia hypothesis and that’s that the world can be thought of as a single giant organism with all things being interconnected and affected by each other. And he thinks that the time for sustainable development and the parallel progress of economies with sustainability of the environment is long past, and it’s time to retreat. So he’s coined ‘sustainable retreat’ and that’s about changing the way we live, how we get our food and how we are gonna face future challenges. In essence, how human civilisation will survive. But if you take a look at most policy documents it’s all about economic growth first, environment second.