2.5: Resources

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Summary

Sustainability refers to three simple concerns: the need to arrest environmental degradation and ecological imbalance, the need not to impoverish future generations and the need for quality of life and equity between current generations. Added up, these core concerns are an unmistakable call for transformation. Business-as-usual is no longer an option. The concept of ethics involves standards of conduct. These standards help to distinguish between behavior that is considered right and that which is considered wrong. The ways in which humans interact with the land and its natural resources are determined by ethical attitudes and behaviors. A frontier ethic assumes that the earth has an unlimited supply of resources. Environmental ethic includes humans as part of the natural community rather than managers of it. Sustainable ethic assumes that the earth’s resources are not unlimited and that humans must use and conserve resources in a manner that allows their continued use in the future. Countries are categorized by a variety of methods. During the Cold War period, the United States government categorized countries according to each government’s ideology and capitalistic development. Current classification models utilize economic (and sometimes other) factors in their determination. Environmental justice is achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment. Many problems face indigenous people, including: lack of human rights, exploitation of their traditional lands and themselves, and degradation of their culture. Despite the lofty U.N. goals, the rights and feelings of indigenous people are often ignored or minimized, even by supposedly culturally sensitive developed countries.

Review Questions

Name some indicators of global environmental stress.
Define sustainability.
Explain the following terms: frontier ethic, land ethic, environmental ethic.
What are developed countries according to the World Bank classification?
Define environmental justice.

Attributions

EEA. (1997). Towards sustainable development for local authorities - approaches, experiences and sources. Retrieved from www.eea.europa.eu/publications/GH-07-97-191-EN-C. Available under Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC BY 3.0). Modified from Original.

Theis, T. & Tomkin, J. (Eds.). (2015). Sustainability: A comprehensive foundation. Retrieved from http://cnx.org/contents/1741effd-9cda-4b2b-a91e-003e6f587263@43.5. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (CC BY 4.0). Modified from original.

University of California College Prep. (2012). AP environmental science. Retrieved from http://cnx.org/content/col10548/1.2/. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (CC BY 4.0). Modified from original.

Contributors and Attributions

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