(DP) A philosophical approach to sustainability

I would start this “path” with an introduction, and a personal reflection that I hope could reach, with the next posts, in a more mature outcome on the philosophical and theoretical approaches on the sustainability; first of all, I would to define this term:

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of union, an interdependent relationship and mutual responsible position with all living and non living things on earth. [1]

The actual situation of our planet shows that we aren’t sustainable for the earth. We’re not far to exploiting all the natural fossil fuels, that is our main source of energy, everyday we’re witnessing the extinction of countless biodiversity because of us, moreover we’ve failed even as society: we’ve a huge difference in quality of life, resources availability, healthcare, education, possibility and so on between rich people and poor people.

Thus, we should wondering…where we’ve failed?  

In my opinion the last 60 years was the key of this philosophical and political failure; after the Second World War, the war went on, but not in a traditional way, it has changed in “cold war” that was even the struggle of two different way to think, and two different philosophies: the Capitalism and the Communism.

In 2011 we can say that we’ve seen the failure of both philosophies.

If the Communism has showed from the beginning its weaknesses especially in the way that it was applied, the capitalism has taken some more time to show it; but in the while, it has changed our way of live and the perception of what we really need to live.

With this mentality we’ve became like spoiled children, we need a lot of un unnecessary stuffs, and without those we have the perception that we can’t live an happy and satisfactory life…now I’m wondering if this is the right perception? Or we’ve been going too far from the real meaning of life? Is it fair to exploit the earth natural resources for our subsistence, to don’t take care about that at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day? [2]

This scenario (and much more negativities that I haven’t appointed) shows that we must choose a different approach in the future, and if we would change something in our world, we should trying to live in equilibrium with our environment and trying to have a development not just for a little part of population, but involve in this development whoever, especially the countries that is developing and the third world’s countries.

It might be possible?

I think the main change should come  from our approach, our way to think, or philosophy if you want to call that in this way…the main issue to win this challenge –our generation’s war- it will be change the capitalism (or better, consumism) way of live. We should start to understand that we are living a life with too much superfluous stuffs, and we are far to live with the essential ones; this means that we are focusing our attention on trivial things and we’re losing the key things of the life: the friendships, the relations…our environment, our earth.

We should “come back” or “degrowth” instead of growth and get day by day farther from an ideal point of no return. As more time as we’ll take to understand that, as less possible will be to come back; and we’re already in terrible delay, we’re almost exploited a huge part of the earth’s resources, and we’re spoling too much of our environment, and we aren’t taking care about the need of poor world’s poor people…where we want to go through this way? It’s like we are driving a car, always faster, and we know that soon or later in our way there will be a wall in front of us…would we want to crash there? Or we could start to concern and try to avoid it finding an exit that we can’t see if we’ll go too fast?

We need to think about it, and not just tomorrow, today it could be too late; we need to choose our future.

In the other hand –unfortunately- it won’t be important just our choices, even the government ones it will be the key for our future.

If with our choices we can be advocates for our future, to induce any changes in the government’s choices is not easy and it seems even harder because the governments of developed countries (and other international organizations) were (and are still) leaving behind a worrying situation: they seem to understand just the “profit” word, and to reach as much as possible of it, they deal the third world’s countries and the developing ones just as resources areas and not more, and moreover they trying to perpetuate this vicious circle to ensure for their the prosperity and the continuous growth with no limit. Without any changes on policy and approach from those countries/organizations it will be impossible any real change or any dream of equity in the world’s population.

I’m going to analize better the inequities of these establishments (IMF, WTO, UN, and so on…) later, because I’d to go deeply on that topic.

This is just the  my “painting of nowadays”, I would to analize in the next steps the current theories that could be applied and that might change (in better) the situation about social inequity and environment sustainability.

1 comentario / 27 Nov 2011 por Luca Palma
IMSD /

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