ABSTRACT
Sustainability has been an important notion far back in time, as will be made clear later in this book. One excellent example is the use and management of forest resources for a sustainable yield of timber, which is said to have begun in the sixteenth century in Germany and Japan (Wikipedia/Forestry). In Germany it came about as the result of mining of metals and salt, for which a steady supply of timber and fuelwood was essential. To guarantee supply, timber production in managed forests became an industry. It was realised that the amount of wood a forest produced is limited by the natural rate of growth of trees, and that therefore a steady supply of timber was guaranteed only if its harvesting remained within the capacity of replanting and natural regrowth. At the end of the eighteenth century, Georg Ludwig Hartig (1764-1837), a German agriculturist and writer on forestry, formulated this concept of a sustained yield in a way that anticipates the Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainability, as will be seen shortly:
Moreover,
In comparison, the contemporary concept of ‘sustainable development’ has been the focus of a convoluted debate that started only about 30 years ago. To gain an insight into this debate – what it has achieved or not achieved in terms of understanding what sustainable development means, or what it has achieved or not achieved in terms of translating the concept of sustainable development into practice – it is essential to investigate the major contributions to what we today understand the key characteristics of sustainable development to be:
Chapter 1
● development and improvement of the human environment, specifically the environment in which we live and work, without irreversibly damaging the natural environment;
● preservation, management and use of non-renewable natural resources such that future generations will have the same access to them that we claim today;
● use of renewable natural resources within the producing and replenishing capacity of the biosphere.
