Development and Environment

This article is presented through a report brought forth by the World Commission in order to discuss the contemporary issues that affect us all. Since we have seen the Earth from space, we have seen that the emphasis is not on humans. From space, one cannot see the man or woman but can see the clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils. The relevance of this is seen in the report itself, Focusing on the human impact on the environment.
What is the Commission?
The commission is an independent body, linked to but outside the control of governments and the UN system. Their objectives are: to re-examine the critical environment and development issues and to formulate realistic proposals for dealing with them; to propose new forms of international co-operation on these issues that will influence policies and events in the direction of needed changes; and to raise the levels of understanding and commitment to action of individuals, voluntary organizations, businesses, institutes, and governments.
The commission believes that people can build a better future that is prosperous and differs from the pace that we are going now. A new era of economic growth, one that must be based on policies that sustain and expand the environmental resource base. This growth is believed to be essential to relieve the great poverty expanding in the world.
The report focuses on the fact that most of the pros of development have terrible cons. These are referred to as failures of "development". Examples of these failures may be the six million hectares of productive dryland that turns into worthless desert each year, or the 11 million hectares of forests that are destroyed yearly. The realization is coming about that it is impossible to separate economic development issues from environmental issues. The idea is that whatever you try and do developmentally, you have analyze such environmentally and vice versa.
The world is growing very rapidly and the UN projects the population could get between 8-14 billion people in this century. The rapid accumulation of people only serves to deepen the impact of poverty and other issues. These poverty stricken/underdeveloped nations who could soon be suffering from overpopulation have to repay debts to other nations. In order to do this, such countries have to exploit their resources, sometimes to the point of overexploitation. These developing countries are faced with trying to bridge the ever-widening gap between them and the industrialized. But the gap stays too large because the industrial world dominates the rule making. The inequality present, is the planet's main "environmental" problem and it is also the main "developmental" problem.Debts that cannot be payed force nations to overuse fragile soils, changing useful land into desert.This will eventually leave these nations with nothing if they every climb out of debt.
The worry leaks into the idea of security also. The environmental issues brings political unrest and tension to well armed, ill-disposed neighbors.
To fix such a problem, the commission believes, there needs to be not only a new era of economic growth for nations in which the majority are poor, but an assurance that those poor get their fair share of the resources required to sustain growth. The idea of the sustainable development on a global scale requires that people adopt lifestyles that fit the planet's ecological means. Not exploitation. Population and growth have to be in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.
The commission ends its report on the premise that sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but a process of change in which the use of resources, direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with the future as well as present needs. But like the developmental ideas going hand in hand with the environmental, sustainable development must rest on political will.

-Aaron Price