Environment Vis a Vis Development: Where will it End.

 

Anurag Dwivedi

 

ABSTRACT:

In twenty first century, economic growth and modernization have been pursued aggressively by nation states. Improved quality of life, increased health care, education, urbanization etc. have made demands on the environment by using finite natural resources generating wastes or near depletion of natural resources. Land and water are the two resources whose scarcity has nearly jeopardized growth for future generations. Demographic pressure, moral density and over population are attributing factors. This paper attempts to identify these interlink ages vis a vis sustainable development from a sociological perspective. Decisions taken at every level throughout society should have due regard to their possible environmental consequence. Only then the philosophy of sustainable development can be attained keeping the environment intact for the future generations.

 

INTRODUCTION:

Before coming to the main theme of discussion, it becomes imperative to delve on the two key concepts: development and environment. Development occupies the centre of an incredibly powerful semantic constellation. There is nothing in modern mentality comparable as a force guiding thought and behavior. In common parlance, development describes a process through which the potentialities of an object or organism are realized, until it reaches its natural, completes full fledged form. Between 1759(Wolff) and 1859(Darwin) development evolved from a conception of transformation that moves towards the appropriate form. By the beginning of the 20^th century a new use of the term became widespread. Urban development has stood since then for a specific manner of reformulation of urban surroundings based on massive homogenous industrial production of urban spaces and specialized installations. Social development, or social change, is the phrase that refers to the alteration of social order within a society. It may also refer to the notion of sociocultural evolution, or ‘social progress’. This is the philosophical idea that society always moves forward by dialectical means, or evolutionary means.

The phrase can also refer to a particular paradigmatic change within the socio-economic structure. Say for example, this could be a movement away from feudalism, and a movement towards capitalism. It’s essentially a huge change in how society works in one area, en masse.

 

The phrase can also be used to refer to a social revolution. A social revolution like the Communist revolution, associated with Marxism is the perfect example of this. However, other social movements that weren’t involved with the takeover of government include the Women’s suffrage, or the Civil rights movement. Social change comes in these forms but is also associated with many other forces within society, including cultural change, religious influence, economic status, scientific change or even technological forces within society.

 

 

Generally, social change is more involved with natural, social behaviors, social relations and social institutions, thus it can be said that Social development is when environmental factors effect the development of humans, and changes their way of living or growing.

 

Development cannot delink from the words with which it was formed growth, evolution, maturation. No matter the content in which it is used, the expression becomes qualified and colored by meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favorable change, a step from the simple to complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better.

 

Levi’s (1995) dictum “First it should be noted that our subject matter is growth, and not distribution” reflects the mainstream emphasis on economic growth which permeated the whole field of development thinking. Paul Baran (1957) opined that political economy of growth  and defined growth or development as the increase in the per capita production of material goods .Walter Rostow(1960) presented his non communist manifesto as a description of the stages of economic growth assuming that this single variable can characterize a whole society.

 

Subsequently, the reports on the social situation prepared periodically by the UN used social development as a vague counterpart for economic development and as a substitute for the static notion of the social situation. The social and the economic were perceived as distinct realities. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) in 1962 recommended the integration of both aspects of development and said “The problem of the underdeveloped countries is not just growth but development. Development is growth plus change. Change in turn is social and culture as well as economic, and qualitative as well as quantitative. The key concept must be improved quality of people’s life.

 

The International Development Strategy proclaimed on October 24, 1970 called for a global strategy based on joint and concentrated action in all spheres of economic and social life. Simultaneously, UN also resolved for establishing a project for the identification of a unified approach to development and planning which would fully integrate the economic and social components in the formulation of policies and programs. This would include components designed –

(a)     To leave no sector of the population outside the scope of change and development.

(b)    To effect structural change favoring national development and to activate all sectors of the population to participate in the development process.

(c)     To aim the social equity; particularly equitable distribution of income and wealth

(d)    Give high priority to the development of human potentials-

 

This unified approach evolved in fact in the opposite direction: - dispersion –Consequently major problems like environment, population, hunger, women, habitat etc. were brought to the forefront.

 

This essay is an invitation to celebrate and call for a potential action. As the Brundtland Report (1972) puts it-Poverty reduces people capacity to use resources in a sustainable manner, it intensifies pressure on environment. A necessary but not sufficient condition for the elimination of absolute poverty is a relatively rapid rise in per capita income in the Third World. Thus; a way was cleared for the marriage between the environment and development No development without sustainability and no sustainability without development.

 

In the history of environment June 1972 is an   important date. On this date environment arrived on the international agenda- UN conference on the human environment held at Stockholm expressed its concern on acid rain and pollution in the Baltic; increasing levels of pesticides in fish. This UN conference was in fact a prelude to a series of UN meetings on environment and other associated issues like population, food, human settlement etc. A new global debate started. This debate centered around infinite growth, rapid industrialization and concern for ecosystem. Above all, mechanism to strike a equilibrium between them gradually emerged. In 1987, the Brundtland report- finally announced craving for development Vis a Vis environment. In addition to continued growth, capital formation, skilled manpower, long term availability of natural resources was also thought off- Thus leading to the emergence of a new concept “sustainable development”. Sustainable development has been defined in many ways, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report:¹

 

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

·        The concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

·        The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs."

 

All definitions of sustainable development require that we see the world as a system a system that connects space; and a system that connects time.

 

When we think of the world as a system over space, we grow to understand that air pollution from North America affects air quality in Asia, and that pesticides sprayed in Argentina could harm fish stocks off the coast of Australia. And when we think of the world as a system over time, we start to realize that the decisions our grandparents made about how to farm the land continue to affect agricultural practice today; and the economic policies we endorse today will have an impact on urban poverty when our children are adults.

 

We also understand that quality of life is a system, too. It's good to be physically healthy, but what if you are poor and don't have access to education? It's good to have a secure income, but what if the air in your part of the world is unclean? And it's good to have freedom of religious expression, but what if you can't feed your family?

 

The concept of sustainable development is rooted in this sort of systems thinking. It helps us understand ourselves and our world. The problems we face are complex and serious—and we can't address them in the same way we created them. But we can certainly make efforts to address them.

 

To quote Gifford Pinchot – the steward of Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation programme after 1900 “conservation means the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time”

 

Brundtland Report incorporated concern for the environment into the concept of development by erecting sustainable development as a conceptual roof for both violating and healing the environment.

 

I am reminded of a statement by Karl Marx—“ Every society as a whole, a nation, or all existing societies put together, are not owners of the earth. They are merely its occupants, its users and like good caretakers they must hand it down improved to subsequent generations” (Marx: Capital, Vol.I)

 

This statement literally brings us to the core of the environmental issues. Environmental issues in the present scenario speak to the goals of Liberation Ecologies in a very important manner- they are very much the object of study for a field of political ecology that seeks to understand the complex relations between nature and society through careful analysis of social forms access and control over resources –with all their implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods. Honestly speaking the road from Stockholm to Rio is littered with new ecological problems and different ecological politics.  The question that comes to us is how to attain environmental sustainability in the present scenario. We have to delve on five parameters:

·        Disasters of natural and human origin, management and prevention

·        Involvement of local communities in developing responses

·        Implications for  sustainable social development

·        Protecting the physical environment

·        Proactive engagement with social, human and ecological development

 

REFERENCES:

(1)     Paul N.Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York, Monthly Review Press,1957

(2)     W.W.Rostow,The Stages of Economic Growth; A non Communist Manifesto, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960

(3)     Ibid

(4)     United Nations, UN Development Decade: Proposals for Actions –New York UN 1962

(5)     Wolfgang Sachs-Environment: The Development Dictionary, ZED Books Ltd., New Jersey, 1992.

(6)     http://www.unep.org/civil_society/GCSF8/pdfs/gender_susdev.pdf

(7)     W.Arthur Levi’s-The Theory of Economic Growth, Homewood, lll Richard D. Irwin, 1955