Contents | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up
From: Priscila Soria
Date: 8/8/01
Time: 9:36:24 AM
Remote Name: 148.221.239.88
Hola!! ¿cómo están? Espero que hiperbien. Me llamo Priscila, soy mexicana y me encanta nadar, ir al cine y leer novelas policiacas. Me parece excelente que tengamos este foro de discusión, así podremos compartir ideas y conocernos mejor. Gracias al foro ya se un poco de Elena y Mari, seguimos en contacto O.K.? Les envío un fragmento de un artículo que leí. ¿Qué opinan?
Reconciling Ecological, Social & Economic Imperatives
Recent debate on sustainability challenges us to harmonize or reconcile human welfare with a world of finite resources and a limited capacity to support a human population. There is little agreement, however, on either the feasibility or the means to achieve this reconciliation. To many environmentalists, especially in the North, the concept of "sustainable development" derived from the Brundtland Report (1986) seemed to be giving a veneer of respectability to a process of continued rapid economic growth which was fundamentally unsustainable. Conversely to many economists, especially in the South, Brundtland seemed to be imposing an unacceptable environmental brake on growth which would inhibit efforts to improve social conditions, and especially to reduce poverty.
A major obstacle to developing a common conceptual framework for ecological, economic and social problems is that there is little consensus among experts in each discipline on how the ecological, economic and social systems relate to one another.
The framework developed at SDRI (Sustainable Development Research Institute) suggests that it is fruitful to consider the biosphere, the market and human society as three interacting "prime systems", each conceptually equal to the others in that each has an equivalent primacy and importance. The three prime systems share a number of common characteristics including self-organization, a divisibility into spatial and sectoral subsystems, increasing globalization, and analogous responses to stress.
The proposed conceptual framework builds on the concept of sustainable development by expressing it as the reconciliation of three imperatives, defined as:
The ecological imperative is to remain within planetary bio-physical carrying capacity. The economic imperative is to ensure and maintain adequate material standards of living. The social imperative is to provide social structures, including systems of governance, that effectively propagate and sustain the values that people wish to live by. There is a growing realization that we are increasingly failing to satisfy any one of these imperatives, let alone all three simultaneously.
http://www.sdri.ubc.ca/ Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia