PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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The earliest meaning of sustain is to “support,” “uphold the course of” or “keep into
being.” What corporate chief, treasury minister, or international civil servant would
not embrace this meaning? Another meaning is “to provide with food and drink, or the
necessities of life.” What underpaid urban worker or landless peasant would not accept
this meaning? Still another definition is “to endure without giving way or yielding.”
What small farmer or entrepreneur does not resist “yielding” to the expansionary
impulses of big capital and the state, and thereby take pride in “enduring”?
(O'Connor 1994:152, as quoted in Pezzoli 1997:549)
Beyond being an increasingly (ab)used, “fuzzy” term (Markusen 1999), the
concept of sustainability is closely related to the evolution of environmental debates and
the environmental movement from the 1960s onward. Whereas the 1960s and the 1970s
were initially only dominated by a growing concern over pollution issues, more profound
critiques of the way in which conventional growth strategies exploited and often
destroyed global environmental resources eventually came to the fore. The most famous
account of the growing uneasiness among scientists is the Club of Rome report The
Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers et al. 1972). In many ways, the sustainability
concept as it was developed in the 1980s provided an answer to the Club of Rome’s
limits-to-growth argument in that sustainability inherently assumed that continuing
economic growth was compatible with environmental protection. It thus broke the
perception that environmental protection could only be achieved ‘at the expense of
economic development,’ instead re-defining the two as interdependent and mutually
reinforcing (Baker, Kousis et al. 1997:3).
The best-known definition of sustainable development was put forward by the UN
World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 in the so-called
Brundtland report (whose official title is Our Common Future). This report strongly
influenced the future global environmental agenda, favoring a sustainability definition