Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
Bank Cities and Climate Change Report 2010,
the UNEP 2010 Green Economy report, the UN
Habitat State of Cities Report 2008, the 2010
State of the World report by the Worldwatch
Institute for example “Transforming Cultures
– From Consumerism to Sustainability”, or
national level studies such as South Africa’s
Environmental Outlook’ in 2007 , to name
a few, all return the same message - that
we are mining our natural capital, that we
are compromising the future functioning of
natural systems and that we are putting more
and more people into vulnerable positions of
compromised health, wellbeing and livelihoods
.
In 2006 the World Conservation Union’s
(IUCN) ‘renowned thinkers group’ stated that
“Evidence is that the global human enterprise
is rapidly becoming less sustainable, not
more”.
By all accounts then the planet is in a growing
ecological deficit and we absolutely need new
approaches, we need to be changing course,
changing mindsets, and changing measures.
As so eloquently expressed by Kofi Annan,
then Secretary of the UN at the 2002 World
Summit on Sustainable Development, ”…
and let us face an uncomfortable truth: the
model of development we are accustomed
to had been fruitful for the few, but flawed for
the many. A path to prosperity that ravages
the environment and leaves the majority of
humankind behind in squalor will soon prove to
be a dead-end road for everyone.” (as quoted
in King, 2009: 1)
American author and environmental activist
Derrick Jensen states that the fundamental
truth of our time is that our dominant western
culture is killing the planet. Further he
maintains that we can quibble all we want –
about whether it is killing the planet or merely
causing one of the six or seven greatest mass
extinctions in the past several billion years, but
no reasonable person can argue that industrial
civilization is not grievously injuring life on
Earth (Jensen, 2010).
What then, is the ultimate goal of striving for
‘sustainable development’ It must surely be
human wellbeing, because it is only when the
majority of people alive at any point in time
are satisfied with their lot, that the planet will
be adequately taken care of and will in turn,
provide adequate underpinning ecosystem
services for humankind.
Changes in worldviews, institutions and
technologies will be necessary not only to
achieve lifestyles that are better adapted to
today’s ‘full world’ context (Costanza et al.,
2010) but to achieve life and survivability for
many. Adam Kahane expands on this idea of
a full world and states that “the fullness of our
world produces a threefold complexity. We can
pretend that we are independent and that what
we do does not affect others (and what others
do does not affect us), but this is not true.
We can pretend that everybody see things
the same way, or that our differences can be
resolved purely through market or political or
legal competition, but this is not true. And we
can pretend that we can do things the way we
always have, or that we can first figure out and
then execute the correct answer, but this is not
true (Kahane, 2010:5).
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