Sustainable development is a shared goal for the planet that aims not only at generating economic growth, but to distribute its benefits equitably. It seeks to regenerate the environment rather than destroying it, to empower people rather than marginalizing them. It is development that gives priority to the poor, enlarging their choices and opportunities.
Since its inception, most iterations of the sustainable development concept have combined two big ideas: first, that the global economy as it operated in the postwar era was socially unjust, in particular for the world’s poor; and second, that the global economy threatened to outstrip ecological limits, mainly due to the patterns of consumption in the rich world.
The term sustainable development came into vogue in 1987 with the publication of Our Common Future , a report issued for the UN by the Brundtland Commission (named for its chair, Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland). Its definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” became the archetypal expression of the concept.
McNeill, J. R.. The Great Acceleration (p. 153). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
For development, modernization, and increased living standards in resource-rich developing countries to actually be sustainable, new forms of drawing income from the land need to be found that are not damaging to threatened ecosystems (such “slash and burn’ techniques to transform rain forests into agricultural land). E.O. Wilson describes biodiversity as a potential source for immense material wealth” and calls for “giving the invisible hand of free-market economics a green thumb,” in the form of a “new environmentalism”in which there is no longer “an ideological war” between conservationists and developers.