It’s Time for a Supranational Sustainable Development Authority
The ingenuity of man that lead to the unprecedented global development of the twentieth century would certainly not have been possible without the earth’s rich natural resources. In this century, Earth has endured a population explosion, yet still has the agricultural capacity to nourish a global population of over six million people. At the same time, the quality-of-life in industrialized nations is perceived to have risen in tandem with the availability and affordability of mass-produced consumer products made possible by the resourceful use of raw materials and energy. Many trumpet this situation that man has created, and urge further industrial growth in the developing countries of the world.
Others are alarmed by these developments. They peer into the future and see population growth exceeding agricultural capacity, enlarged urban centers that provide neither the infrastructure nor the social support necessary for millions of people to coexist in such little space, increased mass-production of consumer goods leading to worsening pollution problems, and urban sprawl that encroaches upon fragile ecosystems.
Quite often, these two sides appear to face each other with opposing prescriptions for future world development. The former argues for environmental protection and creation of a stable ecosystem; the latter supports jobs and increased development of Third World countries. Yet this false dichotomy between jobs and the environment need not exist. The key is promotion of worldwide sustainable development, or development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations,” as defined by the Worl...
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As small mobile groups of hunter-gatherers adopted a sedentary lifestyle, they mastered both agriculture and animal domestication. These small settled groups quickly evolved into cities and towns that encompassed the entire globe. Today the estimated population of the world is over 6.2 million people.1 As the population has grown, it has had several deleterious effects on the Earth. These include climate changes, the spread of diseases, declining food production, deforestation, and environment pollution (particularly air pollution). As people have become more conscious of these harmful effects, they have begun to devise strategies to combat this problem. Among the suggested responses include a switch to renewable energy, a call for zero population growth, and adopting sustainable agricultural practices.
Life is a wheel rolling inexorably forward through the temporal realm of existence. There are those that succumb to its motion and there are a certain few, like Christ and Napoleon, who temporarily grasp the wheel and shape all life around them. "Normal" people accept their positions in life and are bound by law and morality. Extraordinary people, on the other hand, supersede the law and forge the direction and progress of society. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is the story of a group of people caught beneath the wheel and their different reactions to their predicament. One individual, Raskolnikov, refuses to acknowledge the bare fact of his mediocrity. In order to prove that he is extraordinary, he kills two innocent people. This despicable action does not bring him glory or prove his superiority, but leads to both his physical, mental, and spiritual destruction. After much inner turmoil and suffering, he discovers that when a person transgresses the boundaries of morality and detaches himself from the rest of humanity, faith in God and faith in others is the only path to redemption.
The Roman Empire was the most powerful Empire during Antiquity. It is traditionally considered to have “fallen” in 476, when Rome’s last emperor was deposed. Many theories have been presented as to why it fell, from unsound economic and social policies to mass lead poisoning. The actual cause of Rome’s fall is the result of many factors, but was mainly caused by Rome’s poor economic policies.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a nineteenth century literary work that delves into the world of science and the plausible outcomes of morally insensitive technological research. Although the novel brings to the forefront several issues about knowledge and sublime nature, the novel mostly explores the psychological and physical journey of two complex characters. While each character exhibits several interesting traits that range from passive and contemplative to rash and impulsive, their most attractive quality is their monstrosity. Their monstrosities, however, differ in the way each of the character’s act and respond to their environment. Throughout Frankenstein, one assumes that Frankenstein’s creation is the true monster. While the creation’s actions are indeed monstrous, one must also realize that his creator, Victor Frankenstein is also a villain. His inconsiderate and selfish acts as well as his passion for science result in the death of his friend and family members and ultimately in his own demise.
In Frankenstein, Shelley creates two very complex characters. They embody the moral dilemmas that arise from the corruption and disturbance of the natural order of the world. When Victor Frankenstein is attending school, he becomes infatuated with creating a living being and starts stealing body parts from morgues around the university. After many months of hard work, he finishes one stormy night bringing his creation to life. However, “now that [Victor] had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart” (Chambers). Right after Victor realizes what he has done, he falls into deep depression and must be nursed back to health by his friend. Victor spends the rest of the story facing consequences and moral problems from creating unnatural life. When he realizes that the ‘monster’ has killed his brother, even though no one believes him, he feels responsible for his brother’s murder because he was responsible for the existence of the ‘monster’. Also feeling responsible, Victor...
The world is facing issues of overwhelming complexity and urgency. The challenge is to think globally and develop policies to counteract environmental decline and environmental collapse. Brown illustrates the economic future through an environmental perspective to develop a plan that will sustain civilization. Throughout the book, he concentrates on four major components that will head the world towards a brighter future. These include a massive cut in global carbon emissions, the stabilization of world population, the decrease of poverty, and the restoration of our planet’s diverse natural landscape. Brown presents the reader with very accurate arguments in World on the Edge however; he also makes some weak points that may not be the best plan to save the planet.
Seabury, Marcia Bundy. "The Monsters We Create: Woman on the Edge of Time and Frankenstein." Critique 42.2 (Winter 2001): 131-143. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 133. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.
Stephen Hawking had a troubling early life. Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 (Ferguson 21). He lived in Highgate but had to move to Oxford because London was under attack (Wikipedia.org). In 1950, his father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research (Wikipedia.org). As a result, Hawking and his family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire (Wikipedia.org). Hawking attended St. Albans High School for Girls for a few years as younger boys were allowed to do ...
Still today inequality of income and power means that almost 870 million people are chronically undernourished, and more than a billion people live below the poverty line. If current growth trends continue the planetary boundaries will be reached and this will cause rapid environmental change. This will be devastating for people living in poverty who depend upon natural resources as a livelihood. It is possible to change the current trends so that every person has a social foundation and live within the planetary boundaries. I will discuss what the Anthropocene is and what ecological and environmental effects it has. I will show you how through sustainable development we can both eradicate poverty and do this within our planet’s boundaries.
Humans have become a threat to our own way of life by consuming more resources than needed, blind to the consequences that we may face in the future. As of 2016 the world population is at 7.4 billion and it is estimated to be at 11.2 billion by the year 2100. However 10 billion is the maximum population that can be sustained in terms of food security, only one of the many factors to global sustainability. Due to the fact that human consumption exceeds the amount of resources available, the United Nations “recognizes that eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge” in A/RES/70/1. Sustainable development is not only required to fulfill the necessities of the present but to guarantee the capability for future generations to satisfy theirs.
The demands of increasing population magnify demands for natural resources, clean air and water, as well as access to wilderness areas. In the future, when there are not enough resources to go around, we will see significant scarcity, and a backlash of poverty. A number of problems lie behind scarcity and poverty. Ultimately, our own numbers, and the lifestyles many of us choose to live, drive all the critical issues we confront. Left unchecked, the combination of population growth and consumption- along with increasing inequity between rich and poor individuals and nations-will soon threaten not only the well-being, but even the lives of a majority of people on this planet.
Oxford University in 1804, where he spent his time developing his idealism and controversial philosophies, and exploring the topic of Atheism. He was expelled from school for expressing these ideas, and was shunned by his father. Shelley continued to write poetry and take part in various political reform activities, and met Mary Godwin, a friend’s daughter, whom he fell in love with. They married in 1816, and moved to Italy in 1818 where they lived with their children. Shelley’s life began to take a turn when a year later, his son William died, as did his daughter Clara. His wife had a nervous breakdown, and Shelley himself was plagued by illness, struck by rumors of illegitimate children, and had many failures of his political hopes (“Shelley, Percy Bysshe”). Shelley wrote ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in 1820, several months after the death of his son. He wrote it while in Florence, home of Dante Alighieri, who wrote the famous Divine Comedy. This ode is Shelley’s calling for revolution and change, addressed to the powerful West Wind. ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is part of a work of Shelley’s entitled “Prometheus Unbound”. Like Prometheus, Shelley hopes that his fire, a reformist philosophy, will enlighten humanity and will free it from ignorant imprisonment (Lancashire). In this epic metaphor, Shelley expresses his idea brilliantly with vivid uses of symbolism, immense use of figurative language, and stable structure. Shelley makes it clear that the speaker of the poem is himself by using first person, and sets up the poem to be like an apostrophe, speaking directly to the wind, even though it may or may not be listening. He also creates a very personal tone, w...
In two works by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, both works regard the imagination as vitally important. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination (or rather, the lack of it) condemns the Mariner to a kind of hell, with the fiends of sterility, solitude, and loneliness: “’God save thee, Ancient Mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross’”. In Kubla Khan, the imagination of an external being, the narrator that Coleridge created, the ideal critic, can create a masterpiece that far outstrips the meager piece of work that even the emperor of a huge, rich civilization can produce: “I would build that dome in air, a sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!” In Kubla Khan, the imagination can even make people fear an otherwise inconsequential event, sequence, or organism.
Coleridge successfully illustrates the qualities of imagination in his poem, Kubla Khan, through the sound of words, the creative content and his ability to create and recreate. Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that are suspended in the reader’s mind. Coleridge uses creative powers to establish the infinite I AM, a quality of the primary imagination. Coleridge mirrors his primary and secondary imagination in the poem by taking apart and recreating images. The qualities of imagination discussed in the poem exist independently but also work together to create an imaginative world. It is important to understand how the poem works to achieve these qualities, but also how the poem works to bring the reader back to reality. The powers and qualities of imagination are present in Kubla Khan and it is through Coleridge’s extraordinary writing that the reader is able to experience an imaginative world, in which we alternate between reality and imagination.
In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge expresses his desire to use the inspirations from nature to create his own “Paradise” of poetry (54, p.1634). In the first stanza, Coleridge creates an exotic oriental garden, where the trees, gardens, hills, and the “Alph” river, together present the beauty of Mother Nature (3, p.1633). Here, the poet carefully observes his surroundings, as the nature will serve as the source of inspiration for his poetry. The “pleasure dome” (2, p.1633) in line two has two functions, one representing the creation of human beings on earth, and the other being the foundation of Coleridge’s poetic paradise. As the clash between nature and humans takes place in the second stanza with a “woman wailing for her demon-lover” (16, p.1633) the poet calls upon nature for his inspiration, represented by the powerful activity of nature. The energy of nature is released in forms of “a might fountain” (19, p.1633), “rebounding hail” (21, p.1633), or “dancing rocks” (23, p.1633) and eventually the natural disasters will accompanied by man-made destruction as “Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war” (29-30, p.1634)! Coleridge on one hand reinforces that man and nature are inseparable and one the other uses the energy of nature to represent the spontaneous spurring of emotions in the poet’s mind.