By Serge-Paul Carrasco on September 10, 2014

The Age of Sustainable Development

(E) Professor Jeffrey Sachs has started a class on Coursera about Sustainable Development. This is a very important topic that everyone must study. At least, please watch the videos if you do not have enough time to study all the materials.

We do not have many years left to put the world on a path toward sustainable development. Rising world population, ever growing demands of goods and services, destruction of the earth ecosystems and resources, and climate change are some major challenges for our global human society. The sooner we face the reality of every one of those challenges, the sooner we can take the path to commit to their solutions. And, the sooner the human civilization can continue to flourish but definitely not in the same way.

Since the industrial revolution, our pursuit of economic growth, consumption and wealth have led us to take advantage of the Earth resources and ecosystems as if they were inexhaustible. We have depleted the Earth resources for water, food, land, wood, energy and raw materials as we did not realize that we had only ONE PLANET. And, the scale of the human activity is so overwhelming and so ubiquitous that it does not give any home for any other species on our Blue Planet. We have been harvesting the Earth resources and ecosystems at a much faster rate than they can regenerate and kill the other species at a much faster rate than they can reproduce. We have simply reached a point where the Earth cannot give us anymore what we need for our on-going well-being.

So what to do? Learn, think and act!

Reference
A Silicon Valley Insider, The Road to an Unsustainable Economic Development for 2010 and Beyond

Note: The picture above is a New Zealand Christmas Tee – Metrosideros Excelsa – from the San Francisco botanical garden.