Ensuring Sustainable Prosperity
The Worldwatch Institute in its latest release State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity, which is the 29th in a series that Worldwatch began in 1984, stresses that we must act quickly to redefine our understanding of the “good life” and redouble our efforts to make that life sustainable. It further observes that over the last five decades, the world’s middle and upper classes have more than doubled their consumption levels, and an additional 1 to 2 billion people globally aspire to join the consumer class. The planet cannot maintain such increases in resource demand without serious consequences for both people and ecosystems.
Worldwatch Senior Researcher Michael Renner, co-director of State of the World 2012, says, “The Industrial Revolution gave birth to an economic growth model rooted in structures, behaviors, and activities that are patently unsustainable. Mounting ecosystem stress and resource pressures are accompanied by increased economic volatility, growing inequality, and social vulnerability.It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the economy no longer works for either people or the planet.”
Instead, we need to reprioritize basic needs and pursue true sustainable prosperity: development that allows all human beings to live with their fundamental needs met, with their dignity acknowledged, and with abundant opportunity to pursue lives of satisfaction and happiness, all without risk of denying others in the present and the future the ability to do the same. This, in turn, means not just preventing further degradation of Earth’s systems, but actively restoring them to full health.
