The Quest for Sustainable Development

It was not until the late 1960s and the early 1970s that the “environment” became a significant element on the political agenda in developed nations. This was largely a response not only to the spectacular growth of the Western economies, but also to the continued extensive industrialization of the rest of the world. The phrase “sustainable development” was firstly popularized by the World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED, 1987). Since that time, much attention for defining “sustainable development” has been given by the worldwide environmentalists and economists. For example, Pearce et al. (1988, p. 6) state “We can summarize the necessary conditions for sustainable development as constancy of the natural capital stock; more strictly, the requirement for non-negative changes in the stock of natural resources, such as soil and soil quality, ground and surface water and their quality, land biomass, water biomass, and the waste-assimilation capacity of the receiving environments”. Another example cited by Solow (1991) from an UNESCO document is as “… every generation should leave water, air and soil resources as pure and unpolluted as when it came on earth”. The above two passages involve a category mistake being to identify the determinants of well-being with the constituents of well-being (for example, welfare, freedom, and so on), as sustainable development is defined as an impossible goal by these authors.