The Challenges of Sustainable Development

The challenges of sustainable development

Author:

Jordi Badia Pascual

jo************@gm***.com

Formation:

• Architecture and urbanism – UPC
• Sustainable development – UNESCO Chair – UPC
• Trainer of ecological communities – Findhorn Foundation – UOC
• Cooperative economy – IGOP – UAB

Summary:

1. On the concept of development 2
2. Inner growth and welfare societies 3
3. Evolution and sustainability 4
4. Trust and the future 6
5. Social challenges 8
6. Environmental challenges 13
7. Foresight and future scenarios 16
8. The ecological footprint and carrying capacity 19
9. Where nature and culture meet… 22
10. Proposals for development paths 25
11. Bibliography 28

Keywords:

• Development concept
• Sustainability
• Prospective
• Ecological footprint
• Charge capacity
• Coherent cognitive capacity
• Development concept
• Sustainability
• Futurology
• Ecological footprint
• Load capacity
• Coherent cognitive ability

Summary:

Based on the updated information on the state of the world, both socially and environmentally, and foresight work, work paths are proposed to face the ecosystem future and in solidarity.

1 – On the concept of development.

The concept of development is anthropological, does not exist outside of human culture, and therefore differs from the concept of natural evolution.

Development is voluntary there must be the will to develop. Although as social beings we humans are, this will may only exist in one, or in a few, in the group, while the rest of the group simply follows the inertia of changes without knowing, or powering, acting on them.

Personal development and social development are the two pendulum extremes that feed each other throughout history, like a great spiral, moving from the growth in consciousness of the prehistoric tribes to the social development of the first cities, or the personal development exemplified in the Renaissance humanism that would later give rise to the social development of the republics and parliamentary democracies.

These "steps" in the development that society has been experiencing: abolishing slavery, providing the normal school for all children, etc … they correspond to degrees of consciousness of the human collective: That is, there are countries where the death penalty is still "legal". We can understand it as social regions where the collective has not yet matured its consciousness about life and death, about crime and ignorance, (they have not yet read Socrates…). But there are many countries where this issue has long been clear to the vast majority of citizens. This is one more example between personal development and social development, personal awareness eventually leads to collective awareness.

Moreover, whatever level of personal development we are each individually in, we are able to understand the lower degrees but hardly the higher ones, and only with the will to keep an open mind are we able to trust the reality of these higher levels of consciousness. I'm not talking about anything mystical or spiritual (or is it? ), I simply mean how many times we have encountered deplorable attitudes littering nature with bottles of water, with cigarettes or with branches broken gratuitously by people like us, but unable to understand the message of respect for nature that we receive every day on television, in the press or at school.

In any society all types are mixed in different proportions, and only when a critical mass is able to establish itself as a catalyst for change does it appear. However, the "development" defined from the West clashes head-on with the harmony of life in the tropical tribes, in the islands of the South Pacific, in what remains of the Native Americans… What is the use then of having a concept? If "development" is not applicable to all forms of the human species?

2 – Inner growth and welfare societies

At this stage of "development" we are in a temporary space of inner growth, and of permanent social revolution, we are reformulating the formation of the person through holistic knowledge of various fields of knowledge, and we are visualizing the possibility of organizing the world through civil society, people in the West practice sports in nature, takes care of their diet, integral health, body and their experiential capacities, deepens in transcendental knowledge under multiple forms of meditation, and militates cyberactively through Facebook or aimed at some O.N.G. in developed countries …

In developed countries, and in the well-established families of the less developed, the new generations are multi-forming with much more complex methodologies than just 20 years ago. The children of the future, in addition to practicing various sports, multiple musical instruments, or harvesting several university careers, will be super-connected with several languages through an affordable internet in any corner.

In a short time one more degree of this human development will have been given to face the next step of collective social development. That obviously will happen to overcome the current representative democracies, distant, gray not to say dark and with deep gaps of manipulation of information.

But perhaps this level of social change is already beginning to occur in the regions with the greatest critical mass of consciousness:

In recent years there have been important changes in the political direction of the planet, apparently competitive countries with personal development ideology such as Brazil or the United States have elected socializing presidents such as Luis Ignacio Lula or Barack Obama, while strictly socialized countries such as China undertake programs of free trade and free personal development.

Nor do I know if the cause of wars and the extreme poverty of the landless has weighed more, or if the multiple anti-war, anti-WTO, world bank, etc. demonstrations … They are bearing fruit thanks to hundreds, even thousands, of social activists engaged in everyday life to visualize change.

Obviously, there is a risk that this level of development will be unbalanced between the different regions of the planet. If this occurs only in Western countries, in the "spaces of well-being" forgetting Africa, South America, most Islamic countries or the fourth world inside the European and North American macrocities, we will simply be increasing the internal tension in each of the inhabitants of the world, and ultimately the increase of violent conflicts.

This remains the great challenge; A development in privileged sectors of humanity will not bring people closer together but will distance them. And sustainability for future generations will continue to be questioned. (Unless the users of this term are thinking only of the sustainability of "some" future generations located in the privileged regions at the expense of the other future generations in the plundered regions.)

At this point of visualization of possible scenarios, complementary in social and personal development in a holistic way, we must consider the vision of all this from an even more distant, even more interplanetary position. If the future of human development has good expectations, what happens with the rest of the environment, with non-anthropogenic space, with the environment, the planet, the earth, space, the moon …

3 – Evolution and sustainability

Development is still the humanized (I would say psychotic) concept of evolution in nature. But this does not follow the same stressful rhythm of humanity, in fact they are not comparable visions, from our historical point of view nature is very sustainable, but it does not develop …

The planet went from being an incandescent ball to having water, atmosphere, to contain life, and to develop multiple ecosystems according to the basic parameters of temperature and humidity variable between day and night, between summer and winter, between the vicinity of water or the desert …

And indeed this is a great evolution perhaps we could even speak of development from the moment that from an accumulation of minerals and energy life is produced and a variety of forms still unclassified by us.

The creation of fertile soil or biological processes for water cleaning for example are important milestones in this development, which is sustainable because it is created and recreated cyclically, and lasts over time. Although we do not know if there is anywhere the consciousness of this, on the part of the planet in the personified form of Gaia, or in the different living beings that "parasitize" her…

In any case, the "developments" that humanity has been "raising" throughout history have never and in any political form been compatible with the evolution of the planet, except perhaps the tribes of the tropical and equatorial forest of the Amazon, central Africa or the islands of Indonesia.

To humanity the degrees of awareness about slavery, equality, legality, fraternity, or the others that we can describe have been referred to itself and only in the last 100 years we begin to have collective awareness of the rest of beings and the planet, at the beginning of a personal way and since the last 30 in some groups although still very minority.

It is no coincidence that there is more and more information about the environment, we are waking up to it, and today's schoolchildren are re-educating their parents in this facet. Nature remains the best teacher about the health processes that all animals have unconsciously preserved better than we have. As well as ecosystems are the best teachers on the cyclical processes of generating resources in a sustainable way.

We understand sustainability as the ability to live our lives in a way that does not undermine the possibilities for future generations to live their lives with the same abilities we currently enjoy. We are implicitly defining a standard of living for future generations (all of them), at least equal to ours today.

However, we know on the one hand that the capacities for intellectual formation and intercultural transmission will not stop increasing, and at the same time that natural resources such as oil or natural gas exchanges, or the area of arable land have a finite limit.

The earth evolves sustainably, humanity develops unsustainably.

4 – Trust and the future

The doctrine of development is for capitalist ideology, it is the ability to live with all luxury of services around it, the good life is perpetual leisure and fun with minimal or no effort, this was already exemplified in the Roman Empire, where Roman families of lineage had free bread and circuses guaranteed, but at the expense of slaves and the desertification of North Africa in what is now the Sahara.

While for the social classes with few resources, or for socialist and communist ideologies, development means social equality in opportunities to solve the basic needs of health, food, housing, education and security.

But none of these visions of development explicitly contemplates knowing where the goods and resources that are to cover neither basic needs nor luxury arise.

And in fact the ideologues first set out to show that they are the best rhetorically, instead of seriously analyzing the problem and starting to solve it, It is more the competition between ideologies than the problem of sustainability itself.

This is therefore an unconscious development, unaware of the natural cycle necessary to generate the raw materials and fruits of the earth, and ultimately the richness of development. In reality, both developments stem from the confidence that the future will be better than the present. It is not that there is a direct equation to know the future, but it is proven that applying education, technology, security among other factors to a cultural region the next generation will have more facilities to meet their needs, both basic for the poorest and luxury for the upper classes.

In fact mental-intellectual concept of "Development" only appears in the industrial epoch, -in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance the processes are so slow that the idea of development does not yet exist, partly also because a development independent of natural evolution granted by the supreme god is not admissible-, and therefore development seems to be sustained only by the processes of industrial production, forgetting that this is also based on the generation of natural resources, exactly the same as those that already existed in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.

The process of the development of human societies has also been endowed with a no less curious system to make it possible for natural resources, goods produced, or services to be exchanged between people: the economic-financial system, of which, I must add, there is not a single and universal one, since the rules of the value of things in the West are different from the Islamic countries or the tribes of the Amazon, for example, In some there are interests and in others there are not, in some money itself has a price and in others it is only a measure, in some barter is the basis of the system and in others the services of creating children or maintaining the family has no value …

Basically, I am interested in noting that the economic system should be the rule for measuring the value of things, products, services, etc. so that people could exchange the fruit of their labor, but this is not really the case since the value of a fruit, a mineral for steel, or an hour of labor, inexplicably varies over time, varies according to the interests of the banks, varies according to the country of origin, varies according to what an insatiable society wishes to pay, And if it varies it is no longer the rule of anything.

The value of a product of the land, such as a fruit, the rice harvest, or the hours of labor of a laborer could easily correspond directly to the physical effort that people have employed in obtaining it, and in paying it we use the trust in that producer to pay in money what he asks us in exchange for his effort.

However, when a merchant, a distributor, or a trafficker puts a price on a commodity, trust is not in his personal work, which is comparatively very small, but in trust in the economic and financial system that should equate and regulate the value of things in order to develop in a balanced way within society.

Thus, trust in the direct producer is easy to observe and contrast in coexistence, while confidence in the market implies many more risks, due to lack of information, and the many and many examples of scams from the very center of the market.

5 – Social challenges

We then have two intellectually contradictory concepts: development, which in principle has no limits or end, and sustainability, which by definition is stable, has limits and works with cyclical processes in those models that we know inserted in nature.

If in the first paragraph we exposed the spiral evolution of individual and collective capacities, here I remind you that the human species is also torn between two pendulum extremes between the "political" approach of local organization.

There are proactive positions , which seek development ahead of unknowns, who trust people, who understand that they get out of problems by activating social forces, who see the "ecological revolution" and "ethical conscience" from freedom of action.

But there are parallel positions that prefer the security of the known, reactive conceptions propose the reduction of consumption or the return to ethical systems highly regulated by social consensus. Both positions are on the edge of the most current, and both are susceptible to be addressed from both the "right" and the "left". And they do fit into possible solutions of "human development and ecosystem stability that we are seeking.

Among all the endless list of human problems, some will have to be attacked from more proactive positions and other problems from more reactive positions. This is the debate in which many issues have already been encountered. For example, with positive discrimination in cases of gender violence, or in the allocation of university bacas for black population in countries with a white majority.

Human problems are directly related to human needs:

Materials and goods for a dignified life:

• Foods
• Access to safe water.
• Materials for the production of consumer goods, construction, etc.
• Access to clean energy sources.

Bless you

• Access to hygiene and health knowledge and therapies.
• Sport and enjoyment outdoors
• Ability to restore psychological balance
• Sanitation of the surrounding water.

Safety

• Access to secure tenure housing
• Access to participation in the governance mechanisms of society
• Disaster Safety
• Security from abuse by illegal organizations or individuals

Good social environment

• Access to education, cultural and vocational training
• Access to global communication
• Equality in the rights and responsibilities of the human community
• Ability to help or be in solidarity with others
• Capacity for social cohesion and mutual respect

And as a compendium of all this: opportunity to develop personally in what one wants, to be and to do

Going through the list we see on the one hand how many of them are covered in our societies, although not all or not at the level we would like. But rest assured that there are regions on the planet where none of them are available, not even one as simple and basic as food.

On the other hand we can also observe how most of them have a strong dependence on the services provided by the biodynamic systems of the planet: materials, food, water, or primary energy, disaster security, or even a complete education and training, are extracted or depend directly on the natural resources of the ecosystem. and therefore a large part of the challenges for human development are directly related to the natural environment.

Another of the great issues related to development from the social environment is the mechanism that we have equipped ourselves with to value this development, to value the goods that cover the needs, and the processes of exchange between production of goods and supply of needs, that is money and the economic-financial system.

This is a universal mechanism, money, which we use to measure development processes, but which does not serve us because it is full of errors. To begin with, money could not be a rule of measuring the value of things or services because we have money that varies its value depending on … the price that banks are willing to pay, the listing on the various stock exchanges, the human dissatisfaction in satisfying their thirst for consumption, and their induced needs.

Money could have a much more effective equivalent such as its correspondence in time, where one hour of work is the same for everyone, although it could have different socially agreed values regarding the level of responsibility or any other coherent ethical reference.

At the moment only the example of Islamic economies where speculation is not morally accepted, the invention of complementary currencies without interest in the network of global ecovillages, or the barter systems of the most isolated agricultural regions, or the ancestrally invariable consensual value of the jungle tribes, can give us clues about the way forward.

And in any case to assess the development according to the fiction of the numbers exposed by the banks, on the profitability of the return of the interest generated with it is not known what non-existent paper money, is an absurd entelechy, the result of childishly incapable minds not to say disturbed.

As we pointed out at the beginning of the previous chapter, sustainability refers to durability over time, and therefore somehow we must link the system of measuring the value of things to this durability over time. Perhaps this moment in which the banking system has demonstrated its fraudulent foundation would be the best time to start with it.

In this area we can welcome the existence of a universalist internationalist organization such as the UN or UNESCO, which could play this role of concentrator of global policies, although currently the operating statutes are hijacked by a few countries capable of manipulating and kidnapping the entire organization for their own points of view.

To

Millennium Development Goals indicators database:

http://millenniumindicators.un.org

And they are summarized in the following objectives:

Objective 1. Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger

Objective 2. Achieving universal primary education

Objective 3. Promoting gender equality and empowering women

Objective 4. Reduce under-5 mortality

Goal 5. Improving maternal health

Objective 6. Combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Goal 7. Ensuring environmental sustainability

Goal 8. Fostering a global partnership for development Thus UNESCO's work towards a balanced development of humanity is elaborated:

Among the 8 objectives, only one makes direct reference to sustainability and the environment, although many of them, referring to health, food, water or housing, are also linked to the ecosystem.

Looking specifically at point 7, on sustainability we see in its breakdown that it basically coincides with the points made by so many other environmental or social organizations, with this I want to record that there is indeed a certain consensus on the major problems, although for both the agenda and the process of attacking each of them may differ in importance or urgency.

Goal 7. Ensuring environmental sustainability

Target 9.
Incorporate the principles of sustainable development into national policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources

Indicators
25. Proportion of area covered by forests (FAO)
26. Relationship between protected areas for the maintenance of biodiversity and total area (UNEP-WCMC)
27. Energy use (equivalent in kilograms of oil) for $1,000 of gross domestic product (PPP) (OIE, World Bank)
.28 Per capita carbon dioxide emissions (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, United Nations Statistics Division) and consumption of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (ODP-tonnes) (UNEP-Secretariat of the Ozone Convention)
.29 Proportion of population using solid fuels (WHO)

Target 10.
Halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation

Indicators
30. Proportion of population with sustainable access to improved water sources in urban and rural areas (UNICEF-WHO)
31. Proportion of population with access to improved sanitation, urban and rural areas (UNICEF-WHO)

Target 11.
Have significantly improved the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers by 2020

Indicators
32. Proportion of households with access to secure tenure (United Nations-Habitat)

6 – Environmental challenges

* Millennium indicator data. http://mdgs.un.org/

The adjective sustainability is defined as the ability to live without undermining the ability of future generations to live under the same conditions as today. This concept appeared in the intellectual sphere in the 50s from the moment that such a large amount of toxins were detected in the environment that make it difficult for the natural cycles of germination, flowering and fruit to be fulfilled, both for plants, as well as for animals and human beings themselves.

Contemporaneously with this new word, the concept of ecological development appeared simultaneously, but it seems that one of those American presidents, specifically Richard Nixon ended up vetoing the use of ecological development in the United Nations itself, to maintain sustainable development, which as you can understand is nothing but an oxymoron always useful because it cannot have a clear meaning to explain the being in itself contradictory.

If in the human sphere we spoke of complementary and opposite typologies of attitude towards development, proactive or recessive, in the environment of the natural environment we also have two great concepts equally opposed and complementary. And that arise from the ecosystem conceptualization of the planet.

The planet is a great ecosystem and we would talk about the holistic management of the whole, of Gaia, of a capacity to hierarchically centralize the regions and their corresponding ecosystems with their respective sub-regions and sub-ecosystems up to the local level, and of minimum biotope. Or we are proposing that the planet is this harmonious set of a different lot of large or small ecosystems but each and every one of them with their "personality" and with their autonomous capacity for evolution interrelated equally with others of the same scale, capable of organizing the whole without it really existing organizationally.

To make a simple comparison we would be talking about entrusting to the UN the government of the world, formalized in the concept of Gaia. Or expect from associations. NGOs and other entities emerged within civil society in their respective regions and specialized issues, will be able to develop programs in coordination to feed, health, education to the entire planet as they are demonstrating in the day to day of Africa where governments shine for their misgovernment.

This globalization in management versus regionalization will be linked both to the reality of the absolutely different of each of the ecosystems and landscapes, -often coinciding with human cultures-, as well as with the delimitation of the spaces of power: state, region, city, neighborhood …

Thus remoteness with the techno-political control of global interaction will increasingly face proximity, neighborhood management, community management of the bioregion, interacting with the surrounding regions.

As with the conception of the proactive or reactive future, here we find different technological-social conceptions of facing the natural environment.

The super-eco-technified globalization, versus regionalization with the human management of proximity.

And just as in human space there will be issues that must be covered globally such as climate changes, and we have seen this with the Kyoto treaty, but food, food security, or good water status, must be collected in spaces corresponding to their specific ecosystems, river basins, mountain ranges, the great plains…

Regional environmental objectives:

• Increase in forest area and reduction in desert area, increase in fertile soil.
• Increase of protected areas for the increase of biodiversity.
• Healthy maintenance of water in any ecosystem.
• Production of materials, consumer goods, real estate and infrastructure in the form of a closed cycle. Recycling of degradable materials and biomaterials in the ecosystem without environmental toxics.

Global environmental objectives

• Elimination of the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone layer clearers.
• Reduction of generation of_CO2,_{NOx, SOx} and particles of heavy elements in suspension.
• Use of clean energy rationally.
• Reduction of artificial electromagnetic radiation to natural limits.
• Ethical-ecological rethinking of knowledge and use of genomes.
• Ethical-ecological approach to knowledge in quantum physics.

It is clear that both regional and global objectives interact with each other. The crucial difference will be in whom, or better, from what position the problem will be managed, if global management is imposed by imposing uniform criteria on small and delicate ecosystems, or if the assembly meeting of bioregions will be able to understand global interactions and assume local limitations for the sake of the common good.

7 – Foresight and future scenarios

Since the spectacular predictions of the 1972 Meadows^Report1, progress has been made in many ways, especially wide, though little in depth.

It is about crossing the graphs of evolution of the statistics of different basic indices such as population, food per capita, pollution, natural resources, industrial production.

In the evolution of these indices, certain turning points were inevitably reached – crises or social catastrophes – due to the feedback increase in pollution and lack of food, or the exponential increase in the population resulting in a general scarcity of natural resources.

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* Graphics: Denis Meadows. The limits of growth. Club of Rome 1972

Already in the '70s it was concluded that we would NOT reach points of collapse or catastrophe, only with a regularization of the human population together with clean and ecologically sustainable production strategies. However, these recommendations have not been followed at all.

Foresight has made clear to us the importance of interdisciplinary work and the complexity of interactions of ecosystems at their various planetary scales. But it has also served to discover that there are key indicators such as_CO2 or nitrates deposited in the soil that can, from a critical level, cause irreversible changes and natural disasters with uncontrollable repercussions.

The case of CO2, for example, is one of these examples that has exceeded the limit of urgency. Geological carbon cycles only affect many years, but we will only stop burning oil when it runs out. Fortunately we have entered the phase of depletion of this natural resource, there are few new fields to discover and the exploited ones are consumed quickly. In this case it turns out that the dose of CO2 discharged into the atmosphere is indigestible for the planet but we still have a lot of oil to burn. Knowing that all this is a problem now due to pollution and in a few years due to obsolete technology, we are not investing enough resources to switch to new clean technologies that would avoid the double crisis of pollution and lack of fuel.

* Graphic: Raphael Hanmbock: President of the Association of Friends of Nature Clubs (ACAN) of the Cameroon Climate Action Network (ANCC) and Aubrey Meyer is Director of the Global Commons Institute.

Mapping of agricultural areas with deposition of reactive nitrogen from the atmosphere.

In them we observe on the plane the future scenario due to the current use of agribusiness; Fertilizers and herbicides use nitrogen chemistry to interact with plants, but oil combustion also contributes to the dispersion of nitrogenous acids.

If in the 90s thousands of hectares in the Netherlands were closed to cultivation due to fertilizer contamination, this same process is developing in many of the Spanish provinces starting with Girona and its high concentration of pig farms, and nitrites expanded in the capos from the farms. But all this will probably only become apparent in 50 years' time.

* Graphics: www.millenniumassessment.org

8 – The ecological footprint and carrying capacity

For the knowledge of the limits that the earth can support, regarding the circular restitution of waste of all kinds generated by human civilization, we have devised the concept of ecological footprint of a human collective and the concept of carrying capacity that a territory can support as a regenerator of resources plundered from it plus waste in discharges.

For each type of ecosystem its level of carrying capacity will be different, lower for a desert, and much higher for a rainforest.

In the case of the ecological footprint, it depends on each of us individually what we spend valued in the form of a natural resource and this transformed into the surface necessary for its cultivation or regeneration. That is, we are not talking about hectares as an area without attributes of a country but of biologically active surface capable of producing food or regenerating CO2 into oxygen But inevitably our footprint depends on the social environment in which our surrounding culture is located, creating more or less consumerist and more or less sustainable habits.

The ratio between these two parameters gives us the sustainability of a particular human population in a particular ecological region.

* Graphics: www.worldmapper.org

For your information Spain moves around the position nº 20 with about 4.9 Hec / Hab on average, that is, there are citizens with much smaller footprint and others with a much larger footprint, surely you all know both cases.

With this value we define ourselves as more wasteful citizens than Germans, Russians or Japanese, while our country is on the edge of Africa growing desertification by giant steps.

It is also important to know that the overall ecological footprint currently exceeds the arable area.

It is considered that in 1986 there was a proportion of 1.8 hectares of fertile soil and managed forest, to sustain each of the inhabitants of the planet, but since this proportion has increased and we need more than 1.8 hectares per head, there is not so much fertile land available, and therefore we have gone on to consume non-regenerable resources, The "stocks" stored as oil oil, water or air.

* Graphics: Own elaboration. Jordi Badia Pascual

9 – Where nature and culture meet…

The urgent challenges for sustainability from my point of view is to change the "chip" of the vast majority of people so that they realize that on the planet live equally humans and all other beings of each and every one of the valleys, rivers, mountains, lakes, seas and islands. An inter-species democratization!

It's not as easy as writing it down. To realize it means to stop carrying out each and every one of the actions that have as a final consequence desertification, intoxication, radiation, or the alteration of the planetary climate. And it turns out that there are so many of our daily actions that actually contribute to some of these scourges. Using combustion vehicles, using non-biodegradable plastic bags, calling by mobile phone, using mercury batteries, using products that have been manufactured with solvents such as "porexpan", sprays, many synthetic paints, eating agribusiness foods that use synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, or eating meat from animals fed with transgenic soy … All these are actions that we execute not once but sometimes several times a day.

The awareness that our actions have an impact on the planet is complex enough to have to explain it again and again, especially from environmental groups, to the entire population, until it enters our hard heads….

But many times the population simply follows the dictates of the market, of what they find in the supermarket, or of what television sells them: the law of comfort. In these cases it is only possible to resolve it through legislation. That it restricts the continuous deception to which we are subjected, and that it demands accountability from those who have benefited economically from ecological disasters such as pollution of rivers and seas by industry.

Both issues: production and consumption can be reconsidered, and develop an efficient and recyclable feedback process to start talking about sustainability, although it is difficult to think about the recycling of corporations -automobile-oil-road infrastructure-, it is not impossible, and global technology can change in a few years towards a more rationalized transport.

But with this we would only save half of the problem (the problem generated by each individual towards the natural environment), since the other half (the problem of society as a whole and the system in which it is involved) is the need for displacement and transport due to the large concentration of population in desertified areas due to asphalt and cement. because of overexploitation, wars, lack of water, deforestation…

As we saw in the section on future scenarios reducing consumption and regulating production and therefore pollution, we still have a couple of pending issues, which has nothing to do with the "developmentalism" of the industrial era, but in the very process of evolution of the species as a parasite and predator of the planet.

The success of the human species is such that it can desertify the planet and therefore the great challenge is the rationalization of urban areas and population density to introduce the field and the forest in them, allow the garden to be close to housing, and therefore the fields and pastures of agribusiness give way to the regeneration of forests and these achieve such vigor. that they can recycle the deserts into the savannahs that were previously.

Map of global forest processes.

• Net loss of forest cover
• Current forest cover
• Net gain of forest mass

* Graphics: www.millenniumassessment.org

These global disasters as you will see are two sides of the same problem: Better living standards in the northern hemisphere generate deforestation in the southern hemisphere. Better education in the northern hemisphere generates migration and wars in the southern hemisphere…

World map with country areas related to forest loss

World map with the areas of the countries related to the ecological footprint

* Graphics: www.worldmapper.org

10 – Proposals for development paths

All the problems exposed have been on the table for years, they are not new, have I discovered any?

The issue is not the problems but the solutions. Many have been proposed and continue to be proposed from the most varied local or international areas. And they continue to propose more, seeing again and again the failure of the penultimate attempt, but that will not stop us obviously, humanity is like that.

However, the "problem in the system" has been generated through the evolution of civilizations and therefore it is logical that it takes a few generations to solve it.

There are a couple of important factors that have given the definitive change to the destructive course that humanity has been practicing:

• The first is a specific event that occurred in December 1968, when for the first time in its history human beings saw the photo of our entire planet, floating, in the dark, blue…. from outer space. That image marked a before and after: the awareness that the planet is one, that there are no borders, that above all oceans, forests and deserts are seen. The photo he showed us Gaia.

• The other fact is, on the contrary, from everyday life, the pedagogy of the concept of ecosystem, which we now all understand, (but that our parents had not arrived in their time of formation), and that we can recognize around us, and complements, on our natural scale, what is seen in the photo of the planet. That is, the awareness that we are involved, we are a natural part of something larger where all other living beings are.

These two elements simply did not exist for most of our parents, and therefore we are the first generations in which we become aware without being able to avoid responsibility.

In summary there are 4 main axes of evolution:

Two regional and two international, two proactive and two reactive:

	Globalist	Regionalist
Proactive	Hightech – Biotech – Super connection policies – Ecological footprint – Gaia Theory – General Systems Theory – Ecological Planning / Free Market – Transgenics	Ecovillages – Appropriate Technology 3M – Bioregionalism – Permaculture – Pattern Language – Coherent Cognitive Ability / Inbreeding and Cultural Arrogance	Test new proposals
Reagent	Agenda 21 – Limiting Financial Policies – Good Practices – Aalborg Charter – Neighbourhoods / Corporatism	Degrowth – Slow food – Transition-towns – Lowtech – Community development – Ethical-religious communities / Protectionism	Improving what we have
	"Ideology" UN – UNESCO High bureaucracy	"Ideology" NGOs Civil Society

Surely none of them will be feasible in a pure and forceful way over the others, but it will surely end up being a balanced mixture between the four possible ways, given that depending on the seriousness of the environmental crisis we will have to apply measures in the short or long term. With more restrictive or more open policies according to the local resources available, both material and professional capacities.

All of them are also imperfect in themselves because they can fall into their own inbred perverted version towards protectionism, corporatism or the liquidation of civil rules with the excuse of free trade and anything goes.

From my point of view, regardless of the direction in which humanity in general and the different planetary cultures in particular decides, we must recognize the limits of the planet, both globally and particularly in each of the natural resources that we take advantage of in each different ecosystem.

We must rethink the conceptual terms to be introduced in pedagogical discourses, in the plans and programs of the administration, and in business and infrastructure projects.

From the environmental aspects and from the social aspects, as well as in the physical and tangible planes as in the intangible and conceptual, it is necessary to converge in a dynamic balance between four vectors that tend, -without having very clear how to express it-, towards universal ethical values.

	Environment	Society
Physical- Tangible	Correspondence : Ecological Footprint versus Carrying Capacity of the territory.	Creating holistic spaces : City-Countryside-Forest-Water
	Vitality – Fertility	Freedom – Biodiversity
Conceptual	Correspondence : Technology and Ethics. Means and Ends. the Mind and the Act. Humanity and Gaia.	Conceptual cleansing in language, and in the processes of knowledge and transmission of culture and ethics: -Coherent Cognitive Capacity-
	Identity – Transcendence – Love	Empathy – Creativity – Wisdom

To rethink the processes of development of human societies from the same earth ecosystem there are already many small and large, local and global tools that are working or that have been exposed in this document:

• Production from ecosystem processes. Biodynamic agriculture, edible forests, city-countryside-forest.
• Gestalt modeling of water in territorial planning.
• Permaculture business design. Ecotone effect, interface between two biotopes or between biotope and ecosystem, between societies, or between socio-cultural layers.
• Design from natural harmonious models and energy empathy, which collaborate with individual and group health.
• Rethinking the interchanges of work – product / currency – time.
• Civil-cooperative property of the territory, for community use and management.
• Education in the global here-now. Transmission of ethical – ecological values.
• Bioregional administrative rethinking.
• …

The development of the human species has occurred thanks to its capacity for reflection and empathy, that is, its ability to become aware of things, of the human being itself, of the universe and consequently of the thousand questions that arise one after another in search of a meaning of life.

The processes by which natural resources are transformed into consumer products in big cities are so far from citizens that they simply ignore them. This distance, among others, is one of the simplest neurolinguistic factors with which "development" has been able to obviate the real accounting (ignorance, unconsciousness, ) of crop production, transforming it into the fictitious and virtual accounting of the financial stock exchanges. And these: the crises of fiction, will awaken us to the reality of accounting based on energy, time and space.

Jordi Badia Pascual

February 2009

11 – Bibliography

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1 Book: Denis Meadows. The limits of growth. Club of Rome 1972