The Environment, Sovereignty and Environmental Sustainability
Can we find the balance between the three? Often getting private individuals and foreign countries to adhere to international regulations and programs can be problematic to say the least. The issues and difficulties that arise when international treaties, policies and regulations are formulated to solve particular problems such as reducing environmental degradation at the global scale. This conflict naturally arises due to that the majority of environmental resources are assigned pluralistic values. And many of those of values held by the private individuals and governmental authorities are anthropocentric.
In Solow’s article (1993), sustainability: an economist’s perspective, he attempted to clarify what sustainability really meant from the perspective of an economist. But his attempt has yet to fully solve the dilemma inherent in sustainability. At the moment, there is no standard on what exactly sustainability is and all it encompasses. This was even more evident by what transpired at the recent international conference, Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Full implementation of sustainability leads to changing our standard of living into one that reflected a negative or more balanced impact on the environment. The basis behind sustainability is that it focuses on getting everyone to agree to making the same set of sacrifices. For the good of all future, the end justifies the means, although this leads into much conflict. This is on account of that human beings are irrational by their nature and many attempts to predict their behavior falls short. Individuals and groups often focus on their direct local connections that produce benefits and ignore other areas they affect through extended indirect connections. The inherent problem is that sustainability is not clearly defined and has not been so from its’ inception due to that it is so subjective and limited to interpretations. This directly leads into some sustainability approaches undermining the approaches of others.
According to the second principle of the United Nations’ Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, foreign governments and territories have the lawful sovereign right to exploit the resources within their territorial boundaries to what extant they determine appropriate (United Nations General Assembly, 1992). This is provided that their activities within their jurisdictional control do not inflict harm to the environment of other foreign governments and territories beyond the limits of their territorial boundaries. Environmental resources and pollutant transport have little regard for international borders and artificial boundary lines. When treaties and international regulations are primarily based on arbitrary idealistic goals and targets instead of scientific evidence and engineering principles, they are designed to systematically fail from the initial onset. This was the result in 2001 after the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol that was adopted in 1997 (Kahn, 2003).
Can we find the balance between the three? Often getting private individuals and foreign countries to adhere to international regulations and programs can be problematic to say the least. The issues and difficulties that arise when international treaties, policies and regulations are formulated to solve particular problems such as reducing environmental degradation at the global scale. This conflict naturally arises due to that the majority of environmental resources are assigned pluralistic values. And many of those of values held by the private individuals and governmental authorities are anthropocentric.
In Solow’s article (1993), sustainability: an economist’s perspective, he attempted to clarify what sustainability really meant from the perspective of an economist. But his attempt has yet to fully solve the dilemma inherent in sustainability. At the moment, there is no standard on what exactly sustainability is and all it encompasses. This was even more evident by what transpired at the recent international conference, Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Full implementation of sustainability leads to changing our standard of living into one that reflected a negative or more balanced impact on the environment. The basis behind sustainability is that it focuses on getting everyone to agree to making the same set of sacrifices. For the good of all future, the end justifies the means, although this leads into much conflict. This is on account of that human beings are irrational by their nature and many attempts to predict their behavior falls short. Individuals and groups often focus on their direct local connections that produce benefits and ignore other areas they affect through extended indirect connections. The inherent problem is that sustainability is not clearly defined and has not been so from its’ inception due to that it is so subjective and limited to interpretations. This directly leads into some sustainability approaches undermining the approaches of others.
According to the second principle of the United Nations’ Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, foreign governments and territories have the lawful sovereign right to exploit the resources within their territorial boundaries to what extant they determine appropriate (United Nations General Assembly, 1992). This is provided that their activities within their jurisdictional control do not inflict harm to the environment of other foreign governments and territories beyond the limits of their territorial boundaries. Environmental resources and pollutant transport have little regard for international borders and artificial boundary lines. When treaties and international regulations are primarily based on arbitrary idealistic goals and targets instead of scientific evidence and engineering principles, they are designed to systematically fail from the initial onset. This was the result in 2001 after the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol that was adopted in 1997 (Kahn, 2003).
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