[UCI-Calit2] Rebooting Sustainable Development -- tonight

[Anna Lynn Spitzer]

CUSA (UCI’s Center for Unconventional Security Affairs) presents the 2010 Sustainability Seminar Series to help foster dialogue between social and natural scientists on the challenges of sustainability in the 21st century. A select group of scholars, researchers, experts and business leaders will present a variety of perspectives on choices and challenges related to sustainability.

 


Tonight:       Mark Halle, International Institute for Sustainable Development (Geneva)


Title:             Rebooting Sustainable Development: Why It Hasn’t Worked and What to Do About It

Time:             7- 8:30 p.m.

Location:        Calit2 Auditorium 

Abstract:         The notion of sustainable development was launched two decades ago and quickly attracted a broad following worldwide. It appeared to offer a means to organize economic development in a way that would address the challenges of poverty and social exclusion while ensuring the health of the planet that sustains us, and a great deal of energy and enthusiasm has been invested in it. Despite that, the enterprise has been a failure. Any sober assessment of trends over the past quarter century must conclude not only that we have failed but that we have failed spectacularly. We have made a series of assumptions about our societies, our leaders and our international processes that have proved mistaken. And yet sustainable development remains the only acceptable future for humankind. If we are to reach it, or even advance significantly towards it, we will have to change our approach sharply. We will have to take steps to ensure that economic policy - like trade, invest!
 ment, tax or subsidy policy - offers strong incentives to behave in ways that support sustainability. We will have to change the approach to international consensus‐building. And we will have to accept that sustainability will require not an adaptive set of changes but instead that change will have to be transformative. The combination of the economic crisis and a series of looming environmental crises now make it imperative that we not fail in this endeavor.

 

 


Next week:   Richard Matthew, CUSA director and associate professor of planning, policy and design 


Title:             Ethics and Sustainability

Time:            7- 8:30 p.m.


Date:            Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010


Location:       Calit2 Auditorium 

Abstract:      Global environmental change poses significant challenges to human welfare and security. This is not simply a technical matter to be resolved through innovation and adaptation, but one that also involves ethical reflection and practice. Progress on investigating the ethical dimensions of environmental change has been slow for two key reasons.  First, so much environmentalism cloaks itself in a discourse of prudence and security that moral concerns tend to be side-stepped or minimized.  Second, many scholars of environmental ethics concentrate on the harm humans to do the natural world, encouraging us to assign intrinsic value to nature and extend moral concern to other species. As important as this line of inquiry may be, it has been criticized for ignoring and even trivializing the needs of the poor and vulnerable. The concept of sustainable development suggests other ways of linking ethics and the environment. It explicitly asks us to think about how to reduc!
 e poverty and improve the welfare and security of the world's poor while protecting the natural resources and ecosystems that development practices often overexploit and damage. It also asks us to consider the world future generations will inherit. And it demands that we explore the many ways humans exploit and harm each other through the medium of nature.   

 

Sponsored by: the Samueli Foundation, University of California Environment Institute, Calit2, University Extension, Student Affairs, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society.

 

For more information on the series and future seminar dates, speakers and topics, go to:  http://www.cusa.uci.edu/programs/sustainability_series.html.

 

 

 

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