Global Sustainable Development
To environmentalists the concept of globalism is not new. Indeed the environmental movement is based on the realization that the environment and natural resources of the earth, which nourish and sustain life on our planet, are systemic in nature and intrinsically global in scale. Thus environmentalists tend to perceive even the most local of conditions as being linked to the complex system of cause and effect relationships on which the health of the environment of our planet as a whole depends. The processes through which human activity impacts on, and interacts with, this global system have accelerated to an unprecedented degree during the past century through the phenomenon we now call globalization. This can be seen by environmentalists as a mixed blessing. On one hand, it has vastly increased public awareness of the global nature of environmental issues and provided the impetus for international actions to deal with them. On the other hand, globalization has been driven largely by economic motivations which have served to accelerate the environmental deterioration that we have witnessed during this last century, particularly the latter part of it, and which continue to undermine the earth’s natural capital. Knowledge is clearly the principal resource on which the future growth, development and governance of our civilization will be based. Technology manifested in a galaxy of new products and services, design, management and information systems is the primary source of added value and comparative advantage in the global economy (Castells, this volume). It also offers the main ingredient for the transition to sustainability through patterns of production and consumption that are less physical in nature, and less materials- and energy-intensive. The value of a compact disk or a computer chip is primarily attributable to the functions and characteristics with which human intelligence and technology have endowed it, rather than to its material content. This dematerialization of economic growth is already evident in the fact that the biggest single export of the United States today, amounting to some $30 billion per year, is entertainment.