sustainable development

By the year 2200 there will be a lot more people living on this
planet then there are now. Estimates range anywhere from 15 to 36
billion people. Where will these people live? How will they live? The
answer is sustainable development. Sustainable development, "meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs. " It also, "requires meeting the
basic needs of all peoples and extending to them the opportunity to fulfill
their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will
always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes." Sustainable
development is being ignored in Chile, the Philippines, and Siberia,
practiced in Madagascar and in Alaska, and examined in the Lake Baikal
region of Russia. These Countries must learn from each other's failures
and success to discover what sustainable development involves in their
own country. Sustainable development has three divisions, economic,
environmental, and social. If sustainability is to occur it must, meet these
three divisions. In Chile, none of these divisions is being met.
Economically speaking, almost 40% of the population is poor and as a
result many make a living directly from the land clearing forests. In the
IVth region of Chile, forest regions are being depleted at an amazing rate.
This depletion of the forest in this region results in two main things, one,
people must spend increasing amounts of energy traveling to the site of
present cutting and two, the removal of the trees over time has lead to
soil erosion and rapid desertification of the area. This soil erosion also
removes many nutrients from the soil making the land poor for
agriculture. The third division, social, is not met here either. The lack of
organizations to relieve the negative effects of poverty on the
environment have only contributed to the problem. In the Philippines
the environmental degradation is similar in nature but more catastrophic
in result. There in the province of Leyte 6000 people were killed when
flash flood ripped through Ormoc City in 1991. The floods were a result
of logging of a forest in that region and conversion of that area into

commercial farming practices such as sugarcane. This in itself did not
cause the floods, the conversion of the forest into farming left the heavy
rain from a typhoon with nowhere to go. Normally the forest would have
stopped any flash floods as it would have held the water let it out slowly,
but with the forests gone there was nothing to delay the water from
exiting the system. The economical effect of this that land and buildings
were destroyed causing millions of peso's worth of damage. The social
impact is easy to discern, those who lost loved ones, friends, and family
can never get them back. In Madagascar the same type of thing was
happening. Locals were cutting down the forest and planting rice and
cassava. It was estimated that this process of deforestation was costing
the country between, "100 and 300 million a year in decreased crop
yields, the loss of productive forests and damage to infrastructure."
Something needed to be done, the government implemented a plan to,
"protect and improve the environment while working for sustainable
development." The approach integrates all aspects of sustainable
development. Socially, a public education programme explains why
locals shouldn't cut down the tree's and why it is economically more
important that they don't. Environmentally, the forests will not be lost
now. And economically some cutting is still down however it is
sustainable cutting. New jobs were also created in this program. In order
to persuade villagers that this was the best route to take, half of all fees
paid by tourists to enter the parks within which the forests are, go directly
to development projects for the community. They go to the community
because of the "positive correlation between prosperity and
environmental quality. This means that the more prosperous you are the
more you can afford to clean up the environment. A poor country like
Madagascar could not possibly invest as much capital as Canada could
into the reduction of Air pollution or the clean up of contaminants in soil.
In the Russian north all aspects of sustainability were ignored.

There in part of Siberia that stretches from the Ural Mountains in the west
to the Novosibirsk in the south, [see appendix one, fig one] the
environmental and social divisions of sustainable development were
ignored for the economical. This region produces 78% of Russia's oil and
84% of it's natural gas. It also happens to be rich in fish and reindeer,
the principle resources of the Yamal Nenets whom are the indigenous
peoples of the area. Under Stalin socialist plan of the 1930's, the
Nenet's were forced to change their traditional way of life - one that was
completely sustainable - to one based on collective farms. The children
were put in state schools and lost much of their traditional knowledge.
The creation of the massive oil fields and gas reservoirs were started.
The pollution that these industries created in air, land, and sea, destroyed
any hope of ever going back to anything like their traditional way of life.
The massive plants took up to as much as a third of the summer grazing
grounds for the reindeer, and the Ob river has been severely polluted
from industrial centers in the south. The social aspect, that of destroying
way of life of the Nenet's, the pollution caused by the plants is the
disregard for the environmental aspect, and the economical aspect's
importance was, by far, outweighed in terms of the other two aspects in
terms of planning. In contrast the U.S. has developed a different policy
in it's North. Like Siberia, Alaska has a lot of resources centered
environmentally sensitive lands. Similarly, Alaska also has it's own
indigenous peoples, the Iñupiat Eskimo, who have, like the Nenet's
traditionally had sustainable way of life. The ancestral calving grounds of
Porcupine Caribou Herd, one of the largest in the world at 160000
animals, is located on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife
reserve. The Iñupiat herd these animals and require this land to sustain
their way of life. This also is the site for one of the largest possible oil
fields in North America and as such there is much debate on the lands
uses. The Iñupiat want the money that the industry would bring in but

fear the environmental implications as well. In 1971, the U.S. Congress
passed a native land claims settlement act that meant that native groups
had a much greater say in the possible land uses. Following the
passage of the act, the Iñupiat formed the largest City in North America
(in terms of Geography, see Appendix One, fig. two), the North Slope
Borough, and began to tax any oil revenue made within the city. This
revenue - in the millions of dollars - let the Iñupiat live a modern lifestyle
and still engage in their traditional subsistence practices. The Iñupiat
also retained a greater control over environmental rules and regulations,
which they used to make sure little pollution occurred. In this example, all
three aspects of sustainable development were used. Economically,
everyone made money, socially no group was adversely effected, and
environmentally there is little or no pollution, certainly nothing like that in
Siberia.Siberia may also be the place for trying a new method of
sustainable development. This new method created by George D. Davis
hopes to be a, "rational compromise between the economic needs of a
people and the ecological needs of their land." It employs a method of
zoning an area or region as to it's possible land use's. The area that this
new method is being tested on is Lake Baikal, the biggest, oldest,
deepest repository of freshwater on the planet, one fifth of the worlds total
freshwater is found in Lake Baikal. This lake is also home to more than
1800 species found nowhere else on the planet. To save such an
unique place on earth it was necessary to account for all three area's of
sustainability. This was accomplished by zoning the entire Lake Baikal
watershed into 25 different types of zones ranging from farmland to
industrial parks. A total of 52 million acres were set aside as parks,
reserves, greenbelts, and landscapes. As well as zoning the entire
basin, an agreement was struck to reduce and hopefully end the pollution
that enters Lake Baikal's watershed. In this way, not only was the
environment saved, but so were peoples jobs and thus the social and

economic well-being. The Lake Baikal zoning method is an example of
how new methods of sustainable development are always being created.
Countries like Chile, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe all can learn a lot
from examples such as Madagascar, the United States, and the zoning
method in Russia. In fact all countries can learn a lot from the success
and failures of each other. In every successful case of sustainable
development the three aspects were met, economical, environmental,
and social. In every failure at least one or more was missing. The
lessons learned now can only help us as we enter the next millennia, and
over 15 billion people.