Sustainable development: What is it and what is beyond it?

Sustainable development (SD) bridges an era of progressive modernism, now past, and an era of something else, now emerging. Although SD has different meaning for different people, it implies a commitment to interrelate efficient management of supply and demand into an ethical context of equitable justice among humans and other species. The tension between supply and demand approaches can be traced to a debate two centuries ago between the optimistic Marquis de Condorcet and the pessimistic Thomas Malthus. In North American terrestrial ecosystems, the conflict between utilitarian and deontological positions emerged in zoning; Gifford Pinchot's exploitive conservationism depended on advanced technology within zones of productive resources, while John Muir's contemplative preservationism, used only primitive technology in zones good for scenic parks containing remnants of threatened species. An indistinct form of Pinchot-Muir zoning occurred in the aquatic landscape with respect to fish, zoning that relied on a complicated split of space and time between commercial and recreational fisheries isolated the interest groups from each other. Recreational fisheries subsequently split into competitive, strongly commercialized sport fishing and relaxed, simple-gear-oriented angling interests, which needed separation also. In spite of progressive modernism's zoning approach, economic drives tend to trump other cultural purposes, which in turn take precedence over natural processes. Fifty years ago, Aldo Leopold began guiding such failing "sustainable yield management" toward postmodern "caring sharing," or "responsible reciprocity," among all creatures in an ecosystem (Leopold 1949). Generally, free women have been better at this than free men; Rachel Carson and others have helped to move us from the abusive pragmatism of modernism toward greater gender, race, species, and ecosystem integrity. Today, although our countries' democratic politics are incurably pragmatic, there are commitments to foster desirable systemic phenomena, to forestall the disintegration of such systems, and to combat deleterious slum-like phenomena. Together, we must transform these commitments into reality by finding paths that bring us closer toward this multifaceted integrity and a future where places for humans and their friends, the fish, are secure.