Name: EDNELLE VELASCO ABRIGO Professor: Dr. EPIFANIA B.

NUŇEZ
Course: MA PhyEd Subject: Education for Sustainable Development

“Why Sustainability is bad for the Environment?”

. Sustainability is a very broad statements and term if you go in depth; to meet the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. What are our needs now and what are our needs
and future generations’ needs in years and years to come? It’s a question that can only be answered over time. We humans
can be very greedy at times. Even now you can see it with proper research. Banks push wars amongst and against
countries to 'boost the economy'. Year after year, more resources go into the funding of war then into poverty. So with that,
we'll never know what our future needs are going to be. Our future needs could be a certain resource to build more homes
for the homeless, or it could be a resource to get rid of nuclear exposure to everything green on our planet. We don't, and
probably won't, know what our future is going to be, nether less what we will need. But that doesn't mean we can’t work
together to sustain what we have now. If all of us were cut down electricity usage, packaged food and the wasting of
packaged food, and used SUSTAINABLE ENERGY we wouldn't necessarily restore our Earth to how it was before human
contact, but we would be giving ourselves and future generations a better chance.

Today's environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives,
from science to education. You won't hear people of today talking about their emotional reactions to the wild world. Instead,
you'll hear them promoting something called 'sustainability'. We hear this curious, plastic word everywhere. But what does it
mean? It does not mean what it ought to: defending the non-human world from the ever-expanding empire of industrial
humanity. Instead, it has come to mean sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world's rich people - us -
feel is their right, without destroying the 'natural capital' or the 'resource base' which is needed to do so.

A strange confusion has come about. A movement which started out working to sustain nature at large, in the face
of human attacks upon it, has ended up campaigning to sustain industrial civilisation instead. The business of 'sustainability'
has become the business of preventing carbon emissions. This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge
leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then 'zero-carbon' is the solution. Society needs to go about its
business without spewing the stuff out. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate
the power we 'need' without producing greenhouse gases and there will be no need ever to turn the lights off; no need ever
to slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet's ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This
means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant.
Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world's wildest, most beautiful and most untouched landscapes. The
sort of places which environmentalism came into being to protect. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse
and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung
around the coastlines. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and
even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations
designed to provide guilt free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses. What this adds up to should be clear enough. Yet many
people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonising, progressive
human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction
of the wild, the unpolluted and the non-human. It is the mass destruction of the world's remaining wild places in order to
feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this 'environmentalism'. Something has gone
wrong here: we have lost sight of the trees amongst all the wood. Instead of changing how we live, we are talking about
changing our technologies.

The idea of sustainable development is useful and certainly necessary; however it is failing in its execution. Instead
of expanding the distance of our impacts in order to reduce them, we should be utilizing existing infrastructure such as
cities. Make renewable energy mandatory within our existing infrastructure as much as possible instead of expanding into
wilderness we have already decimated. Make all structures more self sufficient (using renewable) and introduce new
proposed solar technologies to harness the sunlight falling on expansive networks of already existing roads. We are looking
into new places to implement solutions instead of making use of the opportunities created by what we already have.
By this, let us work hand and hand in order to attain sustainability. Start it within ourselves as an educator, an
environmentalist and as a catalyst of change to meet our present and future needs.