Sustainable Development, 3/6/11

As an environmental management major, I have taken several classes concerning aspects of sustainability. Sustainability, to me, means finding a way to live that does not jeopardize the lives of future generations. The idea of sustainability is particularly interesting to me because its concepts are important to the economically incentivized business world, as well as to environmentalists. People are starting to realize that sustainable practices are the wave of the future. As unrenewable resources like oil, coal, and natural gas start to run out and become more and more expensive, we will need to come up with innovative new ways to power our lives. Renewable energy sources like solar power, wind power, and nuclear power will need to be improved and utilized in the near future. Reuse and recycling will need to be put into practice. The US has an ecological footprint that largely exceeds the footprint of most nations in the world. As the effects of global warming become more obvious, the world will no doubt look to the US to start making some more sustainable changes.

I guess my largest question concerning sustainable development would be about developing nations. As the worlds populations slowly become more urbanized, we will need to generate more power. Countries like the US and Britain had the luxury of building up their nations with very few environmental regulations. We polluted like crazy for years before we realized how much harm we were doing to the environment. Now that we realize that global warming is an issue, worldwide climate change legislation is in the works. Will developing nations be able to industrialize in a sustainable manner? Or will it be too expensive or simply not feasible? Many of these developing nations have massive populations. It will be interesting to see if they can sustainably provide necessities like power, sanitation, and healthcare for these large numbers of people.

I do have several expectations for this course. After skimming the syllabus, I notice that we are going to be doing a large amount of writing. This will hopefully give me the opportunity to improve my writing skills. Also, the course topic is very interesting to me as someone who hopes to be employed in the environmental field. I’m not quite sure what I want to do after undergrad, so perhaps learning about global sustainability will push me in one direction or another. Last summer I studied at Oxford University in England with the IU@Oxford program. Much of our coursework at Oxford focused on the international community and their response to global warming and climate change issues. We actually got to meet some of the people that worked at the Copenhagen conference, so it will be really interesting to learn more about what goes on at international summits.