The Birth of "Sustainability"

Title

The Birth of "Sustainability"

Description

Excerpt from "Our Common Future":

When the Brundtland Commission released a report titled "Our Common Future" in 1987, it coined the concept of "sustainable development." The Commission envisioned sustainability as the solution to simultaneous ecological degradation and pauperization, which had particularly affected the developing world. "Our Common Future" reflected the growing sense of a global community, united not only through markets, but also universal environmental problems such as global warming, deforestation, species loss, and pollution. Nevertheless, the Report planted the seed of environmental injustice: the document's language argued that the developing world bore the brunt of the industrial North's inflated consumption.

Excerpt from the "Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990":

In 1990, the sustainability concept was further fleshed-out through the omnibus Farm Bill, which declared that "sustainable agriculture" should be researched and implemented.

Creator

-U.N. Commission on Environment and Development
-U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry

Source

-United Nations
-United States Senate

Date

1986
1990

Files

Citation

-U.N. Commission on Environment and Development -U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry, “The Birth of "Sustainability",” Fifty Years of Green: An Environmental History of Middlebury College since 1965, accessed November 21, 2024, https://omeka.middlebury.edu/fyg/items/show/362.

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