Various Viewpoints

Many other definitions of sustainable development have also been offered, some general and some more precise. The followings illustrate the variety of foci evident in discussions of sustainable development.

• ". . . requires meeting the basic needs of all people and extending opportunities for economic and social advancement. Finally, the term also implies the capacity of development projects to endure organizationally and financially. A development initiative is considered sustainable if, in addition to protecting the environment and creating opportunity, it is able to carry out activities and generate its own financial resources after donor contributions have run out." Bread for the World, Background Paper No. 129, Washington, DC, March 1993.
• "[improves] . . . the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems." International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), World Conservation Union, United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Caring for the Earth, pp. 10, IUCN/UNEP/WWF, Gland, Switzerland, 1991.
• "[uses] . . . natural renewable resources in a manner that does not eliminate or degrade them or otherwise dimish their renewable usefulness for future generations while maintaining effectively constant or non-declining stocks of natural resources such as soil, groundwater, and biomass." World Resources Institute, Dimensions of sustainable development, World Resources 1992-93: A Guide to the Global Environment, pp. 2, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992.
• "[maximizes] . . . the net benefits of economic development, subject to maintaining the services and quality of natural resources." R. Goodland and G. Ledec, Neoclassical economics and principles of sustainable development, Ecological Modeling 38 (1987): 36.
• "[is based on the premise that] . . . current decisions should not impair the prospects for maintaining or improving future living standards . . . This implies that our economic systems should be managed so that we live off the dividend of our resources, maintaining and improving the asset base." R. Repetto, World Enough and Time, pp. 15-16, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1986.
• " . . . is taken to mean a positive rate of change in the quality of life of people, based on a system that permits this positive rate of change to be maintained indefinitely." L. M. Eisgruber, Sustainable development, ethics, and the Endangered Species Act, Choices, Third Quarter 1993, pp. 4-8.
• " . . . is development without growth --- a physically steady-state economy that may continue to develop greater capacity to satisfy human wants by increasing the efficiency of resource use, but not by increasing resource throughput." H. E. Daly, Steady state economics: concepts, questions, and politics, Ecological Economics 6 (1992): 333-338.
• " . . . is the search and the carrying out of rational strategies that allow society to manage, in equilibrium and perpetuity, its interaction with the natural system (biotic/abiotic) such that society, as a whole, benefits and the natural system keeps a level that permits its recuperation." E. Gutierrez-Espeleta, Indicadores de sostenibilidad: instrumentos para la evaluacion de las politicas nacionales", unpublished paper presented at 50th Anniversity Conference of the Economic Sciences Faculty sponsored by the University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica, Nov. 19, 1993.