There was no question of ownership of oil, water and other resources freely available in the environment before governments and/or private companies claimed ownership of these resources with the pronouncement that they would process and distribute these resources fairly. Poverty is a result of unfair distribution of resources. Moreover, environmental degradation ensues when governments or corporations are too greedy for immediate profits to consider sustainable development. Surely environmental degradation accompanies loss of life.
Because governments and corporations have wreaked havoc around the world through unreasonable use of natural resources, degradation of the environment is a constantly discussed issue based on the premise that all economies would slow down if the environment is not sustained. Sustainable development is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (“Adaptation to Climate Change in the Context of Sustainable Development”).
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Division for Sustainable Development has identified a variety of issues that must be studied, analyzed, and dealt with around the world in order for humanity to sustain itself, in the name of sustainable development. Agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, demographics, energy, education and awareness, forests, freshwater, health, land management, poverty, technology, and sustainable tourism are only few of the topics under study (“Adaptation to Climate Change in the Context of Sustainable Development”).
As an example of the issues to be dealt with, the United Nations Economic and Social Council has reported the following: …[The] rate of agricultural production growth at the global level has been about 2. 3 per cent between 1970 and 1990 and thus has exceeded population growth so that per capita supplies of food have increased. However, wide regional disparities remain: the situation improved greatly in East Asia but worsened in sub-Saharan Africa.
There still remain large numbers of under-nourished people in developing countries; the figure is estimated at about 780 million, or 20 per cent of their population. The relentless exploitation of the natural resource base to achieve an increased level of agricultural production has resulted in increased natural resource scarcity and environmental degradation (“Promoting Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development”). The following case of the Aral Sea sheds greater light on the fact of natural resources being exploited when governments or corporations refuse to consider the trade-off that the concept of sustainable development is built upon.
Situated southwest of Kazakhstan, northwest of Uzbekistan, and east of the Caspian Sea in a region of interior drainage, the Aral Sea is presently a salt lake. Until the 1970s, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest lake, some 67,200 square miles in area, 420 km long and 280 km wide. The lake was fed by the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, and was quite shallow, reaching a maximum depth of 58 m (“Aral Sea”). When the dictator Josef Stalin rose to power in 1941, and right up to his death in 1953, he desired to make the Soviet Union self-sufficient in cotton, which is used for gunpowder and clothing to boot.
Hence, the successors of Stalin during the 1960s and 1970s allowed an unlimited amount of irrigation water to be tapped from both the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast – to quench the thirst of the cotton fields. The two rivers utilized thus were the only sources of water for the Aral Sea (“Dike Built To Revive Aral Sea; Soviet-Era Policies Turned World’s Third-Largest Lake into Saline Hazard”).