Official UN documents, as well as the current draft of Rio+20, devote substantial space to the model for sustainable development: It must be, they say, economically viable, socially just and environmentally correct. It is the famous triplet called The Triple Bottom Line (the line of the three pillars), coined in 1990 by John Elkington, from Great Britain, founder of the ONG SustainAbility. But this model cannot withstand a serious critique.

Economically viable development: in the political language of business managers, development is equated to increasing the gross national product, (GNP). Woe to the enterprise and the country that do not have positive indices of annual growth! They fall into crisis or recession with the consequent reduction of consumption and increase in unemployment: in the business world, it consists of making money, with the least possible investment, the maximum possible profitability, the strongest possible competitivity, and in the least possible time.

When we speak here of development, we are not talking about just any development, but of the one that actually exists, that is, of industrialist/capitalist/consumerist development. It is anthropocentric, contradictory and wrong. Let me explain.

It is anthropocentric because is centered only on the human being, as if the greater community of life (the flora, fauna and other living organisms), that also need the biosphere and equally demand sustainability, did not exist.

It is contradictory, because development and sustainability obey opposing logistics. The development now in existence is lineal and increasing. It exploits nature and favors private accumulation. Its political economics is of a capitalist character. The sustainability category, to the contrary, comes from the sciences of life and ecology, whose logistic is circular and inclusive. It represents the tendency of the ecosystems towards a dynamic equilibrium, an interdependency and cooperation of all with all. As can be seen, these are two contrasting logistics: one favors the individual, the other the collective; one promotes competition, the other cooperation; one the evolution of the fittest, the other the evolution of all, interconnected.

It is wrong, because it asserts that poverty is the cause of ecological degradation. Thus, the lesser the poverty, the more sustainable development would be, with less degradation. This is incorrect. By critically analyzing the real causes of poverty and the degradation of nature, one can see that they result primarily, if not exclusively, from the type of development now in existence. That kind of development is what produces the degradation, because it degrades nature, pays low salaries, and thus generates poverty.

This kind of development is a trap set by the prevailing system: it co-opts the ecological (sustainability) terminology in order to gut it. It assumes the ideal to be the economy (growth), thus masking the poverty it produces.

Socially just: if there is one thing the present industrial/capitalist development cannot say about itself, it is that it is socially just. If it were, there would not be 1.4 billion starving human beings in the world, with the majority of nations in poverty. Let us look only at the case of Brazil. The 2010 Social Atlas of Brazil, (IPEA), states that 5000 families control 46% of the GNP. The government gives annually 125,000 million reales to the financial system to pay back the loans they received, with interest, and only gives 40,000 million reales to the social programs that benefit the great majority of the poor. All this reveals the fallacy of the rhetoric of socially just development, which is impossible within the current economic paradigm.

Environmentally Sound: the present type of development implies an endless war against Gaia, taking from her everything that is useful, and susceptible to profitting, especially by the minorities that control the process. According to the 2010 UN Living Planet Index, in less than 40 years, global bio-diversity suffered a 30% decline. From only 1998 to the present, there has been a 35% rise in the emission of global warming gasses. Instead of talking of limits on growth, we should be talking about limits on the aggression against the Earth.

In conclusion, the leading model of development that calls itself sustainable is pure rhetoric. It advocates the production of less carbon, utilization of alternative energies, strengthening of degraded regions and the creation of better means of waste disposal. But let’s be clear: all this is dependent on not impairing profits and not reducing competitivity. The use of the expression «sustainable development» has an important political meaning: the necessary change of the economic paradigm, if we want a real sustainability. Within the present one, sustainability is either localized, or non-existent.

There is a conflict these days among the different ways people understand sustainability. The definition of the 1987 Brundland Report of the UNO is classic: Sustainable development is one that attends the needs of present generations without endangering the capacity of future generations to attend to their needs and aspirations. This concept is correct, but it has two limitations: it is anthropocentric (it only considers human beings) and it says nothing about the community of life (other living beings that also need a biosphere and sustainability.) I will try to make a formulation that is as inclusive as possible:
Sustainability is every action destined to maintain the energy, information, and physical-chemical conditions that make all beings sustainable, especially the living Earth, the community of life and human life, seeking their continuity, and also to attend the needs of present and future generations in such a way that the natural capital is maintained and its capacity of regeneration, reproduction and eco-evolution is enriched.
Let’s rapidly explain the terms of this holistic vision:
To make sustainable all the conditions necessary for the creation of all beings: they exist starting with the combination of energies, of the physical-chemical and informative elements that, combined together, give origin to everything.
To make sustainable all beings: this is about completely overcoming anthropocentrism. All beings emerge from the process of evolution and enjoy an intrinsic value, independent of human use.
To especially make the living Earth sustainable: the Earth is much more than a «thing» (res extensa), lacking intelligence, or a mere means of production. She does not contain life; she is alive, she self-regulates, self-regenerates and evolves. If we do not guarantee the sustainability of the living Earth, called Gaia, we take away the basis of all other forms of sustainability.
To also make the community of life sustainable: the environment does not exist as something secondary and peripheral. We do not just exist: we coexist, and are all interdependent. All living beings are carriers of the same basic genetic alphabet. We form the net of life, microorganisms included. This net creates the biomass and the biodiversity that is necessary for the subsistence of our life on this planet.
To make human life sustainable: we are a singular link of the net of life, the most complex being in our solar system and a spearhead of the process of evolution as we know it, because we are carriers of consciousness, sensibility and intelligence. We feel that we are called upon to care for and to guard Mother Earth, to guarantee the continuity of civilization and also to be vigilant of our destructive capacity.
To make the continuity of the process of evolution sustainable: all beings are conserved and supported by the Basic Energy or the Source that Creates all Beings. The universe possesses an end in itself, by the simple fact of existing, of continuing to expand and create itself.
To make tending to human needs sustainable: through the rational and caring use of the goods and services which the cosmos and the Earth offer us, and without which we would cease to exist. To make sustainable our generation and the generations that will follow ours: the Earth is sufficient for each generation so long as a relation of synergy and cooperation with the Earth is established, and goods and services are distributed equitably. The use of those goods must be guided by generational solidarity. Future generations have the right to inherit a well preserved Earth and nature.
Sustainability is measured by the capacity to conserve natural capital, that it may renew itself and, perhaps through human genius, that it may be enriched for future generations. This widened and integrating concept of sustainability must serve as criteria for evaluating whether or not we have progressed along the path of sustainability, and should serve equally as inspiration or idea-generating for making sustainability a reality in the different fields of human activity. Without it, sustainability is pure rhetoric, without consequences.

Our Western civilization, now globalized, has its historic origins, in ancient Greece, during the VI Century, before the current era. The world of myth and religion, which was then the organizing principle of society, collapsed. To bring order into that critical moment, over a period of about 50 years, one of the greatest intellectual creations of humanity took place. The era of critical reason appeared, expressed through philosophy, democracy, theater, poetry and aesthetics. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the sophists were paradigmatic figures who gave birth to the architecture of knowledge, underlying the paradigm of our civilization; there were Pericles, the governor at the head of the democracy; Phidias, of the elegant aesthetics; the great tragic writers, such as Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus; the Olympic Games, and other cultural manifestations, too numerous to list here.

The new paradigm is characterized by the predominance of a type of reason that omits any awareness of the Whole, any sense of the meaning of the unity of reality, that characterized the so-called pre-Socratic thinkers, founders of the original thinking. In this moment the famous dualisms were introduced: world/God, man/nature, reason/sensibility, theory/practice. Reason created metaphysics, that in Heidegger’s understanding objectifies everything, and sets itself as the holder of power over that object. The human being no longer felt he was part of nature, but placed himself above her, and subjected nature to his will.

This paradigm reached its highest expression one thousand years later, in the XVI century, with Descartes, Newton, Bacon and others, founders of the modern paradigm. The dualist and mechanical world view was consecrated by them: nature on one side and the human being on the other, prior to and above nature, as her “teacher and owner” (Descartes), the crown of creation in function of which everything exists. The ideal of boundless progress was developed, that assumes that progress can continue infinitely into the future. In recent decades, greed to accumulate transformed everything into merchandise, to be negotiated and consumed. We have forgotten that the goods and services of nature are for everyone and cannot be appropriated only by a few.

After four centuries of applying this metaphysics, this is, this way of being and seeing, we see that nature has paid a high price for this model of growth/development. We are now reaching the limits of her possibilities. The scientific-technological civilization has reached a point where it can destroy itself, profoundly degrading nature, eliminating a great part of the life-system and, eventually, eradicating the human species. It could result in an eco-social armagedon.

It all began in Greece thousands of years ago. And now it looks as though it all will end in Greece, one of the first victims of the economic horror, whose bankers, to salvage their profits, have pushed the entire society into desperation. It has reached Ireland, Portugal, and Italy. It could extend to Spain and France, and perhaps to the entire world order.

We are witnessing the agony of a millenarian paradigm that is apparently completing its historic trajectory. It can still be delayed for a few decades, in a moribund state that resists death, but the end is predictable. It cannot reproduce itself with its own resources. 

We must find another way of relating to nature, another form of production and consumption. It must develop an awareness of dependency with the community of life and of collective responsibility for our common future. If this change does not begin, we will be sentencing ourselves to extinction. Either we transform ourselves, or we will disappear.

I make my own the words of the economist-thinker Celso Furtado: «The people of my generation have shown that it is within the reach of human ingenuity to lead humanity to suicide. I hope the new generation shows that it is also within the reach of the human being to open a path to a world where compassion, happiness, beauty and solidarity prevail.» If, that is, we change paradigms.