"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Sustainability is not a goal but a process. It leads to a better life for the present generation and survival for generations to come, enhancing their ability to cope with the world that they are about to inherit. As Chief Seattle put it so very well: "We do not inherit the earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children."(Nolberto Munier, "Introduction to Sustainability: Road to a better future").
Several books and papers are trying to explain the terms: weak and strong sustainability. It seemed to me a little complicated in the first, like a need to combine environmental and economical issues closely related to sustainable development. Reasonable and expected combination..
According to Eric Neumayer in his book "Weak versus strong sustainability: exploring the limits of two opposite paradigms":Weak sustainability: is based in the belief that what matters for future generations is only the total aggregate stock of "man-made" and "natural" capital, but not natural capital as such. it doesn't matter whether the current generation uses up non-renewable resources or dumps CO2 in the atmosphere as long as enough machineries, roads and ports are built in compensation. Natural capital is regarded as being essentially substitutable.
Strong sustainability: Natural capital is regarded as being non-substitutable.
More simply, one says that natural sources are utilitarian and are there to support human kind using resources today without caring for the future, which is somewhat egoistical since upcoming generations are not considered. The other one says that natural sources should be used in more rational and restrained ways, since human kind cannot sustitute most of them, which is not so realistic because society needs resources to survive (Nolberto Munier, "Introduction to Sustainability: Road to a better future").
