Environmental Sustainability Research Paper

Sustainability has become the buzzword in recent times, sustainability has reached a stage where science meets politics and politics meets science. In the last two decades, diverse actors of various institutions have been formulating projects and are spending large amounts of money in the name of sustainability. There have been numerous recent studies which have offered solutions to the problem of achieving sustainability. Many policy analysts see technology and development as a tool for growth that can attain environmental sustainability. One of the approaches suggested is the ESI approach which quantifies whether the countries safeguard their resources effectively, using sixty-eight data sets to construct a global index of sustainability.

Some of these are values but values change over time so there is no one measure of environmental sustainability as it is value based in nature. Another is Religion which acts as a major driving force in many people's lives, but these different religions react differently when it comes to environment. If we look in the historical sense then there is difference in the relative roles in Judeo-Christian religious systems of the "dominion" belief versus the "steward ship" belief. On the contrary the recent evidences in "eco-theology" have suggested that the religious foundations can have a positive impact on sustainability (Haught and Holmberg 1996). If we look at Catholic theologians, they have the sentiment that the earth is God's gift to be properly respected (Ven 1994), but the Protestants justify capitalism which effects the environment. Even Judeo-Christians show lower concern about the environment and give more emphasis on the anthropocentricism. In the world, there are vast religions which have their own texts and scriptures, which preach different things which may not be in sync with the other religious texts, for example Jews may consider milk

The values of policies/politics move with greater pace in affecting the values regarding sustainability. Neoliberalism through State policies try to bring in modernist values such as high consumption through free trade. This all happens at the global level where all the MNCs are linked which have power to influence these values and therefore bring changes in policies. If we look at a society, pope’s encyclical can bring awareness about the climate change, but for these values to move to a larger picture and to really make a difference takes time. For example the sustainability idea brought out by the World Council of Churches which was around 1970s was moved and absorbed slowly by the society to bring about the change but leaders like Ronald Reagan who were strong politically and was a neoliberalism follower, the pace of his ideas moved fast which changed the course of the US