Blogspot

"Leading ecologists and conservation scientists raise absolutely fundamental concerns about the physical limits on resource use that should be considered at the Rio+20 conference held this week—but almost certainly won’t be, because sustainability has focused primarily on the social and economic sciences and developed largely independently of the key ecological principles that govern life.

The field of sustainability science does not sufficiently take account of human ecology and in particular the larger view offered by human macroecology, which aims to understand what governs and limits human distribution. The very strong – and seemingly obvious – point they make is that ultimately we are constrained by the same hard biophyisical laws that regulate every other species and population on the planet — and we have already surpassed the Earth’s capacity to sustain even current levels of human population and socioeconomic activity, let alone future trajectories of growth. And while we often applaud ourselves for doing something apparently sustainable at a local level, we ignore the fact that we displace the consequences of using up resources either temporally or spatially at larger regional or global scales. These authors provide a powerful set of examples that show the wider detrimental impacts of locally ‘sustainable’ systems, including that of Portland, Oregon – which ‘is hailed by the media as “the most sustainable city in America”’, and the Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery, also cited as a success story."

http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/06/20/rio20-why-sustainability-must-include-ecology