“It’s easy to mine the land and fish the seas and get rich. Yet [in the long run] … you cannot have a prosperous nation …that does not conserve its natural environment or take care of the well-being of its people.”
So says the Minister for Education in Bhutan. And he is right.
But even in a country that knows this, and acts on it, they are finding sustainability more difficult:
“The weather has changed a lot, … the rains come at the wrong times and our plants get ruined, the temperature has got hotter so there are more insects in the fruit and grain. I don’t understand it, but if it continues we’re going to have many problems in growing food and feeding ourselves.”
This is the essence of the survival problem of the human race. The actions of a few are threatening the survival of the whole. Even those who want to become sustainable cannot achieve it, if others continue to threaten our global life support systems.
If one single community of people is unsustainable, the whole planet is unsustainable.