[MUSIC] The 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015 have a long previous history of ideas about cautious exploitation of natural resources, universal human rights, and history bringing progress rather than decline. They achieved their provisional form in 1987 and they represent a compromise between northern concerns about environmental protection and justified southern demands for social development. They are however rather complex and many consider their inherent plea for environmental resilience and continued economic growth self-contradictory. [MUSIC] For the larger parts of human history, small scattered and vulnerable populations were compelled to adapt their way of life to the natural environment as they best could. Environmental problems consisted normally in some kind of maladjustment to the immediate habitat, lack of food, wild weather, flooding, epidemics, etc. But during the 19th and 20th century, growing populations that were increasingly concentrated in urban areas. And who based their subsistence on industrial production turned the relation between humans and their environment around. So in the modern world, an increasing number of biosphere malfunctions are directly caused by human enterprise. But frequently some humans suffer from environmental degradation caused by others. In 1944, fiction writer C.S. Lewis wrote that, I quote: "what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be the power exercised by some men over others with Nature as its instrument." The UN slogan 'Sustainable Development' synthesizes a comprehensive range of goals to improve the present global predicament, and it implies a great number of different means. Some presupposes collective systemic action on a global scale, while others depend on individual lifestyles to change. But they all imply a basic comprehension of the complex troubles that we face. [MUSIC] Historically, the realization that we humans are intensely aggravating the global biosphere was slow. By the mid 19th century, American envoy to the Ottoman Empire, George Perkins Marsh experienced a Mediterranean landscape that was very different from the one he knew from classical literature. And in 1864, he published the book "Man and Nature", driving attention to the fact that we humans change and frequently deteriorate our own environment. In his home country, cultivation, industrialization and modernization went fast and for that reason, the US became a front runner in early nature conservation. So since the late 19th century, conservationism appeared in many western countries. In many respects, early conservation primarily aimed at setting aside natural resources for later use. To a growing number of adherents however, nature conservation became a matter of protecting natural beauty, national landscape peculiarities or endangered species. Everywhere what was conserved was specific places, great or small in extent or species. They were however all considered to be manifestations of the same all pervasive aboriginal force: Nature. Welsh cultural scientist Raymond Williams says that, I quote: "just as in religion, the moment of monotheism is a critical development, so, in human responses to the physical world, is the moment of a singular nature." And that moment appeared in the 18th century. The more tangible idea of the world as one coherent whole only developed together with those scientific advances that characterized the period after World War II, and enabled global collection, standardization and computation of geophysical data. Advances that were closely related to the Cold War arms race and monitoring of nuclear test fallout. From about this moment, the concept 'environment' gradually replaced 'nature' as a broader concept for those human surroundings that were increasingly threatened. In 1956, the private Wenner-Gren Foundation arranged a conference at Princeton University with the theme: 'Man's role in changing the face of the Earth'. It concluded that so large changes had already taken place that science should methodically continue to monitor environmental issues. And in 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson in her famous book "Silent Spring", opposed the extensive use of chemical pesticides by industrial farming. The following year, social scientist Murray Bookchin unraveled what he, as his book title, called: "Our Synthetic Environment". And during the 1960s, still more people all over the world supported the emergent environmental movement. Soon, the scientific concept ecology was turned into a normative ideal of harmonious connectivity of all things alive. The 1970s become a virtual 'age of ecology'. More often than not, however, environmental issues were coupled with the challenges from continued demographic and economic growth in the global south. So when the UN in 1968 decided to call for a world conference on the environment to be held in Stockholm, Sweden four years later, environmental issues and economic development were inevitably intertwined. The Stockholm summit in June 1972 was a truly defining moment in the global quest for environmental action. But as expected, it also displayed a clash between nature conservation and social development most clearly in an epoch-making speech by Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. "Countries with but a small fraction of the world's population consume the bulk of the world's production of minerals, fossil fuels and so on. Thus we see that when it comes to the depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution, the increase of one inhabitant in an affluent country at his level of living is equal to an increase of many Asian, Africans or Latin Americans at their current material levels of living. The inherent conflict is not between conservation and development, but between environment and the reckless exploitation of man and earth in the name of efficiency. It has been my experience that people who are at cross purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves. Modern man must reestablish an unbroken link with nature and with life. He must again learn to invoke the energy of growing things, and to recognize as did the ancients in India centuries ago, that one can take from the earth and the atmosphere only so much as one puts back into them. In their hymn to Earth, the sages of the Atharva Veda, chanted: "What of thee I dig out, let that quickly grow over. Let me not hit thy vitals, or thy heart", so can man himself be vital and of good heart, and conscious of his responsibility. I thank you Mr. President. [APPLAUSE] The vocabulary used to describe exactly what it was environmental policy should be aiming at changed over time. From scientific ecology, concepts like resilience and carrying capacity, that were first phrased by American ecologist Aldo Leopold in the 1930s, became part of public discourse. The first reflected the ability of ecosystems to withstand external stress, whereas the latter refers to the population size of any species that a specific habitat can support. In the age of ecology of course, both terms were applied to the entire global ecosystem. During the 1980s however, especially within the UN system, they were increasingly replaced by another much older concept, that of sustainability. Sustainability or, in German 'Nachhaltigkeit' was originally an economic rather than an ecological concept. Or you could say it originates from a time, when the distinction between the two different approaches to the Oikos, the human dwelling - economy and ecology - was not yet established. The phrase sustainability was first phrased by German forester Hans Carl von Carlowitz in a 1713 book about forest management. And in this book, Carlowitz described how forests should be managed, I quote: "by such a conservation and cultivation of the forest that it will give a continuously unceasing and sustainable use." So in economic terms, the core aspects of sustainability was using the returns of nature without using the natural capital.
