Living Sustainably

If you’re reading this blog, I’m hoping that you’ll also log onto the new blog by Diane Husic at ANewProsperity.blogspot.com. Sustainability is not one of the buzz words here in Tianjin – the UN mainly likes acronyms, although in this conference, the words “balanced” and “fair” have come up a lot.  No relation to Fox news. “Balanced” has to do with the different parts of the negotiation texts. “Fair,” as the Secretariat thinks of it, has to do with the fairness between the north and south hemispheres (the south is more vulnerable to climate change impacts with fewer resources), between the countries in the south hemisphere (not all G77 countries have equal resources or same climate problems), and between the current generation and those that will follow (we need to think more about what we leave to our grandchildren). The idea of living sustainably, in my view, relates to these issues of fairness: we should limit our use of the world’s resources in order that the developing countries may improve their standards of living and we should collectively leave the world’s biosystems as intact as possible for future generations.