Is Sustainable Development an Oxymoron?
We love Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor Roosevelt loved the United Nations. While it does not necessarily follow that we too love the United Nations, we have always felt that the central idea of a United Nations was a good one, in fact it is really the only one that has any chance at all of ending war, colonialism, slave trade, arms trade, nuclear power and weapons, and destruction of the Earth’s natural patrimony, be it oceans, atmosphere, biodiversity, sacred sites or indigenous wisdom.
Like it or don’t, these days if you want to resolve conflict, either between groups humans or with the natural world, at the global scale, it is the only game in town.
“OK, everybody was aware of the horrors that nationalism had wrought in the immediate aftermath of World War II. So, instead of—one impulse was to create something called the United Nations. And then, the unfortunate side impulse was: Let’s not give it any power; that’s too dangerous.”
— Art Spiegelman, Democracy Now, January 8, 2014
In his 2015 Forecast for the USA, James Howard Kunstler emotes an R.Crumb-style, dystopian vision of modernity:
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