Prevailing View of Sustainable Development

by Paul J. Dejillas, Ph.D.

In the past, sustainability has not really been expressed as an explicit goal of development. Over time, however, as industrialization progresses, man’s very own survival and existence has been severely threatened because of several factors: limitations and constraints of the physical environment to grow, rapid population growth, climatic change, natural disasters, scarcity and depletion of the world’s resources. All these factors have in turn contributed to the deterioration of man’s social conditions that give rise to such global problems as poverty, ecological degradation, inequity, social divisiveness, cultural disintegration, and disenfranchisement. To ensure and maintain man’s existence, global attention to development has, since the early 1990s, focused on sustainability as an explicit goal. [Read more] ...