Guest Editorial

TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

Sustainable lifestyles, and institutional structures to support them, are essential to `sustainable development’.

The word "sustainable" has acquired tremendous currency in recent years, particularly after the momentous events in Rio this June. Sustainable development is a critique of the current growth-oriented, top-down development paradigm. It emphasizes a development framework which is based on an appreciation of the finite human and natural resources available on planet Earth. Accordingly, it stresses peoples’ local control and governance, respect for all living creatures and processes, equitable access to and use of resources, a non-violent perspective on dealing with conflicts, and a feminist appreciation of life and creativity.

Sustainable development is essentially a matter of achieving a sustainable lifestyle, based on meeting the basic needs of all people, on austerity and economy, and deriving satisfaction from existing socio-spiritual processes in society.

Viewed in this sense, the contemporary lifestyle of the bulk of the population in the countries of the North, as well as the "blind aping" by the upwardly mobile classes in the countries of the South, is blatantly unsustainable. A life-style based on pursuit of material goods for the sake of over-consumption, and of living only in the present ("make hay while the sun shines") without reference to the past or concern for the future, is at the root of current unsustainable lifestyle. Sustainable development can only be built on the basis of a sustainable lifestyle.

If we examine this further, we will find that sustainable lifestyles can only be practised by a collectivity in the framework of a sustainable society. Most contemporary societies organised since the Second World War have steadily marginalised people and their institutions. In some societies, the state and its institutions have become over-dominant and omnipotent. In other societies, ruthless pursuit of profit and self-interest through the machinery of the market has undermined ways in which individuals and families relate to one another. The ideological, material and institutional bases of the civil society have been largely destroyed in most societies in the contemporary context. As a result, initiatives aimed at strengthening the civil society vis-a-vis both the state and the market, with a view to making them accountable to the civil society, may yet ensure a sustainable society.

It is in this sense that individuals, social movements, people’s organisations and voluntary development organisations, engaged in a variety of voluntary action in India and elsewhere, can contribute towards re-building the civil society - a society built on principles of sustainability.

by Rajesh Tandon

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