Sustainable growth is the key to our future

Sustainability is the buzz word for the Green movement. Here two environment campaigners look at the issues surrounding sustainable energy and transport

NO DISCUSSION of sustainable consumption can ignore the concept of “peak oil”. This is the situation where we reach the maximum possible rate of oil exploitation.
Because of massive population growth, oil production per person was maximised as far back as the 1970s. As our planet’s population is forecast to double between 1980 and 2030, the reliance of more and more people on an ever-shrinking resource might well prove calamitous.

Senior environmentalists in Wales such as Patrick Holden (director of the Soil Association) and Martin Fitton (former chairman of the Brecon Beacons National Park) understand this instinctively.

They believe all of us – and especially schoolchildren – must be taught to anticipate a world very different from the present.

Thus profound changes must be made in how we see our own futures.

For instance, Holden believes we should learn how to grow some of our own food. And then how to cook it. Such basic skills, once widespread, are rare today. But they will help us survive in a world where the social and environmental impacts of climate change and resource depletion are still unimaginable for most people.

Surely such thinkers are correct.

That a child can leave primary school in 2007 not knowing the names of fruits and vegetables, or where milk and cheese come from, is ridiculous. If that same child leaves secondary school ignorant of basic gardening and cookery skills, it will not be merely a failure of the education system. It will be possibly dangerous.

icWales