Integrating human needs into our vision of sustainability

• Published in: Futures : the journal of policy, planning and futures studies Vol. 26; no. 2; pp. 180 - 184
• Main Author: Clark, Mary E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Guilford, Eng Elsevier Ltd 01.03.1994; Butterworths; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Behavior; Behavior Modification; Cultural change; Economic development; Environmental Policy; Environmental Protection; Future; Human Ecology; Integration (human needs); International; Social change; Sustainability; Sustainable development
• ISSN: 0016-3287; 1873-6378
• DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(94)90107-4

Sustainability is often treated as something to be attained simply by quantitative assessments, technological improvements, plus whatever behavioural adjustments are needed to ‘bring us back to sustainability’. But we place too great an emphasis on the first two, ignoring the reasons for our current ‘misbehaviour’. We seldom ask what sorts of behavioural adjustments will ‘work’: what does it take to satisfy our profound human needs for ‘meaning’ and ‘identity’? This article proposes that some cultural maps serve these needs better than others, and that the competitive, hierarchical ‘map’ of the dominant ‘West’ contains behavioural expectations that fail to satisfy these needs. Yet calling anyone's ‘map’ into question is threatening. We face the perennial dilemma of changing ways of thinking without creating resentment. For this, we can look around the world to places where positive reconstruction is under way, to examples of cooperation and community building, using them as texts for sustainability.