Sustainable development - all you need to know

Once again, in his National Post column on Friday, Peter Foster set his critical sights on ‘sustainable development’. He observed that critics of the election of Zimbabwe’s Francis Nhema as head of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development have largely missed the point. While Nhema’s election is bad enough - what is far more deserving of criticism is the very notion of ‘sustainable development’ itself. His bottom line:

It is deeply ironic that the commission should only be brought into disrepute by the appointment of a witless representative from a banana-peel republic, not for the muddleheaded and/or dangerous nonsense for which it stands.

A few more quotes [emphasis mine]:

The definition of 'sustainable development' -- meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the needs of the future-- was hatched by the UN's 1987 Brundtland Commission.

The definition manages to be at once bland, meaningless, utopian and dangerous. How can we know, much less add up, the "needs" of everybody on earth? How can we possibly gauge what the needs of "the future" will be?

Canada 's maestro of multinational multi-tasking, Maurice Strong, was a key member of Brundtland. ....It is essentially yet another of the sleeper cells set up to pursue Mr. Strong's impossible dream.

....as Mr. Strong has said without attracting sufficient laughter, what the world needs is a UN-based system to manage literally everything.

If anthropogenic global warming represents the mother of all management problems, sustainable development represents the matriarch of all political pretensions.

Sustainable development, like its semantic sister, corporate social responsibility, is merely the failed socialist wolf in the emperor's new sheepskin.

In short, reasons we should all recoil in horror from ‘sustainable development’:

• It’s socialist utopianism involving global central planning;
• Like most socialist ideas it’s not workable, even in theory;
• Maurice Strong was a key figure in hatching the idea;
• The U.N. is enthusiastic about it;