Sustainable

When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek hupomenei. The Wycliffites meant the same as King James’s committees in 1611: to endure.

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Arthur Roffey

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Yet when David Cameron and his disciples speak of a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ they do not, I hope, mean that we must presume housing is something we must endure, a lasting blot on the landscape. What they do mean is by no means clear.

Sustainable development is a hooray term. Unsustainable development is not so much development that you can’t bear any longer, but development that runs down like a battery-driven rabbit, or poisons everything around it. Whether the development must be sustainable for ever is a different question.

Someone much to blame for visiting upon us the term sustainable development is Gro Harlem Brundtland, three times prime minister of Norway. The commission she chaired was asked by the UN in 1983 ‘to propose long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development to the year 2000 and beyond’. In 1987, its report, under the inspiring title Our Common Future, declared that sustainable development means ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. That might imply having your cake without eating it, or possibly cutting off your nose to save anyone else the trouble in future.

To an ecologist sustainable development means that a city should ‘include green wedges, corridors, stepping stones and pockets’ for plants and beasts to find a niche in, as someone suggested in the journal of the Town and Country Planning Association in 1998.