Environmental Sustainability - The Concept

Sustainable development can be defined as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Our continuing consumption of oil is seriously compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Because the demand for oil increases every day and there is only a finite amount of it, we are bound to run out sometime. In the last few months, oil has affected the economy greatly. If, one day, every single oil rig announced that there was no oil left? The world would return to a very primitive state, because there would be hardly any energy. Our only option is to develop systems using renewable resources, like solar, or wind. However, despite the fact that the total amount of solar and wind energy available is many times our total energy consumption, it is not possible to harness all of this. A practical alternative is to consider using a reliable non-renewable source of energy while using the renewable sources to augment it. By the time the renewable resource runs out, we should have, ideally, switched increasingly to the renewable resource.