An environmentally sustainable future

WE ARE often reminded of the need for sustainable development

– a phrase commonly used in our current vocabulary. How do we achieve it?

Our current environmental and other serious, challenges – including inequities in development efforts, and the threats of global warming and ozone depletion – show how individuals, communities and governments must come together and co-operate in order to address such common concerns.

Such crises call for a united action based on both scientific evidence and ethical considerations.

Genuine solutions to overcome such challenges, in the Baháí view, will require a globally-accepted vision for the future, based on unity, justice and willing co-operation among the nations, races, creeds, and classes of the human family.

Commitment to a higher moral standard will be essential. The

Baháí International Community, in one of its statements, asserts: “The profound and far-reaching changes, the unity and unprecedented co-operation, required to reorient the world toward an environmentally sustainable and just future, will only be possible by touching the human spirit, by appealing to those universal values which alone can empower individuals and peoples to act in accordance with the long-term interests of the planet and humanity as a whole.

“Once tapped, this powerful and dynamic source of individual and collective motivation will release such a profound and salutary spirit among the peoples of the Earth that no power will be able to resist its unifying force.”

Global co-operation is needed to eliminate human suffering and to ensure that everyone meets their basic human needs.

There will also be need for close co-operation among the local populations, through participatory groups and organisations, for the success of community development efforts if they are to be sustainable and equitable.

Furthermore, as the Bahá’í International Community states: “co-operation between countries is essential in eradicating the gross inequalities among nations that continue to destabilise the world”.

To cultivate an attitude of co-operation at all the levels of society, we need universal education in the oneness of humanity.

“At the same time, science and religion must be used in order to come up with effective strategies and plans for the kind of development we are seeking.

“In order to progress beyond a world community driven by a largely economic and utilitarian calculus, to one of shared responsibility for the prosperity of all nations,” says the Bahá’í International Community, the principle of oneness of humanity “must take root in the conscience of the individual. In this way, we come to recognise the broader human agenda – which subsumes those of climate change, poverty eradication, gender equality, development, and the like, and seeks to use both human and natural resources in a way that facilitates the progress and well-being of all people”.

Through universal education in the oneness of humanity, the attitudes necessary for co-operation at various levels of society can be cultivated. In the Baháí view, there will also be a need for a world federal system to enable mankind to arrange its economic, material, and social life with justice for all peoples and reverence towards the Earth.