Sustainable Development is the most significant concept that all kinds of people must deeply consider its implication in modern society. The concept was originated by Mrs. Brundtland who chained the World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987. The concept has become subject of discussion very often and in various occasions since then, but without concluding any practical policy or activity to satisfy the concept. As a result, some people starts insisting that the concept is just an illusion which can not be realized and sometimes deceive the masses.
This insistence is absolutely wrong. The concept, Sustainable Development, is not mentioning the ways along which people can actually achieve the goal. On the contrary, it is proposing an equation that must be solved urgently in order to avoid the concurrent global disasters of natural environment and human society. The definition of the concept is clear but solution of the equation proposed within the concept is difficult to solve.
More definitely, it should be said that Mrs. Brundtland told us that there is no solution in our society if we proceed on the same way that we did in the past. Some fundamental changes are requested. They are international relations, industrial policies, competition in the market, policies for material and energy resources, official aids for developing countries, and rather strange to say, life styles of people. How can we moderate them in a harmonic way? We do not have any feasible way to cope with them concurrently.
Some comprehensive proposals to solve the equation of Sustainable Development are highly requested. They seem to be integrated ones that involve national science, engineering, social science, medical science and humanities. It is desirable that those separated researchers in different academic domains would come together to communicate each other and to construct a unique proposal to be opened to the general society. It should be pointed out here,that for the integration of different academic domains, the domain-specific academic conclusions must be followed up by practical actions.
For such follow-up, we may need new engineering, such as social engineering and humanity engineering, both of them will be doubtlessly based on social science and humanities, being similarly composed the relationship between natural science and engineering.
EcoDesign 2001 will show a sound step to solve the different equation of Sustainable Development from various aspects of disciplinary and interdisciplinary researches. We heartily hope that you will get unbounded information about Sustainable Development from the Conference, and possibly contribute it for further step of progress by your thoughts in the particular scientific domains.
Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, Symposium Chair
Chairman, The Science Council of Japan
(C)1999-2001 Sec, EcoDesign
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Last modified on 2001/12/07 11:13
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