by Dorothy Zhang
Coming back from Boston to Lausanne, I was asked what I have learnt during the unique World Student Community on Sustainable Development 2005 Annual Meeting. At that instant, unexpectedly there wasnâ€TMt anything coming out of my mind. “Learn? What did I learn?†I asked myself several times. After being so touched by the conference, how come I cannot answer this question?
Well, it is most probably because Iâ€TMve got too much to learn, eh… not exactly “to learn†, but “learn to know†. I learnt to know how valuable our resources are; I learnt to know the pain of people suffering from environmental and social disasters; I learnt to know how serious global warming is a problem; I learnt to know how weak the intergovernmental cooperation is in facing issues of sustainability.
We are here creating values; we create and give values to scarce resources found in many different regions of the world. Perhaps I knew how precious they are before attending the meeting. But then, the difference is I found “precious†is no longer enough to describe their exact worth. We are aware that unsustainability is almost everywhere in our daily life, and we see more clearly the impacts of globalisation - “one pollute, everywhere contaminated†. We know that sustainability issues are so much multi-disciplinary, with the concerns covering social, environmental, political, economical issues, which are also multi-layered in the respective field. We know sustainability is a concept which penetrates deeply in our every day life.
Unluckily still, worldwide, there are not many people who know about it - in schools, in companies, in governments, in families. Sustainability is a vast concept and this leads to difficulties in explaining what exactly it is. However, people are curious to learn about its true meaning. I often hear from people, the intellectual ones, that they hear so many different stories about sustainability, however, they still find it hard to get the most general idea.
Perhaps there is not a general definition of sustainability — apart from describing the mission of sustainability — “Do not sacrifice the rights of our future generations for OUR development†. Sustainability is buried inside the behaviour of everybody which has evolved over the past thousand years and is so obstinate to change. Although we say that changing consumption behaviour and changing lifestyles are the ways that help people become more sustainable, it is just despairingly hard.
Fortunately we are here, all representatives who have the chance to attend this meeting; we are here, standing for a force from the student communities, from the global youth, of the south and the north, standing for the awakening of the next generation. We are looking for solutions to remit, solutions to prolong the life of our planet and solutions to the human existence itself. We are not strong, yet not weak. We are not saying because of our involvement, unsustainable issues would be changed dramatically. What we are advocating is simply that the future of this planet belongs to us and depends on our ability to change.
Hopefully together one day we will meet again to see the sunrise from behind the top of the highest mountains of our planet and find the sun shining and smiling to us and the earth, with 100% satisfaction seeing the equilibrium between human beings and the nature .
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