In the report those needs are anchored in international treaties and other statements, so that the specific targets to feed, house, nurture, educate, and employ are something more than the opinions of two dozen American scientists. Using the hopes of international diplomats is only a marginal improvement, of course. The idea of a sustainability transition is, I think, both more realistic and more optimistic than the related idea of sustainable development. Their report, entitled Our Common Future , appeared in 1987. In the dozen years since that influential definition was articulated, it has been adopted by corporations, governments, and citizen groups around the world.
Sustainable development is a wonderful and essential hope.
With the notion of a sustainability transition , we hope to re-connect science and values to institutions' commitments to sustainable development. This is so for an analytical reason. Specifying where we want to end up, two generations down the road, is a way to cut through the complexity and uncertainties of trying to predict where today's trends might carry us. So when I call for serious educational attention to values, I am anticipating a need for precisely articulated goals. That is, I am an optimist, expecting debates that go beyond whether to save nature, to the far harder question of how and how much and in what sense we intend for nature to remain beyond the bounds of human modification.