Sustainability in Practice

In class last Friday I believe, we took a look at the development of Sustainability over the last few decades. We covered what legislation has been passed, scientific reports have been given and what meeting scientists and countries have had to try and deal with climate change. The push for sustainability began in the late 60's when a Silent Spring was published by Rachel Carson linking pesticide use and its harm to animals and humans. We talked about the first Earth Day in 1970 as well as the OPEC Oil Crisis in 1973 as well as the formation of Green Peace in Canada 2 years before. its surprising that the hole in the Ozone layer was originally discovered back in 1985 and that at the end of the day, we haven't done much to fix it over the past 25 years. Chernobyl in 1986 was a major point of interest as it showed mankind the dangers of "clean" nuclear energy. 1991 was when Canada's Cod Fishery collapsed. The over fishing wiped out all the cod and we still see not signs of the cod making a comeback. We went through all the COP's (Conference of Parties to Convention on Climate Change) as well as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the U.S. withdrawal in 2001. Over the years mankind has done alot to find out how the world works, how we affect it and what we have to do to save it. The class was a brief look back at all we have done up until the recent years.