Twenty-first International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

To realize sustainability, it is necessary to incorporate a contemporary version of Indigenous thinking about problems and solutions. Western science has made numerous advances by reducing its scope to narrow concerns, assuming general approaches apply everywhere. Failure to analyze holistically and long term has caused a complex environmental crisis, along with social, economic, and political imbalance. That situation has been improving but needs to advance further. It is necessary to undertake holistic systems thinking, noting how everything is interconnected with varying degrees of independence in an interlinking whole of numerous, often overlapping, systems and subsystems. While everything is related, each place is different. Valid general approaches often require significant adaptation to be applied in specific places. Policies need to be long term, with short and medium term considerations. Since knowledge is always limited, risks must be carefully weighed before acting, and actions regularly reviewed and adjusted for changing circumstances and new learnings. This is most obvious concerning the physical environment, but is equally so in social, economic and political matters. Indeed, the environmental and socio-political-economic need to be seen as a whole. Since knowledge is limited, good policy can only be made with the participatory input of all concerned, with political and economic power relatively equal to ensure balanced outcomes. If policy of all kinds is made from this perspective, so far as possible, with ongoing learning and redirecting thought and efforts as events and policies unfold, reasonable sustainability is possible in all spheres.