Why Should We Learn About Sustainable Cities?

Overview Quotes

• "Scientists have produced the first comprehensive evidence that the diversity of butterflies, birds and plants is on the decline in the UK. The earth is approaching its sixth major extinction event."
• "You could say that this latest one is an organic event; that one form of life has become so dominant on Earth that through its over-exploitation and its wastes, it eats, destroys and poisons the others."
• "Naturalists now think that extinction rates are a hundred time greater than the natural ‘background’ rate because of pollution, habitat destruction, hunting, agriculture, global warming and population growth." (The Guardian, March 19 2004)
• "We have 6 billion people on the planet…5 billion in developing countries. The 1 billion in the developed world has 80% of the assets, the 5 billion have 20%…… the inequities are considerable and we have 2.8 billion who are living on under $2 a day, and 1.2 billion under $1 a day. And we find the fact in so many parts of the world that the equity is in fact diminishing in terms of rich and poor rather than improving."
• ".....we're now spending 1,000 billion dollars a year on military expenditure.. up from the 800 billion dollars that we had in 1999 and we're spending..something over 300 billion dollars in subsidies and tariffs on agricultural production. And on achieving our objectives (addressing poverty, inequity, environmental degradation etc.) .. 56 billion, of which only half goes in cash to developing countries."
• "Today, roughly half the world, 2.8 billion people, are under the age of 24, and 1.5 billion are under the age of 15 and we have 2 billion more people coming to add to the planet, all of whom will be young before they are old. And this is an enormous resource that we have, if we can take it and have it used. But it's also an enormous danger."
  
  (from a speech by James Wolfensohn, President The World Bank Group, London February 16 2004, conference Making Globalization Work for All)
• "How can humankind respond to the enormous challenges we are currently facing? How can educators help develop an understanding of "one world" and our roles as global citizens? “Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that sounds abstract – sustainable development – and turn it into reality for all the world’s people.”
  Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations