An Investigation on the Historical Factors led to the Conceptual Origin of Sustainable Development

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development emerged as a result of an effort to direct two longstanding different means of thoughts into one direction. It accounts to the stream of thoughts in respect of humanly centralized physical development and ecologically centralized environmental preservation. There are various historical events which led to bring these streams up to one single direction. These events could be identified in the fields of social, economical, political and environmental aspects. As a general result of the above, the emergence of a sustainable development concept of the orthodox paradigm took place. The objective of this research is to investigate in to the historical factors that led to the emergence of this concept. This research was carried out on the lines of qualitative research methodologies based on secondary data. Secondary data were gathered by way of scrutinizing information from various sources of books, magazines, internet and web sites. In accordance with the above data, the events that led to the emergence of the concept of sustainable development were differentiated clearly and each of them were streamlined periodically. Subsequently, while studying through the inter-­‐relationships of these events, an investigation was carried out to ascertain the manner in which the background was created for the concept of sustainable development. The circumstances that led to the emergence of sustainable development could be identified as two major sectors. The main sector is environmental disasters that felt the necessity of a sustainable developmental concept. Secondly, it was identified as environmental seminars, conferences and organizations that pioneered toward the emergence of the concept of sustainable development. Most of these massive environmental catastrophes could be identified as man-­‐made disasters. Most out of them could be reckoned as technological hazards too. They are mostly centralized in developed countries. Few examples for such situations are discovery of love canal, atonic explosion of Chernobyl, contamination of mercury into Minamata Bay and leakage of oil in St. Barbara sea etc. The main reason for the emergence of sustainable development concept that led to important events such as seminars, conferences and organizations are due to the environmental calamities that took place worldwide. Accordingly environmental disasters and environmental conferences are inter-­‐related.