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13 NZJPIL 1 (2015)
New Thinking on Sustainabilty

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FOREWORD: NEW THINKING ON

SUSTAINABILITY

Catherine J Jorns Magallanes*





I      INTRODUCTION

    We all depend on the natural environment for our survival. Our food, water and air is derived from
the natural world around us, as are our material comforts. Our fundamental dependence is obvious,
when we think about it, yet we have also managed to create many communities and societies
worldwide where this dependence can be forgotten-where we can live comfortably, buying what we
need, divorced from and not having to worry about its natural origins. With the help of modem
technology, we have been able to take for granted the existence of such ecosystem services, and thus
assume that they will continue-and that our societies will continue-in at least as good a position as
they are now.

    However, scientific assessments show that we are using more of the world's resources than can be
replenished, given the rate we keep taking them. Every year we are destroying more and more of the
world's bio-capacity, which makes it harder for our ecosystems to even provide the same level of
service as the year before. To meet growing human populations and their growing levels of wants and
needs, we use (and pollute) more and more land, water and air each year, leaving less and less for
other species on this planet. Unfortunately, we are also using up the planet's resources at a rate which
means that they will not be available to meet the needs of future generations. Our current way of living
is ecologically unsustainable. Worse, we are altering the physical state of the planet in a way that it
will make it significantly harder for future generations to survive at all. If we are to fulfil argued duties
to future generations, not to mention argued responsibilities to the survival of other species and the
earth's ecosystems on a larger scale, we need to change our actions and we need new systems or rules
for regulating our actions. In terms of law, we need new thinking on how to define, require and enforce
true, ecological sustainability.

    In February 2014, Petra Butler and I organised a conference at the Victoria University of
Wellington Law School that was designed to address such new legal thinking on sustainability. This
Journal issue contains articles from several of the key presentations from the conference. The
background to the issues addressed, the conference itself, and then this Journal issue are addressed
below.


*   Senior Lecturer in Law, Victoria University of Wellington; BA, LLB(Hons) Well, LLM Yale.

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