Reflective paper Research Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Reflective - Research Paper Example The fear over environmental sustainability arises because the global population of about ten billion people must decently feed and shelter without damaging environment, (Goodland, 2002, p. 1). The possibility of sustaining this size of population while keeping the environment intact is lean because the social and economic needs of this population size exceed the carrying capacity of the environment, (Marquart-Pyatt, 2010). More importantly, the economic sector (the corporate) is the chief culprit in derailing environmental sustainability. I believe environmental sustainability directly affects economic sustainability because economic growth derives its inputs from the environment, (Goodland, 2002, p. 2). This relationship has implication on the natural resources that sustains the economic growth. Economic growth is infinite but the ecosystem that supports the economic growth is finite. This means that economy continues to grow in terms of rate of production and consumption of products while the environmental capacity from which raw materials are derived remains constant or reduces with increased extraction. However, part of this limited environmental capacity, the renewable resource, has ability to replenish, (Goodland, 2002, p. 2). Renewable resource partly provides mechanism of adopting environmental sustainability. The other portion, non-renewable resource, lack ability to replenish. Implementing environmental sustainability policy is challenging because only part of the whole environment is able to replenish wher eas the depletion process affects both. In respect to this, I would propose three rules for environmental sustainability. The first is the rule for the output, which stipulates that the quantity of waste emitted from a social or economic activity must be within the assimilative capacity of the local environment without compromising its subsequent absorptive capacity for similar wastes