At times “sustainable living” is seen as too broad a goal for practical and realisable implementation. Most of us would like to make a positive contribution to the environment—we would like to "make a difference". Al Gore, in his recent whirlwind visit to Australia, spoke passionately about living a "carbon neutral" life, and the measures one can take to ensure that one puts back as much as one takes out of this planet’s delicate ecosystem.
Dr Wim Hafkamp, a visiting academic from the University of Rotterdam, is someone who is very passionate about living a life that is “sustainable". He has a background in environmental economics, with a PhD that concentrated on building models which looked at the interaction between the economy and the environment. In the Netherlands, Dr Hafkamp looked at how emissions generated by various activities affected air quality in different regions of the country.
Dr Hafkamp suggests that governments and private enterprise begin to pursue alternative policies on emissions, and that they start to work towards pollution reduction. One of the projects Dr Hafkamp was involved with, was modelling the economic effects of a more sustainable environmental policy at both an industry level, and at the level of individual firms. Heavy industry today faces more and more criticism about the role it can and should play in providing jobs and making consumer goods, on the one hand, and making more of an effort not to pollute and degrade the environment, on the other.
Dr Hafkamp brings up both the coal and car industries as examples of industries who are in denial about the damaging impact they can have. However, through his work with groups in these industries, Dr Hafkamp has found that some are willing to be proactive about the environment. He believes "the key thing is the shift in (industry’s) frame of mind, and all of a sudden new avenues open up as we have seen in industry since the late 1970s. The whole movement towards cleaner production, eco-design, pollution prevention are all industry generated, (it’s) not environmentalists having thought it up."
For Dr Hafkamp sustainable living is "something that is both individual and contextual". He takes a more holistic view of our place in the eco-system. Our interactions with, and our physical presence in, the eco-system means that the principles of sustainable living and sustainable development become inseparable. Dr Hafkamp believes that two things need to