Māris kļaviņŠ, azamat azizov, JĀnis zaļoksnis environment, pollution, development: the case of uzbekistan

 12.1.2.  Limits to development
Considering the self-regeneration potential of population and 
industrial capital, they can be viewed as the driving forces of the 
world system’s exponential growth. Society promotes their growth 
in every way for the purpose of ensuring production.
The number of population and capital have a potential that 
ensures their production and reproduction. This potential cannot 
be realised without a continuous supply of energy and materials or 
without a continuous removal of pollution.

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12. Sustainable Development
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People need food, water and air for their growth, sustenance of 
their bodies and procreation. Production, in its turn, needs energy, 
water and air as well as huge amounts of minerals, chemicals and 
biological material to produce goods, to facilitate human life, to 
maintain the system of production and ensure its increase. In accord-
ance with fundamental laws, people – and plant-consumed materials 
and energy do not vanish. Materials can be recycled, or they turn 
into waste and pollution, whereas energy is dispersed as heat.
Materials and energy consumed by population and capital are 
extracted from the Earth, returning waste and heat to the Earth 
instead. There is a constant flow from the global sources of energy 
and materials via economy to the environ ment, where waste and 
pollution are accumulated. However, there are definite limits to the 
increase rate of the use of materials and energy and the resultant 
production of waste, so that it would not harm people, economy or 
the Earth’s absorption processes, regeneration and self-regulation.
All resources that people use – food, water, iron, phosphorus, oil 
and thousands of others – are limited in terms of both their sources 
and resulting emissions. These limits are complex, since both the 
sources and emissions constitute part of a dynamic, interrelated and 
single system – the Earth. There are short-term limits, for example, 
the amount of oil in a reservoir stored for a specific purpose; there 
are also long-term limits, for example, the amount of oil in the 
Earth. Sources and discharges can interact, while the planet can, 
through natural processes, influence both the sources and pollutant 
emissions. Thus, soil can be both a source for food production and 
a recipient of acidic precipitations resulting from air pollution. The 
capability of soil to perform a particular function largely depends on 
the performance of other functions.
To  introduce  some  clarity  in  this  complexity  and  to  define 
long-term or equilibrium limits to development, the World Bank 
economist Herman Daly has offered three simple regularities:
1)  for renewable resources – soil, water, forests, fish – the rate of 
long-term use must not exceed that of their regeneration. For 
example, catch of fish is viable if the fishing rate is in balance 
with the reproduction of the remaining fish population;
2)  for non-renewable resources – fossil fuels, high-concentration 
mineral ores, natural underground water – the rate of their 
balanced use must not exceed that of the use of renewable 
resources to replace the non-renewable resources. For 
example,  the  use  of  oil  fields  would  be  balanced  if  part  of 
profits  were  systematically  invested  in  the  production  of 
solar panels or planting trees. This means that when oil 
reserves are exhausted, the flow of renewable energy will be 
sustained;

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286 
ENVIRONMENT, POLLUTION, DEVELOPMENT:  THE CASE OF UZBEKISTAN
3) the rate of pollutant emissions must not exceed the rate of 
ab sorp  tion of pollution or the rate of rendering it harmless 
to the en vi ronment. For example, a discharge of wastewater 
into a lake or a river is admissible only if the rate of 
discharge corresponds to the ecosystem’s natural capability 
of self-purification.
There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that development 
and growth take place at the expense of irreversible depletion or 
degradation of the existing resources.
The nature of human development demonstrates that people 
do not use the Earth’s resources and possibilities of development 
in a balanced way. Soil, surface waters and groundwater, wetlands, 
nature and the environ ment are degrading. Even in the places where 
renewable resources seem to be plenty (for example, North American 
forests or European soils), the quality and diversity of these resources 
and their potential of survival can be questioned. Mineral and fossil 
fuel resources are running out. Moreover, there is no plan and no 
satisfactory capital investment programme to sustain industry when 
fossil fuel will have run out. Pollution is accumulating – pollution 
emission  has  started  to  overtake  the  flow  of  substances  in  their 
biogeochemical cycles, and the chemical composition of the atmo-
sphere is changing.
If only a single resource or several resources run out while there is 
sufficient amount of others, we might presume that growth will con-
tinue by replacing one resource with another (although there are limits 
even to such replacement). However, if many sources are depleted 
and  pollution  flows  are  overloaded,  there  is  no  doubt  that  human 
consumption of materials and energy has gone too far. Humanity will 
have overstepped the limits of sustainable development.
These limits apply to the amount of raw materials that has been 
used up over a given period of time. Humanity has accelerated the 
consumption of resources not only in terms of space, rate of flows or 
limits; this is also true concerning human population growth.