Human Progress Towards Equitable Sustainable Development: A Philosophical Exploration

This paper suggests a new paradigm for understanding and managing global human progress in the context of overall sustainability of our planet. It deals with the complex interrelationship between society, technology, and the environment from the global perspective. The authors use the Cascaded –S Curve Model to explore humanity progress and the challenge of sustainability from the first human to the contemporary.  They observed that major historical and teleological human progress tends to occur in five critical stages:  the existing level of progress, crisis-breakthrough stage, breakthrough education stage, transformative action stage, and a new level of progress stage.

The paper characterizes contemporary human level of progress as globalization based on a dogmatic free market economy that neglects the sustainability of the human civilization, which are in the edge of exhausting non-renewable resources and deterioration of the environment below the carrying capacity that can support the future generation of humankind. The emerging reality that the developing world cannot reach a level of consumption of the present developed world and the developed world will not be able to retain the present level of consumption is a sufficient trigger for the five stage human progress towards equitable global sustainable development.  The collective will of the family of nations to manage such transition from today’s existing level of progress based on extractive consumerism to the new level of progress based on renewable sustainability requires crisis-breakthrough, education-breakthrough and transformative action by all stakeholders – every human being.