Sustainable development and Turkey's environmental policy

Sustainable Development Concept as expressed in Brundtland Report is "paths of human progress which meet the needs and aspirations of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs" and as "a process of change in which exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations" Sustainable development concept has three ingredients. The first element is unsustainabilitiy of the present growth, the second one is satisfying the present needs, in other words, providing for all people certain standards of life and the eradication of poverty, the third one is ensuring the next generations? life meanwhile maintaining the pressure on environment on a level not menacing civilization. Thus, the concept -sustainability- which has the economic and ethical aspects has also close relations with the ecology, the discipline that researches the relations between organisms and their environment. With the advent of ?Enlightenment Era? technologic developments, division of labor and specialization which fuelled the industrialization race between the nations by causing consumption that focused previously on certain cities or seen on a local base, started to expand gradually. Today, Neoclassical and Keynesian approaches prevail in Western communities. For success, the basic precondition for both of these approaches is economical growth. But, as ?economic growth? amounts to producing and consuming more by dint of industrialization; producing more wastes by providing more crude materials from nature, occur unavoidably as a result of this process. In economical circles mentioned above, the environment deteriorating and the natural resources depleted is neither taken in to consideration nor evaluated adequately. Consequently, our economical activities are not compatible with ecology. As environmental questions occur unexpectedly, in other words on an unseen manner, this entails to be adopted inductionist approaches in the discipline. The definitions and the explanations concerning sustainable development were revealed in Brundtland report in which passes the expression ??. In a world where inequality and poverty take place will usually be inclined to ecological and other crises?. The first inductionist approach on international level was adopted in the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987. In this conference environment and development strategies were checked out profoundly and an 21st century agenda was defined. In our country and in world environmental concept has been referred as a luxury or fiction and the problem was evaluated within the approach called ?develop at first, and then solve the environmental questions?. The stance taken on, after Rio Declaration, emphasize that neither the resources nor the rapid technologic development is satisfactory for developing countries to maintain the policy of contaminating now and purifying later, as far as time concerned.