No sustainability without survival

Excerpt

I would like to highlight the environmental research and education program which my co-workers and I were going to conduct on the basis of results and discussion obtained in the 21st COE program¹ under the leadership of Prof. Masayuki Horio (Horio 2007). The former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had reformed the conventional Japanese Society, which was mired in a sense of helplessness with a long economic recession, with the slogan ‘No Economic Recovery without Structural Reconstruction’. We named the slogan of our research/education program ‘No Sustainability without Survival’ after Koizumi. The fourth IPCC report (released Feb ‘07) has clearly stated that global climate change has showed the sign of an impending crisis in the last 5 years, and our premonition of ‘No Sustainability without Survival’ has become a real possibility. …