Details of the Initiative
In “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the post-world of a highly developed technological civilization is represented. In the post-world, human beings continue to exist, and there is a civilization different from the present one in which the vestiges of technology are connected with a medieval lifestyle, but there is no state of nature that we see now as the natural environment has been completely destroyed by the ante-civilization.
The SDGs present goals to realize sustainable development unitedly in the fields of economy, society, and the environment. The sustainable development of economic activities in which a huge amount of energy is used is included in those goals. We now need to think seriously about the meaning of that.
I am rather pessimistic about the future of modern civilization. I think that the total burden that human beings have put on the Earth since the Industrial Revolution has already exceeded the limits of the self-regenerative capability of the global environment. I wonder if it is no longer possible for the natural environment on the Earth that supports our civilization to maintain the same state in the future as before. So, in my seminars and lectures, emphasis has started shifting from how to prevent environmental destruction to how human beings can survive in the world of a natural environment drastically changed owing to pollution and climate change.
