The Sacrifice for Our Planet

What we need to give up when it comes to working towards a sustainable future.

Question: What do we need to give up? Gro Harlem Brundtland: I do think that in the transport sector we need to understand that it's not always a good idea for single persons to use a car and to go driving on their own with just short timeframes between them completely overlooking the fact that they could, maybe combine with neighbors, with other in the family and be a little more forward looking with regard to the total impact of their pattern of movement because it has become in some countries something self-evident that each person has their own car and they move at independent times and so the link -- the whole transportation area I think a lot can happen that also has to do with changing habits. But of course, we will have much better cars, I'm sure we will have more and better railways, we will have better bus systems I many countries so that the private car is not a dominant in the future as the only way to move from one place to the other. Question: To what extent do you think modern western culture has contributed to the climate crisis? Gro Harlem Brundtland: Those things have contributed, no doubt. But even if you look at countries that are not at the upper level of all these kinds of tendencies, you also there have high energy use because of heating, because of a number of things that is not directly linked to consumerism in the less/more extravagant sense. But of course, there's another aspect that I want to mention. Now, in some countries the young people still have the habit of using a bicycle. They have a habit of walking to school, at least within a three, four, or five-kilometer limit. They are not used to always driving. I am a doctor, I am a public health physician. I really feel that the lack of movement of using your body to move and by that having this as a natural part of hour lifestyle. This has also been kind of pushed aside by the overuse of this tendency to just always think that even if you go 500 meters, you use your car. Question: Do you see the explosion in global population as a threat or an opportunity to sustainability? Gro Harlem Brundtland: I do think we have to be very much aware of the need to give families, especially women and girls the ability to have greater control over their own lives, to be able to plan an decide for how big families they want to have because we have experienced in so many countries about what happens when women get that possibility, when they get that power, when they get that education. And the access to family planning and a culture that respects the choices of families. So, we have to continue working on the perspectives of the Cairo Conference where these were basic assumptions because it is necessary broadly for human rights, for humanitarian efforts, also for sustainable development in a broader sense. It's not a good idea to have poor countries expand enormously with increasing poverty in many poor sectors of the population because they don't have access and opportunities to plan their own lives. Recorded on February 26, 2010