Sustainable Development, Agenda 21

The environmental depredation has reached such extreme proportions that if it continues unabated during 21st century, we could face the massive disappearance of animals and vegetables species, the widespread contamination of the planet, and the remarkable diminution of the life maintenance in the world. Since 1972, when was published the The limits to growth, the well-known Club of Rome report, it was warned that the Earth resources are exhaustible and perishable. This would have to impose limits to the economic activity that was increased voraciously with the acceleration of industrialization just after World War II. In June of that same year, it was celebrated in Stockholm the Conference on Human Environment, which expresses in its six first principles the importance of the natural resources (renewable and non-renewable) for the human beings, who must preserve them for the present and future generations. In Latin America the country's highest level of contamination during 1980-1995, due essentially by the industrial production, were Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. The sustainable development emerged in the eighties and it was beginning to proclaim the change of the destructive exploitation on the part of the society, for a rational exploitation that protects the environment. Recently, an instrument for the sustainable development implementation has arise, the Agenda 21, that conjugates integrally the three dimensions of the sustainable development (ecological, economic and social) and guarantees that any approach prevails among them.