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"Japan has often been cited as an example of a nation which is achieving the\r\nobjectives of'sustainable development' as advocated by the Brundtland Commission.\r\nVarious commentators believe that Japan attained rapid economic growth (at least until the\r\ncurrent economic crisis which began in the early 1990s) while simultaneously protecting its\r\nenvironment, particularly after the oil crisis in 1973. However, this perspective ignores the\r\nfact that Japan's economic 'miracle' still involves the consumption of large quantities of\r\nlow-entropy natural resources, and makes heavy use of the ecosphere's assimilative\r\ncapacity for high-entropy wastes.\r\nMonetary analyses are excessively abstracted from biophysical reality and are\r\ntherefore incapable of providing ecologically meaningful indices of sustainable\r\ndevelopment. Various biophysical approaches to assessment of sustainability have been\r\nproposed to fill the gap. In this dissertation, I use one of these, 'ecological footprint\r\nanalysis,' to reassess the Japanese success story. The ecological footprint (EF) of a\r\nspecified population has been defined as \"the aggregate area of land and water ecosystems\r\nrequired continuously to produce the resource inputs and to assimilate the resource\r\noutputs of that population wherever on earth the land/water may be located.\" It provides\r\na useful sustainability indicator in the form of the difference between a given country's\r\necological footprint and its domestic area of ecologically productive land/water. The gap\r\nbetween the two represents that country's 'ecological deficit' or 'sustainability gap.'\r\nData from 1880 indicate that the per capita Japanese EF in the pre-industrial era was\r\nabout 0.4 hectares (ha). By 1991 it had risen to 4.7 ha per person. Far from 'decoupling\r\nfrom nature,' the historic trend has seen a ten-fold increase in Japan's per capita load on\r\n\r\nthe ecosphere. Japan is running a massive ecological deficit with the rest of the world.\r\nMoreover, since there are only about 1.5 ha of ecologically productive land and 0.5 ha of\r\necologically productive ocean per capita on Earth, Japanese material standards cannot be\r\nextended to the entire world population without depleting natural resource stocks. I\r\nconclude that the current level and form of Japanese resource consumption would be\r\nunsustainable if every country tried to do the same. Global society needs to consider\r\nalternative development paths that will reduce resource consumption by the inhabitants of\r\nhigh-income countries while enhancing their quality of life."@en
<https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0099453>