Sustainable Development?

Here's a quote from a recent article in Crisis discussing sustainability:

While recognizing that proponents of the New Paradigm do accept some notion of a divinity, the cardinal noted that theirs is but a “poetic and aesthetic god” that each individual makes up for him- or herself. This is certainly not the God of the Bible. Rather, it is evidence of a new global ethic that seeks to replace all previously known religions with a spirituality concerned with the global wellbeing of all human persons within a world order of “sustainable development”:

By sustainable development is meant a development where the different factors involved (food, health, education, technology, population, environment, etc.) are brought into harmony so as to avoid imbalanced growth and the waste of resources.

. . . .

In the New Paradigm, Cardinal Barragán asserts, “sustainable development” becomes the supreme ecological value. He said: It is spiritually without God, at the secular level. Its
ultimate objective is the viability of the present world, and man’s well-being in it. Practically speaking, it is a new secularist religion, a religion without God, or, if one wishes a new god, that would be the earth itself, to which the name Gaia is given. This divinity would have man as a subordinate element.... The series of values upheld by the New Paradigm are values subordinated to this diversity, which is translated into the supreme ecological value that it calls
sustainable development. And within this sustainable development is the supreme ethical objective of well-being.

According to Cardinal Barragán, the grave danger of this New Paradigm is its lack of an objective standard for truth. Consensus on what to do or not to do rests on subjective opinions, which in turn gives rise to an ethic or bioethics that has no consistency.

While the article discusses the influence of this "New Paradigm" upon the UN, the object of sustainable development is common in the U.S. in reference to land-use planning techniques. The idolization of sustainable development in any context creates a conflict with human dignity, subordinating the nature and dignity of man.

Through reason we derive the principle that sustainability is objectively good, but in a limited context. No effort of mankind will ever cause this world to be sustained forever and ultimately there must be some cause greater than sustaining this earth and its resources. An objective standard of truth, or Truth itself, orders and guides our understanding of sustainability, guarantees consistency, and protects the proper preeminence of man.

How do we apply this Truth to our subjective judgments concerning sustainable development? One suggestion: Remember your death, brother.