Environmental protection and sustainable development Sustainable development holds that development and environmental protection are interrelated and an organic whole. The Rio Declaration pointed out that "for sustainable development, environmental protection should be an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from this process". Sustainable development attaches great importance to environmental protection and regards environmental protection as one of the most basic purposes it actively pursues. Environmental protection is the watershed and touchstone to distinguish sustainable development from traditional development. 1. Sustainable development emphasizes development, which is a common and universal right of human beings. Both developed and developing countries should enjoy equal and inalienable rights to development, and development is more important to developing countries. Facts show that developing countries are facing the dual pressures of poverty and ecological deterioration. Poverty leads to ecological deterioration, which in turn aggravates poverty. Therefore, sustainable development is the top priority for developing countries. Only development can solve the disparity between the rich and the poor, provide the necessary technology and funds for the population explosion and ecological crisis, and finally move towards modernization and civilization. Second, environmental protection and sustainable development are closely related. Sustainable development regards environmental construction as an important content to realize development, because environmental construction can not only create many direct or indirect economic benefits for development, but also escort development and provide suitable environment and resources for development; Sustainable development regards environmental protection as one of the objective standards to measure the quality, level and degree of development, because modern development and reality are increasingly dependent on the support of environment and resources. Before people fully understand sustainable development, with the traditional development, the environment and resources are rapidly declining, and their support for development is becoming more and more limited. The higher the development, the more important the environment and resources are. Environmental protection can ensure the ultimate goal of sustainable development, because modern development is not only full of material and spiritual consumption, but also unremitting efforts to build a comfortable, safe, clean and beautiful environment as an important goal. Third, sustainable development holds that everyone has legal environmental rights in environmental protection. Environmental rights and obligations are relative, a right to others and an obligation to oneself. People's environmental rights and obligations are equal and unified. This right should be respected and maintained by others. Fourth, sustainable development requires people to abandon the traditional production and consumption patterns. We must promptly and decisively change the traditional mode of development-that is, first reduce and then eliminate the mode of production and consumption that cannot make the development sustainable. On the one hand, it requires people to invest as little as possible and produce more; On the other hand, people are required to use as much as possible and emit less. Therefore, we must correct the mistake of increasing investment, consumption and output at the expense of the environment in the past, so that development depends less on limited resources and is more organically coordinated with environmental capacity. 5. Sustainable development requires accelerating the research and popularization of new environmental protection technologies, solving the environmental crisis and changing the traditional production and consumption patterns. The fundamental way out is to develop science and technology. Only by using advanced science and technology in large quantities can we greatly reduce the energy consumption and material consumption of unit production, realize the development mode of less input and more output, reduce the dependence on resources and energy, and reduce the pollution load of the environment. 6. Sustainable development also requires raising people's general environmental awareness. The premise of implementing sustainable development is that people must change their traditional attitude towards nature-that is, from the utilitarian point of view, we can use it for ourselves, and we can develop and use it at will as long as it is necessary for human beings.