Sustainable development of humanity: joint responsibility for the future

The paper focuses on the new place of humans in the modern world: their technological power and the ensuing global environmental crisis. It recognizes sustainable development to be a strategy for humanizing the civilizational progress of humanity in the 21st century. It is revealed that the idea of sustainable development opens the prospect of constructing new models of a globalized world where self-organization of society will be based on real humanism. Enactment of models of balanced development is based on the ethics of responsibility for the life of both present and future generations. Evidence is provided that joint responsibility is in line with the strategy of sustainable development, demanding that technological progress should be environmentally friendly and socially equitable for con- temporary and future generations.