The 1970s: the foundation of modern environmentalism
The 1980s: defining sustainable development
The 1990s: implementing sustainable development
2000 and beyond: reviewing the agenda
The environment has always been critical
to life but concerns over the balance between human life and the environment
assumed international dimensions only during the 1950s. In the years that
followed, supposedly unconnected pieces of a global jigsaw puzzle began
to fit together to reveal a picture of a world with an uncertain future.
Paradigm-breaking books and articles such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
(Carson 1962) and Garrett Hardin's 'The Tragedy of the Commons' (Hardin
1968) galvanized individual countries and the international community
into action. A series of catastrophes added fuel to the environmental
fire: thalidomide caused congenital deformations in babies, the Torrey
Canyon spilled oil along France's picturesque northern coast, and Swedish
scientists charged that the death of fish and other organisms in thousands
of the country's lakes resulted from the long-range transport of air pollution
from Western Europe.
| The tragedy of the commons |
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'The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private
property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters
surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the
commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive
laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to
treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.'
Source: Hardin 1968
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At the end of the 1960s, the voice of environmental
concern was heard almost uniquely in the West. In the communist world,
the relentless destruction of the environment in the name of industrialization
continued unabated. In developing countries, environmental concerns were
regarded as Western luxuries. 'Poverty is the worst form of pollution,'
held India's Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi, who played a key role in orienting
the agenda of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm
in 1972, towards the concerns of the developing countries (Strong 1999).
'We hold that of all things in the world, people are the most precious,'
said Tang Ke, leader of the Chinese delegation to the Stockholm conference
(Clarke and Timberlake 1982).
In the early 1970s, attention was focused first on the biophysical environment,
for example, on issues of wildlife management, soil conservation, water
pollution, land degradation and desertification - and people were considered
as the root cause of such problems. In the West, there were (and, to some
extent, still are) two principal schools of thought about the causes of
environmental degradation: one school blamed greed and the relentless
pursuit of economic growth; the other blamed population growth. As one
commentator put it, 'Unabated pollution and unstabilized population are
real threats to our way of life and to life itself' (Stanley Foundation
1971).
These views were encapsulated in the most famous study of the time, the
Club of Rome's computer model of the global future which attracted worldwide
attention. The Club of Rome was a group of some 50 self-appointed 'wise
men' (and women) who met regularly to try to put the world to rights,
much as did the Pugwash group of scientists in relation to the Cold War.
Published as The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome model analysed five
variables - technology, population, nutrition, natural resources and environment.
Its main conclusion was that, if current trends continued, the global
system would 'overshoot' and collapse by the year 2000. If that were not
to happen, both population and economic growth would have to cease (Meadows
and Meadows 1972). Although The Limits to Growth has been heavily criticized,
it publicized for the first time the concept of outer limits - the idea
that development could be limited by the finite size of the Earth's resources.
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