Introduction

Abstract

During the middle and late 1960s, concern about the way the world might be going began to move out of the arena of academic debate amongst specialists, and became a topic of almost everyday interest to millions of people. Concern about mankind’s disruption of the natural balance of ‘the environment’ brought the term ‘ecology’ into widespread use, though not always with the meaning to be found in the dictionary, and fears that world population might be growing so rapidly that very soon we would run out of food, resulting in mass starvation and a disastrous collapse of civilisation, helped to make books such as The Limits to Growth bestsellers in the early 1970s. Today, quite rightly, decisions on long-term policy with widespread repercussions — most notably, those concerning nuclear energy planning — are a subject of equally widespread public discussion. But all too often such debate focuses on specific issues without the problems ever being related effectively to an overall vision of where the world is going and how it is going to get there.