Environmental Issues: An Overview

Abstract

Overall, global environmental trends are not reassuring. The health of the planet has deteriorated dangerously during the 20 years since Stockholm [the UN meeting on Environment and Development in Stockholm in 1972]…. Muddling through will not work. Either we turn things around quickly or the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-decline scenario will take over. The policy decisions we make in the years immediately ahead will determine whether our children live in a world of development or decline. There is no precedent for the change in prospect. Building an environmentally sustainable future depends on restructuring the global economy, major shifts in human reproductive behaviour, and dramatic changes in values and lifestyles. Doing all this quickly adds up to a revolution, one defined by the need to restore and preserve the earth’s environment. If this Environmental Revolution succeeds, it will rank with the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions as one of the great economic and social transformations in human history (Brown, 1992, p. 174).