E3G

Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World

By Tom Burke

But we learned too late that we needed to invest some of the proceeds of economic growth to maintain the social conditions necessary for it to continue. Our failure to do so in good time let loose the massive tide of social tensions that swept through every country in Europe at the end of the 19th Century. As a consequence we spent the first half of the 20th Century deciding empirically whether Communism or Fascism was our preferred form of totalitarianism.

By the middle of the last century there was no longer any argument over the need for nations to invest in health, education and social security in order to underpin their economies. The purpose of public policy expanded from simply facilitating economic growth to promoting economic development, that is, growth plus welfare. The arguments over how much welfare to provide and how best to provide it will continue for a very long time but very few today believe that governments can ensure prosperity without such investment.

As population and prosperity accelerated in the aftermath of the Second World War the world entered an era of very rapid economic development. Within two decades a new debate began.

As air and water quality deteriorated, wastes accumulated, the deserts spread, cities sprawled and natural habitats and the plants and animals that lived in them began to disappear, doubts emerged as to whether the planet could continue to provide the resources necessary to maintain the momentum of development. Reinforced by the graphic pictures from space of a blue and white planet alone in the darkness of the universe these growing doubts led to the first of the great global conferences that punctuated the last decades of the 20th Century.

The Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 defined for the first time an agenda for action to protect the planet’s environment. Over the following thirty years it became increasingly clear that we now needed to invest some of the proceeds of our burgeoning economic development in maintaining the environmental conditions for that development or it would not occur. In other words, economic development must become sustainable development if prosperity and security were to be ensured in the 21st Century.

Let me recapitulate this argument.