There is no such thing as a free lunch
I must be an extremely optimistic techno-idealogue (who doesn’t read the news and is unaware of the negative environmental trends around me). Unfortunately, I am not these things but I still believe ‘sustainability’ is an important idea that we all should subscribe to. There’s more than a little cognitive dissonance here.
A toe in the water: Australia gets its first Federal environment minister (1971) and the world comes together in Stockholm (1972)
The growing body of evidence, unfortunately, is that our world is not on a trajectory of sustainability. If anything, we are accelerating away from it. However, there was a time, no so long ago, when there appeared to be a growing international consensus that sustainability was a real and achievable goal.
I’m going to suggest to you that 1969 and drafting of the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is really when environmental policy began, and it owes much to a visionary political scientist named Professor Lynton Caldwell.