The divide over environmental policy was not part of the political landscape when environmental concerns first became prominent in the public consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather, it emerged much later as vested interests, realising the implications of the policies necessary to counter environmental decline, pushed back hard, including by framing issues in terms of the ‘environment vs jobs’ dichotomy that reflects the dominant and still-powerful post-war paradigm, that of economic growth as progress.