Evidence for Hope

Evidence for Hope

Author: Nigel Cross

Publisher: Earthscan

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1853838543

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Since the first international environment conference in Stockholm in 1972, there has been unprecedented public concern for the future of the planet and a growing awareness that future development has to be sustainable. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has been at the heart of this growing agenda. In this volume, to mark the IIED's 30th anniversary, leading figures involved during this period draw on their accumulated experience to reflect on the lessons learned and to chart the path for future policy and practice. This covers the spectrum of policy areas from agriculture and resource management to energy, industry and institutional change. It offers an authoritative perspective on three decades of development and green debates, as well as a lively history of this unique institution.


The Age of Global Warming

The Age of Global Warming

Author: Rupert Darwall

Publisher: Quartet Books (UK)

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780704373396

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Rachel Carson's epoch-creating Silent Spring marked the beginnings of the environmental movement in the 1960s, its 'First Wave' peaking at the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The invention of sustainable development by Barbara Ward, along with Rachel Carson the founder of the environmental movement, created an alliance of convenience between First World environmentalism and a Third World set on rapid industrialization. The First Wave crashed in 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and decade-long energy crisis. Revived by a warming economy of the 1980s, environmentalism found a new, political champion in 1988: Margaret Thatcher. Four years later at the Rio Earth Summit, politics settled the science. One hundred and ninety-two nations agreed that mankind was causing global warming and carbon dioxide emissions should be cut. Rio launched rounds of climate change meetings and summits, with developing nations refusing to countenance any agreement restraining their greenhouse gas emissions--their blanket exemption from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leading to its rejection by the United States that year, refusing again twelve years later in Copenhagen. Despite proclaiming global warming a planetary emergency, Barack Obama ignored the Europeans to reach a toothless accord with the leaders of the developing world. Copenhagen therefore marked not just the collapse of the climate change negotiations, but something larger--an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the hands of the rising powers of the East.


Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future

Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future

Author: Iris Borowy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1135961220

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The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues. This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation. It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes. Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.


The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment

The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment

Author: Perrin Selcer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0231548230

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In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.


Only One Earth

Only One Earth

Author: Barbara Ward

Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 9780393301298

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Only One Earth remains a classic study of the environment on a global scale....The organization and subject matter of Down to Earth reflect the metamorphosis of the environmental issue in ten years. Walt Patterson, New Statesman"


Of Limits and Growth

Of Limits and Growth

Author: Stephen Macekura

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1107072611

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Of Limits and Growth offers new perspectives on environmentalism, post-1945 international history, and the origins of sustainability.


Rise of the International

Rise of the International

Author: Richard Devetak

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-05-06

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0192871641

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Rise of the International brings together scholars of International Relations and History to capture the emergence and development of the thought, the relations, and the systems that have come to be called international in western discourse.


Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future

Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future

Author: Iris Borowy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1135961298

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The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues. This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation. It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes. Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.


Barbara Ward

Barbara Ward

Author: Jean Gartlan

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2010-12-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1441155570

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The first major study of the immensely influential political economist Barbara Ward, drawing heavily on her own writings.


Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth

Author: Barbara Ward

Publisher: New York : Columbia University Press

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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Prospects for an integrated world community in view of contemporary progress in science and technology analyzed by a British economist.