Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Setting the scene
The nations of the world came together in Rio
de Janeiro in June 1992 at the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED)—dubbed the Earth Summit—to try to
reach consensus on the best way to slow down,
halt and eventually reverse ongoing
environmental deterioration. The Summit
represented the culmination of two decades of
development in the study of environmental issues,
initiated at the United Nations Conference on
the Human Environment held in Stockholm in
1972. Stockholm was the first conference to draw
worldwide public attention to the immensity of
environmental problems, and because of that it
has been credited with ushering in the modern
era in environmental studies (Haas
et al.
1992).
The immediate impact of the Stockholm
conference was not sustained for long. Writing
in 1972, the climatologist Wilfrid Bach expressed
concern that public interest in environmental
problems had peaked and was already waning.
His concern appeared justified as the
environmental movement declined in the
remaining years of the decade, pushed out of the
limelight in part by growing fears of the impact
of the energy crisis. Membership in
environmental organizations—such as the Sierra
Club or the Wilderness Society—which had
increased rapidly in the 1960s, declined slowly,
and by the late 1970s the environment was seen
by many as a dead issue (Smith 1992). In the
1980s, however, there was a remarkable
resurgence of interest in environmental issues,
particularly those involving the atmospheric
environment. The interest was broad, embracing
all levels of society, and held the attention of the
general public, plus a wide spectrum of academic,
government and public-interest groups.
Most of the issues were not entirely new. Some,
such as acid rain, the enhanced greenhouse effect,
atmospheric turbidity and ozone depletion, had
their immediate roots in the environmental
concerns of the 1960s, although the first two had
already been recognized as potential problems
in the nineteenth century. Drought and famine
were problems of even longer standing.
Contrasting with all of these was nuclear
winter—a product of the Cold War—which
remained an entirely theoretical problem, but
potentially no less deadly because of that.
Diverse as these issues were, they had a
number of features in common. They were, for
example, global or at least hemispheric in
magnitude, large scale compared to the local or
regional environmental problems of earlier years.
All involved human interference in the
atmospheric component of the earth/atmosphere
system, and this was perhaps the most important
element they shared. They reflected society's ever-
increasing ability to disrupt environmental
systems on a large scale.
These issues are an integral part of the new
environmentalism which has emerged in the early
1990s. It is characterized by a broad, global
outlook, increased politicization—marked
particularly by the emergence of the so-called
Green Parties in Europe—and a growing
environmental consciousness which takes the
form of waste reduction, prudent use of resources
and the development of environmentally safe
products (Marcus and Rands 1992). It is also a
much more aggresive environmentalism, with
