Sustaining Earth

The World Commission on Environment and Development was established in 1983 at the instigation of the United Nations and under the chairmanship of Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. Its mandate was to explore the nature and possible consequences of the environmental threats that face mankind and to recommend measures to safeguard and improve the quality of life on earth in the future, taking into account the interrelationships between people, resources, environment and development. The commission concluded that provision for an acceptable future could only be made by the adoption of sustainable development as the working principle behind all future planning.;In 1988, a year after the Commission's report was published, we organised a series of public lectures at Cambridge University to examine how politicians, industrialists, scientists and the public were responding to the report's recommendations and to the degradation that it highlighted. Some of the lectures were given media coverage, but the editors felt that a greater number of people than this reached, would benefit from the information and advice they gave. Macmillan's agreement to publish and their request that more mater