ABSTRACT
Humankind has given the impression, especially in the past decade, that it is acquiring a clear understanding of the challenges that modern civilization will have to overcome in order to mitigate and adapt to environmental stress. Yet, the issues that seem to permeate the debate within and between nation-states elude the nature of the environmental crisis. The naiveté of many world leaders today recalls the example offered by Alvin Toffler (1974) about the simplemindedness of the elders of an Indian tribe that for centuries lived off the produce of a river at its doorstep. Its culture and economy are based upon fishing, boat building, and harvesting from the soil fertilized by the river, so that the future of this community merely repeats its past. But what happens when this tribe pursues its traditional style of development unaware that a dam is being built upstream? Its image of the future is misled, dangerously misled, for the river will soon dry up or become a trickle (Guimarães, 2003).
