ABSTRACT
Mainstream sustainable development, developed through the 1980s and entrenched at Rio, has begun to acquire the intellectual scaffolding necessary to translate rhetoric into practical policy. The philosophical bases of environmentalist social movements in the so-called new environmentalism of the 1970s (Cotgrove 1982) were complex, eclectic and confused. Sachs (1992b) argues that environmentalism, or the ‘ecology movement’ as he calls it, combines modernism and anti-modernism, a call for a better science with a critique of the rationality of science. Sustainable development is the uncertain inheritor of this confusion. As we have seen in Chapter 5, the discipline of economics has furnished bridges between normal practice in development planning and concerns for environment. Environmentalism and human rights have been factored into the business spreadsheets of ‘Earth plc’, enabling trading and planning to continue very much as normal (Pearce 1992).
