ABSTRACT
With the collapse in 1990 of the Cold War superpower confrontation, the world found itself faced with “threats without enemies”. The rapidly wasting environment was the threat that eventually caused most public concern. Records of UN debates in previous decades show discussion often centring on such threats to humanity as fall-out from nuclear testing, or debris in outerspace, or gross pollution of seaways and urban areas. The symptoms of mankind’s thoughtless use of the world were soil erosion, increasing aridity, and damage to water supplies and settlements; the causes attracted less attention. Although the term “environment” does not occur in the UN Charter, from the very beginning there was a great sense of environmental mission to improve the health, wealth and happiness of people living in habitats that were generally depicted as “undeveloped” or as “inadequately resourced”. Years of UN work have addressed economic and social betterment. It is mainly from the late 1960s that the UN articulates and amplifies a note of growing public and expert anxiety about the consequences of heedless exploitation of natural resources, with the inevitable conclusion that we all have a duty to save an endangered biosphere from further despoilation. The UN as a world organization has since attempted to give environmental problems salience by providing a forum, a means of careful observation, and recourse to specific programming. Concern about securing the future not only of an inhabited world but of Planet Earth is grounded in the sober realization that the consequences of our ecological (and economic) fecklessness transgress all human boundaries. Uniting nations in rational and determined action seems the only way forward. Governments that are complacent or tardy about this are being jerked into action above all by young people everywhere: “20% today, 100% tomorrow” expresses the conviction that although young people are not in the majority today, it is particularly their future that is in peril.
