ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers it as particularly appropriate that the first international symposium on the disruption and possible destruction of man's environment had taken place in a country that had to endure the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both the costs of environmental disruption and the benefits of environmental control and improvement are predominantly non-market in character. People will have to face political decisions based on evaluations arrived at outside the market under conditions of possible disagreements and lack of unanimous consent. To concentrate only on the physical chain of causation or to view the problem in isolation from the institutional framework in which it takes place can convey only an incomplete and therefore a false picture. The author would like to advance the thesis that people are faced with a tendency of an increasing impairment of the environment and hence of increasing social costs resulting therefrom.
