ABSTRACT
There is today a strong feeling of urgency in environmental issues. This is quite understandable, and even unavoidable, given the widespread knowledge about the risks of an ecological breakdown on our planet. But at the same time here lies a temptation: the urgent need to find and implement solutions to the current problems tends to give all other matters only an instrumental value in relation to the task of promoting a ‘sustainable development’. This concept was formulated in the 1980s with the ambition to defend the possibility of a constructive cooperation between economic growth and environmental protection and thus to propose an alternative to the ‘zero-growth’ recommended by the ‘Club of Rome’ in Limits to Growth (1972).
