ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests why this future-orientated environmental moment coalesced in the years around 1950, and examines some of the numerous strands that became entwined in its creation. It is important that the idea of the environment, and the prediction of a whole global system falling into degradation, emerged together: co-determined, or bound in a kind of double-helix that it is an important challenge to unravel. The approaches that coalesced around post-war environmental thought drew on a wide range of disciplines: demography, geography, resource management and economics, ecology, and soil science. The problem was essentially one of expectation, or prognostication, which is why the emergence of predictive environmental expertise was so emblematically a part of the general orientation of attitudes towards futures. A kind of paradox lay at the heart of the new environmental paradigm, related to the two kinds of expertise is identified.
