ABSTRACT
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, in his report to the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, drew attention to the major challenges facing the nations of the world. He pointed to the urgent need to ensure the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on the planet by taking decisive action on climate change, the water crisis, the protection of soils, the preservation of forests, fisheries, and biodiversity, and the need to build a new ethic of steward- ship. ‘We have been plundering our children’s future heritage to pay for envi- ronmentally unsustainable practices in the present’, he said (Annan 2000: 55). Annan’s call was in essence an appeal for economics to adopt sustainability as its overarching organizing principle.
