Introduction

Awakening of concern over the environment and what we are doing to it has put large questions on the agenda. One that is often framed in the West is whether ‘we’ do indeed face a kind of terminal environmental catastrophe in the foreseeable future; though, of course, for large numbers of people the collapse of the systems they rely on is a present fact and not a future contingency. Less dramatic but still serious threats to the attractiveness and sustaining powers of the world we live in are noticed on all sides.