ABSTRACT
If it is difficult to estimate the achievements of the Earth Summit, it is even harder to gaugeprogress since June 1992. There have been encouraging initiatives, but many of these highlight missed opportunities. There is also much evidence that the forces most opposed to sustainable development have not begun to slacken significantly. It is therefore hard to know whether individual steps are blips in trends that will continue to dominate our treatment of people and planet, or whether in retrospect the first half of the last decade of the twentieth century will prove to have been a turning point.
