ABSTRACT
During the decade of the 1980s the phrase 'sustainable development' migrated from an obscure report produced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in 1980, through several popular 'green' books, to become the central organizing concept of the Brundtland Commission report. Convened by the General Assembly of the United Nations and known officially as the World Commission on Environment and Development, the Brundtland Commission identified sustainable development as the criterion against which human changes of the environment should be assessed, and defined it as
development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (The World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). By joining the words 'sustainable' and 'development,' the Commission sought to reconcile the demands of the environment with concerns about global poverty. Ramphal (1992), who served on the Brundtland Commission, has recently written that
the great achievement of the sustainable development concept is that it broke with the old conservationist approach to natural resources and its tendency to place Earth's other species above people.
