ABSTRACT
Attitudes towards the environment and humankind's ability or willingness to modify it are not fixed. In the early 1980s, the author visited Tome-Acu in Amazonian Brazil; this settlement illustrates how differently people with roughly similar resources at their disposal fare in managing their environment and development. The concept of development affects how people see and study the world. Escobar went further and argued that development is a mechanism used by richer nations for the management of less developed countries since the mid-1940s. Development is increasingly seen as requiring reduction of inter-group disparity or a 'social transformation' - the use of capital, technology and knowledge, to alter culture and society. Environment can be defined as the sum total of the conditions within which organisms live; it is the interaction between non-living physical and chemical. The World Commission on Environment and Development set out in 1984 to re-examine critical environment and development problems and to formulate realistic proposals for solutions.
