ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE DECADE

Over the final decades of the twentieth century the rapid development of industry and the pursuit of continued economic growth for corporate profits had accelerated changes to the entire world environment. The incredible expansion of organic chemistry had produced thousands of synthetic compounds for industrial manufacturing that have no counterparts in nature, and against which nature has no defences. In 1962 Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring had brought dramatically to world attention the issue of organochlorine contamination of American farmlands, and in turn, rivers and seas, from agricultural runoff. Carson was followed by a sequence of concerned critics – Lynn White Jr, Paul Ehrlich, René Dubos, Barbara Ward, among many others – who began constructing the pattern of connections of massive global environmental degradation that led to the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the World Environment of 1972 and the concept expressed in the title of its publication Only One Earth (Ward & Dubos 1972). That concern, however, was not taken seriously, and the quest for development under the mantra of economic ‘growth’ continued, not simply unabated, but with mounting impact.