The Encyclopedia of Life Support System is not another Encyclopedia of the classical type. It is different. It is a body of knowledge of varying levels of detail on what have been considered the main systems supporting life: Water, Energy, Food and Agriculture and the Environment. This is supported by another body of knowledge on the basic subjects of science: chemistry, mathematics and several others. All this in an attempt to better understand the process of sustainable development and identify the best means of achieving it.

The Encyclopedia itself will be a huge undertaking. These two volumes which we commonly call among ourselves as Editorial Committee, the Forerunners, are not meant to summarize or even indicate what the Encyclopedia will contain. They are meant to stand alone. The only relation to the Encyclopedia is that they contain as many subjects as possible, again in varying levels of detail.

This introduction is not a classic one either. It is a contribution by the editor to the contents of these volumes but covering more than one subject that are addressed in great details in the body of the Encyclopedia, and all are related to sustainable development. This introduction covers issues such as environment and development, environmental economics, environmental security and a look into the future.

Evolving Understanding of the Relations between Environment and Development.

There is nothing static about either "environment" or its relationship to development. The environment - which we now see as our home - provides the resources and ecological processes which make all life possible. And development is the means by which we utilize the environment to produce goods and services. Our understanding of these processes is in a constant state of evolution.

Early human beings lived by hunting and gathering. They transformed many areas of the Earth and wiped out several animal species. Then, about 10,000 years ago people in various parts of the world started to cultivate food plants and keep animals. They began to set up agricultural communities, exchanging hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement.

During those early times, people learned that their actions could damage the natural resources by which they lived. Tree cutting, overgrazing and soil erosion undermined agricultural productivity around the Mediterranean, in southern and central China, in India and in Central America. Historical records give evidence of early attempts at conservation: religious taboos protecting some species of animals, some forest groves and plants; the use of organic fertilizer and other practices to maintain soil fertility and prevent erosion; the creation of wildlife or natural reserves.

The Industrial Revolution of the latter 18th and early 19th centuries and the 20th century scientific and technological revolutions dramatically increased humanity's need for natural resources and its pressure on the environment. Overwhelmingly, this impact has been negative. Today- as we enter a new millennium- we face an ecological crisis that has assumed planetary dimensions. The problems are so great that they threaten to derail economic development.

The technological advances in the first half of last century raised fundamental questions about the future. Could the globe continue to support its rapidly growing population? And how appropriate was the technology itself? These questions were first debated in scientific circles, but soon caught the attention of the public.

By the late 1950s public concern was rising: people had died in smog episodes in Belgium, the United States and the United Kingdom; lives had been shattered by mercury pollution in Minamata and Niigata, Japan; acidification was killing lakes in Scandinavia and North America; birds were dying from the side effects of pollution; and oil spills had polluted the sea. This concern gathered momentum in the 1960s and culminated in the convening of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. The Stockholm Conference was the turning point in the history of environmental awareness and action.

Environmentalism-once the domain of a prescient and often privileged few, primarily concerned with wildlife conservation- has broadened, both in its public support and in its scope. The movement has taken on board all aspects of the natural environment: land, water, minerals, all living organisms and life processes, the atmosphere and climate, the polar icecaps and remote ocean deeps, even outer space. What is more, the movement no longer concentrated on the natural environment alone but also addresses the interrelation between environment and such aspects of international economic cooperation as trade, debt, commodity prices, structural adjustments and subsidies.

In the last three decades, scientific research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the different processes that control and affect environmental systems. We have gained impressive insights into the biogeochemical cycling of elements essential for life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. And we now understand the mechanisms that could lead to ozone depletion and global warming better than we did 30 years ago.

As a result of this increased understanding, and of advances in computer technology, mathematical models perform much better than they used to and the public is more open to model-derived 'futures'.

The last three decades have also seen the introduction of techniques of environmental impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis and management, natural resource and environmental accounting, technology assessment, environmental audits and the use of geographical information systems. These and other tools have improved our understanding of environmental processes and our ability to draw up policies to deal with different problems.

Thanks to this scientific progress, we now have a clearer picture of the size of the challenge. Scientific monitoring and assessment confirms that the capacity of our planet to support life is growing weaker. Synergistic, perhaps irreversible, forces are at work.

Since the early 1970's, there has been a search for a new, more rounded concept of development, in which environmental considerations play a central role.

What are the features of this new kind of development? Three aspects are particularly important: it has implications for all countries, rich and poor; it presupposes new directions for growth and development, not their cessation; and it incorporates the environmental dimensions.

Present patterns of production and consumption, based on waste, extravagance and planned obsolescence, must be replaced by patterns based on conservation and re-use of resources. It is entirely unrealistic to believe that the future is best assured by a development process which does not recognize our interdependence with the common services provided by the environment and the natural resources available to us. It is singularly ineffective development which exploits the present without regard to future consequences.

At the beginning of the 1970s the Club of Rome formulated the 'limits to growth' theory. The idea was that the planet's physical limits were being reached. Of course, the theory is only partly correct. But it was an eye opener. For we now have the ability to destroy the environment completely. In so doing we will write off the economic machine which feeds more than 6 billion people.

It is wrong, however, to say that destruction is a necessary consequence of growth. Growth is only destructive if it ignores the limits of the environment. Some elements of the environment are limited, some are not.

The World Commission on Environment and Development in its report Our Common Future, published in 1987 pointed out that most of the new wealth created in the 1980s was created in non-polluting industries. It was the service industries such as information and data which were the hub of present growth.

This growth which works in tandem with the environment is what we call ' sustainable development'. Sustainable development will be the foundation of economic and social planning in the 21st century. If it is not, Malthusian laws will take over again.

At the core of the concept of sustainable development is the requirement that current practices should not undercut future living standards. In other words, present economic systems should maintain or improve the resource and environmental base, so that future generations will be able to live equally well or better. Sustainable development does not require the preservation of the current stock of natural resources or any particular mix of human, physical and natural assets. Nor does it place artificial limits on economic growth, provided that growth is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

Of course, there are no quick fixes. Sustainable development is not a ready made policy menu. It is a demanding series of concrete, costed and draconian reforms which confront failed economic policies and instigate new structural adjustment programmes. These reforms work to alleviate poverty, meet basic human needs and put to rest economic conditions that promote environmental destruction. Throughout the global South, a rigidly unfair, protectionist international economic order, commodity price volatility, crippling debt and poverty all tighten the stranglehold of natural resource destruction, chronic pollution and skyrocketing population.

Environment: Costing it right.

Classical economic theories and practices treated nature as a bottomless well of resources and as an infinite sink for wastes. The economy became disconnected from nature, in theory and in practice.

This approach began to lose its hold in the late 1960s, when pollution became a major concern in industrialized nations. It became clear that the natural process of self regeneration was slow and complicated. People began to accept that the capacity of air and water to absorb and carry wastes was limited, and that pollution control measures were needed to safeguard the environment and the quality of human life.

If sustainable development is to be achieved, the environmental costs and benefits of any development process must be evaluated. This is not easy. Some of the environmental effects of development can be simply identified and quantified; others cannot. But even partial economic analysis is important because it makes people aware of the fact that natural resources should not be treated as free goods.

Environmental costs arise either through the damage done by resource exploitation or through the effort expended to redress the damage.

In the last three decades, several studies have attempted to cost the damage caused by environmental pollution.

Such costing is far from complete. Environmental damage is often selective and unequally distributed in time and space and among societies. Many of the physical, biological and socio-economic consequences of large development projects are inadequately known and some cannot be quantified. For instance, when landscapes or historic monuments are threatened with irreversible change, it is hard to place a price tag on the damage, even if all the consequences could be enumerated and their likelihood assessed.

We must recognize the self interest of governments, industry and special groups and show what can be done within these constraints. We must go on pointing out the links between the lack of environmental management and the failure of development efforts: showing, for instance, that famine is a painful symptom, but desertification and the mismanagement of natural resources are the causes of many natural shortages, and of Africa's recurrent pain.

Famines can be stopped through the introduction of better land use practices. There is no better investment than an investment in prosperity. You cannot promise a return on investment straightaway, but you can point to the danger and futility of feeding one generation of famine victims without ensuring that the next will not starve.

The payoffs from a switch to better management of resources are quantifiable. The present costs of switching to better policies and programmes are small in comparison to the future costs or to the cost of the damage that will result if too little is done.

There is an urgent need for countries to reckon the value of intact resources into their national accounting systems. In the last two decades, some attempts have been made to adjust national income accounts to register both direct environmental costs and the 'depreciation' of the capital of natural resources. Although national accounts record the income earned from harvesting resource stocks (such as fish, timber and minerals), they exclude the loss of future income as a result of declining stocks and deteriorating environmental quality. If this depreciation is factored in, the net contribution of resource depletion to national income is much lower and more accurately reflects the impact on economic welfare.

We need to get into the habit of adding the environmental dimension into such main indicators of wealth creation as food, technology, energy, commodity prices, financial transactions and borrowing.

The traditional model of industrial activity - which takes in raw materials and generates products for sale plus wastes for disposal - is now being gradually transformed into a more integrated model, an 'industrial ecosystem'. This optimizes the consumption of energy and materials, minimizes waste generation and uses the effluents of one process as the raw material for another.

Although the subject of integrating environmental management with concerns about economic and social development was raised at the Stockholm Conference, emphasized by the "Our common Future" Report and set into an Action Plan "Agenda 21" at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it is still a major arena of debate. Many developments over the last three decades suggest that societies will think very differently in the future about the relationship between nature and human activity. But most of these advances have yet to be institutionalized into governments' and development agencies' policy and planning systems.

Environmental Security.

In the past three decades, it has become clear that military means alone cannot provide peace. The security of nations depends equally on economic wellbeing, social justice and ecological stability. Certainly part of the economic wellbeing will come as a result of directing some of the huge resources expanded on arms to serve education and health especially in developing countries.

This thinking has led to the evolution of new concepts of security. Such expressions as 'balance of power', 'deterrence', 'peaceful coexistence', 'collective security' and 'common security' make the point that security involves political, economic, social, human rights, humanitarian and ecological aspects, not only military ones.

Environmental degradation imperils the foundations of national security by undermining the natural support systems on which all human activity depends. These processes do not respect man-made borders. They jeopardize not only the security of the country in which they occur but also that of others, near or far.

Progress towards global peace may lull us into ignoring these threats to our planet's survival. National security remains entrenched within the age old narrow parameters of military response. The time has come to appreciate the implications of environmental degradation for national and global security.

Environmental security must be considered at three levels: national, interstate and global. Natural resource destruction and pollution create strains within national boundaries. Each year the world has 90 million more mouths to feed, but 28 million tons less soil on which to grow its food. Total global food production is going up; but per capita production in parts of India and in large areas of Africa is going down. The drift of refugees from the countryside into slums and shantytowns shows how environmental stress can result in social stress. In countries as different as Thailand, Nepal, Mali and Brazil, deforestation and land degradation have led to open clashes between local people over dwindling resources.

Competition over ever shrinking natural resources is growing. In North America, tensions are mounting over freshwater diversion and national claims to depleting fish stocks. In the Middle East, tensions have risen not over oil but over the management of water from shred rivers. The Nile, the Tigres and Euphrates, for example. In Central America and Haiti, land degradation has forced people to emigrate, creating racial and social tensions. In Short, resource depletion is causing new flashpoints in international relations.

On the interstate level, there is also the potential of conflict between North and South. While the rich North expresses concern about tropical forest destruction, some of its multinationals clear land, export tropical timber and exploit tax and labor conditions. Some multinationals take advantage of poverty and lax environmental standards to site polluting industries in the South which would be unacceptable in their own countries. Incidents of 'garbage imperialism' - millions of tons of hazardous wastes exported from industrialized countries to developing countries in Africa- have fostered anger and resentment.

On the Global level, ecological destruction is as lethal as nuclear war. But its work is covert. For example, the depletion of our planet's stratospheric ozone layer, and the destruction of tropical forests and other habitats. These trends are a tragedy in themselves. But they also raise tensions between North and South over who is responsible for the destruction of the ozone layer, and between rich countries who insist on conservation and tropical countries who seek compensation for it.

The greatest threat to the world order comes from the build-up of greenhouse gases leading to climate change and global warming. Our planet is in the midst of the greatest climatic shift since the last great ice age. Then, the ecological face of the Earth was transformed. Forest died. Sea levels changed. Some species became extinct. Others had time to adapt.

Today, time is running out. The Earth's global temperature has already risen by some 0.5ºC over the past 100 years. It is expected to increase by another 3ºC before the end of this century.

The most devastating impacts of climate change will be felt in low lying countries including Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Maldives and Egypt. But there can be no mistake- all countries will be affected.

This threat alone is reason enough for nations to act together for the security of our life support systems. Yet other destructive forces are at work. Our world is being destroyed because people either have too much or too little. The pollution of poverty remains the most inhumane and most destructive force on this planet. The rich can afford to change, to clean up their environment, to increase environmentally friendly consumer goods. The world's poor do not have a choice.

If we want to head off the prospect of 21st century eco-wars, the world will have to mobilize not millions but billions of additional pounds and dollars. Saving the world is not going to be cheap.

The debate is influenced by how people perceive security and the nature of the threat of themselves and their families. So much of the rhetoric of security works at the emotional level, appealing to the instinct to protect one's family and way of life from external threat.

In practice, individual and collective security cannot be segregated. Action is mutually reinforcing. There is not much point in the individual taking action unless the government is responsive. And there is not much point in nations taking steps to conserve energy or protect coasts and rivers unless their neighbors do likewise. No country can protect its own patch of the sky.

The debate about environment and security must take place simultaneously on three levels. First, on the personal level. For most of the world's people, for most of the time, security is a strictly local affair- a safe home, a decent standard of living and an ability to take decisions which safeguard the family and community.

Second, on the national level. The first duty of the state is to preserve peace and territorial integrity, by political and military means. But increasingly citizens are demanding that security should be expanded to include their country's life support systems: clean air, clean water, a secure source of food.

Finally, in the post war period the threat of nuclear war destroying the whole planet forced us to consider global security. Global environmental and natural resources destruction which could stop development should make us think in exactly the same terms.

The concept of sustainable development provides a key point of departure for rethinking our responsibilities. For it demands that the welfare of future generations- including today's children- be brought explicitly into all environment and development planning. It raises concern for a new type of fairness and equality rarely considered previously- intergenerational equity.

Our best hopes for future peace and global security rely upon strengthened international cooperation to protect the web of life support systems that we destroy, so ridiculously, a day in and day out. We share only one planet. We -and future generations- have nowhere else to go.

A Look into the Future

Over the past 30 years ecology and environmental sciences have matured. In some cases, we have been able to turn the theories of 20 years ago into fact, in others to dismiss them entirely or to uncover new areas of concern.

A subtle change of emphasis has taken place during the past years, from worrying about changes in the state of the physical environment to concern over the causes and impacts of such changes. Our perceptions and our understanding have evolved.

Stockholm accepted the idea that the solution lay in an environment-based development which enhanced rather than damaged the planet. Then, it was a revolutionary concept; today, it is common currency among decision makers. Strategies, action plans, programmes and guidelines have resulted. All this was formalized during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 which adopted the concept of sustainable development ensuring economic growth, social development and environmental protection. Unhappily, governments have not matched these pronouncements with deeds. The concept of sustainable development has been imperfectly or too slowly applied. In some cases it has been ignored entirely.

On virtually every front there has been a marked deterioration in the quality of our life support system. Just when we need more housing, more food, more jobs, more fresh water, the planet's capacity to meet those needs is being undermined.

Gains have been made in specific areas in industrialized countries &endash; urban air quality, cleaner technologies, reduction of vehicle weight, cuts in the use of the natural resources and the amount of energy used per unit of GDP. In most developing countries, the environment has further deteriorated. Not one single issue earmarked for action in Stockholm has been solved and, new issues pose unprecedented threats; ozone depletion, climate change and the loss of biological diversity.

Putting the world on the path of sustainable development will not be easy, given the environmental degradation and economic confusion which now prevail. Sustainable development is not a slogan, but rather an exacting and demanding process. Meaningful reforms and bold policies are needed. Perceptions must be transformed, beginning with how we rate the environment. Our natural resources &endash; fresh air, clean water, virgin forests &endash; have been undervalued, even regarded as economic free goods. This must change.

Two hundred years after the death of Adam Smith, economic and ideological debates perhaps distract many from what I see rather clearly: too often, economics has been wrong. We have been wrong about natural resource scarcities, pollution carrying capacities and the ecosystems upon which all economic life is based. We have been wrong about the value of our natural patrimony. And now we are paying the price for our ignorance and arrogance.

Too often the 'invisible hand' of the market economy has been the absent hand, with too soft a touch. So precious resources like air and water have been priced as free goods, and pollution has been written off as an externality.

Getting development and conservation to work together means making serious reforms. The reforms should involve fresh planning and policy approaches to agriculture, energy, industry, direct investment at home and abroad, fiscal, monetary and trade policies.

Sustainable development does not mean slapping environmental considerations onto project planning. It does mean radical reform &endash; to sharpen the explicit linkages between national income accounts and the natural resources upon which economies depend. The conventional barometers of wealth &endash; income, GNP and GDP &endash; have systematically provided false signals about a country's natural capital. And false signals are also dangerous signals. Since the Industrial Revolution, they have been beckoning industry and individuals to pursue fast track economic growth based on ecological deficit financing.

We must get the true cost of natural resource use and pollution added into the final price of goods and services. We have the tools, such as input-output analysis, cost-benefit analysis, environmental impact assessment, adjustments in marginal opportunity costs and discount rates. We must make them work in favor of intergenerational responsibility and equity. If we get our economic assumptions right, then other sources of destruction &endash; including misdirected incentives and subsidies &endash; can be adjusted.

As we move into the 21st century, the world desperately needs to agree on solutions which will set it on a new course. Development planning and implementation will have change significantly, the global economy will have to be fundamentally restructured, and there will have to be a quantum leap in international cooperation.

Environmental economics should be integrated into major industrial and resource based sectors. By working to get the prices right, we can also get agriculture, energy, transport and other subsidies right, and build in incentives that work for sustainable development.

There is now a broad consensus that industrialized rations cannot remain immune from an environmentally induced economic collapse in the developing world. The need for a more just, less consumptive economic order has wide acceptance. But we have yet to see these applied in any meaningful way.

North and South each hold in their hands the keys to efforts which can benefit all. The North has at its command the lion's share of the world's capital: many decisions on trade, financing and debt therefore require its cooperation. The South, on the other hand sits astride the world's greatest natural assets: the forests with a unique biological diversity which underpins global agricultural and pharmaceutical research and the minerals that feed heavy industry.

The current imbalance between North and South must be addressed, and seriously. The Third World, with 77 per cent of the world's population, consumes 12 per cent of the world's natural resources and 18 per cent of its energy. The South needs a clear recognition from the industrialized world that it must develop. But is also needs help to avoid destructive development.

We are living through one of the most exciting periods in human history. Past tyrannies and monopolies on the truth are dissolving. The shadow of global war becomes much lighter as East-West tension faded away. Yet, global injustices remain. The twin enemies of poverty and disease have if anything become stronger. The gap between rich and poor has become wider.

These can no longer be ignored as someone else's problems, distant sufferings in distant lands. For if global interdependence means anything- and surely it does- then poverty, disease, skyrocketing populations, accelerating natural resources destruction and mounting ecological degradation are our problems, affecting each and every one of us. In this, there is no us and them. We are all in it together.