It is true the above vision had become somewhat faded since systems scientists openly raised the problem of the limits of development, and their concern was done justice by the Stockholm Declaration on the Environment (1972). But for an ideology to be buried, its successor must first be born. The Rio Conference is memorable because it s

And now a brief comment on the original title of the Greek edition, namely "The Twelve Tablets of the Environment". The Twelve Tablets of Law was the primitive Code of Roman Law when man began to assert his dominance over the land. Its twelve Tablets contained the basic rules needed at that time for social coexistence and for people to act productively. Today, sustainable development is no longer dominance over the land but a symbiosis man and nature, and it needs its own Twelve Tablets, which provides the same number of basic rules for that collaboration and which summarises the new environmental law. The New Twelve Tablets of the Sustainable Society is not just a legal code, it is also a manual of morality which, though heralded as new, resurrects the classical Greek values of "justice", "frugality", "moderation" and "nature". It would be a tragic irony if Greeks, of all people, were to persist with the belated initiation of the western model of "progress" even after its failure had been officially recognised.

Some topics in this essay:
Environmental Law, Programme IHDP, Sustainable Society, Sustainable Development, Global Change, Environmental Changes, America Europe, Rio Conference, Soviet Japanese, Newton Galileo, sustainable development, man-made systems, environmental crisis, global change, environmental law, sustainable society, ruthless development, control system, man-made systems ecosystems, systems ecosystems, economic development, vision affluent society, system hierarchical structure, models economic development, qualitative development words,