The environment in the political arena

Most reports on current environmental problems usually describe the problems, indicate their causes and outline the technical guidelines to be followed tor a reasonable solution to them; but only very rarely do they pose the political questions of who should take the relevant action, how they should do so, who should bear the cost, how effective the action of those agents may be expected to be, and what the response would be of the various social groups. In the author’s opinion, if environmental recommendations do not go together with political actions and studies they are likely to add to the already towering mountain of ‘committee-room utopias’ drawn up in international forums, which fail to achieve any practical consequence beyond their manifest goodwill.