Down to earth : environment and human needs

Struggling week by week to survive, caught in endless cycles of hunger, illiteracy, exploitation and disease, the absolute poor have no time to worry about global environmental trends. Yet... many are forced by circumstances beyond their control to destroy the very resources from which they must scrape their living!

Eckholm's quiet percipient analysis of the state of the environment and the fate of the global underclass covers population growth, health, the oceans, pollution and toxic wastes, the global atmosphere and energy, soil erosion and desertification, deforestation and biological diversity. Ten years after the UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, it gives an authoritative and balanced evaluation of humanity's progress towards what Barbara Ward then called 'the care and maintenance of

a small planet: Published in association with Earthscan and the International Institute for Environment and Development.