On this day, April 27 1987, Our Common Future also known as the Brundtland Report, was released, giving the world the term “sustainable development”, (which actually had been used in the Global 2000 report released in April 1980. But that was attached to the Carter Administration, by then regarded as a bunch of hopeless losers).
The United Nations had created the World Commission on Environmental Development in 1983. And the commission was chaired by Norwegian politician, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The point of the Brundtland Report was to imagine that environmental development and ecological protection were not mortal enemies that you could have when win-win situations.
There was some stuff in there on climate (but not as much as there would have been if it had been published two years later! – they took information that had been produced for the 1985 Villach WMO/UNEP/ICSU conference and shoved it in a chapter.
Why this matters.
If you’re an apocalypse geek like me, it matters.
What happened next?
The Earth Summit, the WCED proposed for 1992 kind of sort of got overtaken by the climate issue. But biodiversity was also still in the mix, as was “Agenda 21”, which called for all sorts of participatory bottom-up democracy processes which ran into the sand. But the idea is too useful, politically, to be abandoned, so it is constantly rebranded as the Millennium Development Goals, and then the Sustainable Development Goals etc etc
Meanwhile, the UK called its first climate white paper “Our Common Inheritance.” Droll.
And Brundtland decided to throw in her lot with the technocrats rather than the deep ecologists. There’s a good article about that here. Despite this, she remains a hate figure for the far-right (one world government etc etc).