Any discussion on the politics of environment should essentially be concerned with the ways in which environment and its relationship with man and development has been looked at.
Needless to say, there exists a plurality of perspectives on this question. No single pattern of thinking can be said to have a monopoly on this aspect. Also, the various political perspectives on environment represent a curious mix of consensus and divergence of viewpoints.
Human knowledge on the relationship between man and environment has also grown progressively. For example, till as late as 1950s the dominant thinking was that the environment could be taken for granted. Natural resources were understood to be inexhaustible. Man was free to utilize them indiscriminately and to the hilt without really bothering about their consequences.
Not only was that, the natural resources meant to be indiscriminately exploited for the material development of mankind. This perspective pervaded much of thinking on economic development of any kind, prevalent in the industrialized world. Natural resources were not seen as having a limited availability span, but merely a means through which a material development for mankind could be achieved.
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This view has now come to be questioned and repudiated. Environmental fragility (which implies a real possibility of the natural resources being depleted) and the need for conserving it have now emerged as incontestable facts. Also the environmental indispensability not just for itself but for human survival has been established as a fact of human existence. In other words, protection of the environment is not seen merely as a virtue, it is seen as a necessity. In this Unit, we shall make an attempt to understand the relationship between environment and development and concentrate on the different kinds of political perspectives around the question of environment.