Such development paradigms also pollute the environment and such of its components as air, water and soil, quite apart from directly undermining human, animal and plant health. Our undermining of the environment's resources restricts the capacity to meet the present needs for goods, services and amenities, in terms of both quantity and quality. It makes the prospects for the distant future bleak. Hence the need to pay the closest attention to the environment in all our instruments of social governance, foremost among them the constitution. The purpose of constitutions is to provide a framework of political authority for public decision-making.
Constitutions regulate and sanctify fundamental policy choices.
An eminent component of such choices, given the main contemporary issues, concerns the factors that limit the wonted strategies of social and economic development. All decision-making for such development takes place in the ambit of the constitution or in the interstices on the constitutional body. Such constitutions are necessarily detailed. They contain, in many cases, broad declaratory principles on matters of national mission, national vision and institutional arrangements which stipulate functions, powers and immunities. Such arrangements aim, ultimately, at providing a scheme of governance to ensure human welfare.