The Conference will also have emphasized the imperative of local responsibility and education, as well as public policy, in encouraging environmentally friendly behaviour. This is important because urbanization is regarded as a source of our dominant quantitative-growth approach to development.
Urbanization is seen to de-emphasize the role of the natural environment.
Never before have so many lived in a world so cut off from any understanding of the fragility and finiteness of resources. One result of this separation is the view that resources are virtually limitless - a basic assumption of technoculture. The notions that the aim of the society is to maximize gross output from all processes, that the most vigorous and progressive nations are those which maintain high growth rates of energy consumption and the use of natural resources, and that technology is good and provides the means of solving humankind's problems, now transcend national identities and even political ideologies. As these ideas have led to a drastic modification of the global environment, I think the time has come to reassess our most basic cultural beliefs. It is no longer valid to assume that someone else can bear the consequences of wasteful, thoughtless or inappropriate development.