Page 38 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

CHAPTER 2

Motivating Forces

I truly believe that we in this generation
must come to terms with nature, and I think
we’re challenged, as mankind has never been
challenged before, to prove our maturity and our
mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.
—rachel carson [1]

Wake-Up Calls
The adoption of DFE practices, beginning in the early 1990s, was the
inevitable result of growing environmental awareness around the
world. U.S. society has transformed its attitudes from indifference
about environmental impacts into placement of global warming and
renewable energy near the top of the political agenda. This chapter
traces the origins of the environmental movement in the United
States against the larger backdrop of the emerging global consensus
on the importance of sustainable development.
The urgent need to protect environmental resources was first rec-
ognized in the 1960s, yet scientists and policy-makers spent decades
gathering data and debating the state of the environment. Environ-
mental protection goals were typically viewed as secondary to the
desire for economic growth. Finally, in the early 2000s two authori-
tative reports appeared, involving hundreds of scientists around the
world, which left little doubt about the urgency of the situation. The
International Panel on Climate Change [2] confirmed the rapid in -
crease in global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, and
Al Gore wisely used the cinematic medium to sound a public alarm
about the “inconvenient truth” of climate change.* Less well publi-
cized, but equally significant was the Millennium Ecosystem Assess-
ment, which confirmed the rapid degradation in ecosystems due to
industrialization [3]. According to this report

*Al Gore became the first person in history to receive both a U.S. Motion Picture
Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize.
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