If life is about stretching our limits, then the world is about crossing thresholds and knowing when we have done so. The tragedy is that we are waking up to the dangers facing our world far too late. We are realizing how one crisis after another has overtaken us, only after we have been enveloped by it. Thresholds give us a benchmark for knowing what those danger levels are, and where they have already been passed. They can be gauged from the signals we get from a polluted river where marine life has simply ceased to exist, killed by chemicals and waste poured into it day after day; or a drop in land fertility as a result of the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; or unending traffic snarls in towns and cities because of the lack of foresight to know that broader roads would be needed to support a galloping vehicular population.

It has been a few decades since the spread of environment consciousness began. Yet, it is not as if human beings have been destructive of nature since the very beginning of their existence or unaware of the need to conserve. There are enough examples going back to the river valley civilizations of China, India and Europe as well as even the hunter-gatherers of ancient times, environmentally-friendly communities that existed even then.

More than a century ago, the scientist and philosopher Baron Alexander von Humboldt developed the belief—which was further expounded upon by his follower Charles Darwin—that interdependence was the key to the world’s existence and the health of its many species.1 Humboldt talked of a ‘chain of connection’ holding life on earth together and that, within the chaos of the world, there was also harmony, what has been called as ‘unity in the vast diversity of physical phenomena.’

The environmental buzz of this century started with the UN Conference on the Environment at Stockholm in 1972, and the brilliant and powerful testimony of Rachel Carson in her Silent Spring, against the long-term impact of pesticides in the life chain. Perhaps, no other book has influenced the world’s perception of and policies toward environmental issues as Carson’s has.

These were followed by the development of Greenpeace and other environmental activist groups in the First World and then in the Third, the influence of think-tanks such as the World Watch Institute in Washington and a series of toughly-negotiated international treaties on climate change, protecting the ozone layer, the resources of the sea and bio-diversity.

Over these years, we have been witness to the development of a new language where phrases such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘eco-friendly regimes’, ‘eco-friendly industry,’ ‘eco-efficiency,’ ‘carrying capacity’ and ‘social thresholds’ have become both commonplace and meaningful.