Sustainable development of society, economy and environment: consequences for integrated coastal management

The intensification of the process of global environmental change and its manifestation across a range of temporal and spatial scales has served to highlight the importance of the contemporary sustainability debate. It is tempting to characterise the wider debate in terms of two polar viewpoints which contrast economic growth-orientated technological optimism with steady-state-oriented technological pessimism. The latter position also implies that there is a need for some new environmental ethic to guide individual and collective action and public policy.