What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.

Not to say that corporations are perfect today, but even grand corporations like Dupont have made immense progress in translating some of their past environmentally damaging practices into new profit opportunities.

Strengthening the role the United Nations can play...will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.

I've got used to criticisms and, naturally, I try to make sure I don't listen to the more extreme ones because most of the people who have taken their rightwing extremist view of my life are people that I've never met.

Well they do have a use, but we should never believe that any international conference is going to suddenly solve problems like the condition of the global environment.