Policy, Environmental

Environmental policy concerns the attitudes that states, representing their people, adopt toward the environment and the need to protect or exploit it in different ways. These range from the desire to maintain nature in a pristine state to the desire to exploit all resources of the land and atmosphere without regard for the future or side effects.

Most ideologies, in common with most forms of organized religious belief, derived from a period in which agricultural lifestyles, featuring sustainable use of resources as part of folk wisdom concerning husbandry of the land, were dominant. This might have been expressed either through sacred texts outlining the role of man as part of nature or through practical education such as that provided by Buddhist monks in forested parts of ...