Global Future—Meeting the Challenge

June 1981
Citation:
11
ELR 50011
Issue
6
Author
Nicholas C. Yost

In 1977, the federal government, at President Carter's direction, launched an unprecedented two-part effort, first, to determine what population, resource, and environmental problems may face the world in the year 2000 and, second, to devise a plan of action to deal with those problems.1 The first of those studies, the GLOBAL 2000 REPORT,2 was delivered to President Carter in July 1980. Its purpose was to make projections as to the state of the world's resource problems absent intervening policy changes. The report was descriptive without making recommendations. The second report, GLOBAL FUTURE: TIME TO ACT, proposed measures to deal with the problems discussed in GLOBAL 2000. This article first summarizes the findings of GLOBAL 2000 and then turns to its main theme, GLOBAL FUTURE's recommendations for solving these problems.

Nicholas C. Yost (B.A. 1960, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; LLB 1963, University of California-Berkeley) served in the California Department of Justice from 1965 to 1977 where he was Counsel for the California Environmental Quality Study Council (1969 to 1971), appointed by Governor Reagan and the state legislature to survey California's environmental problems and laws, and Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Environmental Unit (1971 to 1977). From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Yost was General Counsel of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of President Carter, during which time he took a six-month leave of absence to be Director of the President's Task Force on Global Resources and Environment, which prepared the GLOBAL FUTURE REPORT. Mr. Yost is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute.

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