A start has been made in the adoption of measures in the areas of greatest priority, in other words the relief of hunger, the restriction of overconsumption and the control of population explosion. Indeed, the European Union gives priority to measures concerning the more efficient use of energy, the limitation of waste and assistance to the public in environmentally sound consumption. It is true that the official report on the first five years since the Rio Conference (1977: Five Years Plus) is not encouraging from the standpoint of tangible results. It does, however, confirm the full prevalence of the principle of sustainable development and the firm determination of peoples to implement them in the future.
We are therefore on the road towards sustainable development. But that noteworthy progress goes with some confusion: there are still some who insist on the outdated policy of economic growth, others who are nostalgic for the days of ruthless development, and still others who will not countenance any development at all. Some, out of ignorance or ill-will, confuse Environmental Law with the recent neo-romantic propensity of extremist environmentalists for a return to nature! Others are trying to distort the meaning of sustainable development by identifying it with preservation of the present high level of consumption, and so on. .
In our country this confusion is great. Since no official national strategy at all has been announced so far for sustainable development in Greece, but the State and politicians continue using the vocabulary of economic development, it was thought best to summarise in this book the new Environmental Law identified with the rules of sustainable development. This will make clear the legal commitments in drawing up the so far deficient national strategy and current policy. The structure of the argument is plainly synthetic, in other words it aims to give an overall picture of the VVWHP of sustained development, and is for that reason limited to its basic principles, stemming from another and larger work by the author in the context of large-scale systems.
