Published: 1999
Total Pages: 165
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Humanity faces an unprecedented challenge as our numbers grow, while Earth and its capacity to support us do not. People across the United States and around the world aspire to better lives for themselves and for their chil- dren: food, shelter, a stie and healthy environment, education, jobs, and other material needs and conveniences. Industries strive to produce more goods, farmers to grow more crops; and human demands on forests, fields, rivers, and oceans increase. Our challenge is to create a fiture in which prosperity and opportunity increase while life flourishes and pressures on oceans, earth, and atmosphere - the biosphere - d~minish; to create, as the Council's vision suggests, "a life- sustaining Ear & that supports "a dignified, peaceful, and equitable existence." It is a powerfitl vision, and the two of us, brought together as co-chairs of the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCS D), fervently believe it is achievable - a uni~lng and necessary goal for the boundless capacity of human ingenuity so manifest in America. This document addresses climate change, environmental management, metropolitan and rural strategies, and international leadership.