Epilogue

Abstract

In June of 2012, Brazil was again host to a high-profile United Nations summit intended to reconcile often conflicting goals of economic and human development, sustainable utilization of finite resources, and environmental protection, restoration, and justice. The UN Summit on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, as it became known, was billed as an inclusive forum for forward-looking reflection—the document that delegations negotiated was titled “The Future We Want”—and it served as a moment to assess the present state and perception of environmental problems, policies, and politics against the state of things twenty years earlier, at the time of the original 1992 Earth Summit.