Economists, lawyers, and minerals have one thing in common. We are all three resistant to change. Resistant or not, we now have a momentous change to deal with -easily the biggest paradigm shift yet attempted in international environmental law and economics - a new approach that could have enormous impact on the availability, amount, and equitable distribution of our "Mineral Wealth for the Next Century." That change is, of course, the international community's adoption in 1992 of "sustainable development" as the new paradigm, model, or standard for harmonizing our world's environmental, economic, and social aspirations. The intention was laudable - to create a concept that would mediate, balance, and integrate the all-too-frequent conflicts between ecology, economic development, and human rights. If paper counts, we are serious about this change. "Sustainability" is now the focus of numerous international treaties, UN declarations, national government laws and action plans, reorganizations of UN and other international government organizations' (IGOs) missions and budgets, proliferation of new nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even the new rules for international lending and development assistance institutions, like the World Bank.
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