Ups and Downs of Czech Environmental Awareness and Policy: Identifying Trends and Influences

Roughly since the beginning of the 1970s, and particularly as a consequence of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, environmental issues have been gradually acquiring prominence, reaching a peak - for the time being - at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The same period also witnessed a growing variety and divergence in approaches towards the environment. While for a number of states, at least in the "developed" part of the world, the beginning of the 1970s marked a turning point, other countries remained more or less "frozen", allowing (or even further promoting) the continuity of the dreadful processes of over-exploitation of natural resources, careless consumption of the "global commons" and extending their "borrowing from the future" [see Kara, 1992]. Typically, this held true for central and eastern European countries, and the Czech Republic (the western part of former Czechoslovakia and from January 1993 an independent state) was no exception.