The Brundtland Commission in its report Our Common Future (United Nations, 1987) is widely credited with setting down the first policy definition of sustainable development. In 2017 this report will be thirty years old yet it seems we are still a long way from living sustainably: If, as of 2017, there is not a start of a major wave of new and clean investments, the door to 2 degrees [global temperature increase] will be closed. (Birol, 2011) Green policies have been ‘adapted and adopted’ by mainstream parties across Europe, despite Green parties being a relatively small political force (Carter, 2013). The European Commission has become a worldwide driver of green policy (Judge, 1992) and market-based innovations such as the Emissions Trading System 1 , despite being celebrated and criticised in seemingly equal measure. Media coverage of ‘outsider’ party growth in the UK has swung towards the libertarian and anti-Europe UKIP recently, despite comparable and longer term growth in support for the Greens (Goodwin & Ford, 2013). Efforts have been made to disassociate Green voices from older clichés of self-deprivation: The Green party has changed: partly the personalities within it, partly in response to the changing world outside it....At the same time, ideas that were mainly theoretical 25 years ago – solar and wind technology – have been demonstrably workable...The Greens have become the party of possibilities, not catastrophes. (Williams, 2014). One attempt to imagine a sustainable future can be found in The World We Made, written by Johnathon Porritt from the perspective of a school teacher in the year 2050. The positives of huge renewable investments, progressive economic policies and a panoply of exciting new technologies are matched with equally plausible negatives of stubborn inequality, famines and riots. In the postscript, Porritt states: ‘If we can’t deliver the necessarily limited vision of a better world mapped out in The World We Made, then the hard truth is that no other vision will be available to us anyway, on any terms.’ (Porritt, 2013: 276)
Patients Value Symptoms and Quality of Life in Treating Eosinophilic Esophagitis: Not a Hard Truth to Swallow
