Peter Cosier:
“We have, as a nation, become highly skilled in economic management, highly skilled in the social sciences – education, health, law and order. Our problem is that our political institutions were designed at a time when the natural world seemed endless, where nature was there for the taking and where land clearing was part of a heroic vision to develop the nation, where freshwater flowing to the sea was considered to be wasted. If we’re to have any hope of addressing the challenges that we’ve heard tonight, we’re going to have to apply the same discipline to environmental management that we currently apply to managing our economy. And it’s a very simple principle: if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. What we need are national environmental accounts that tell us, region by region, state by state, nation by nation, the health of our key environmental assets and any change in the condition of those assets over time.”