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In 1987, the Brundtland Commission (World Com-mission on Environment and Development, 1987) published a seminal report urging a theoretical and practical response to the emerging crisis that threatens both the global environment and the global economy. The report describes a cycle of poverty, debt, overuse of primary resources, environmental degradation, increased poverty, and increased debt, which links the economy of the North and the ecosystems of the South in a destructive cycle and imperils both. Since the publication of Our Common Future, a number of social policy commentators have echoed and elaborated the concerns expressed in the report (L. Brown, 1995; Harrison, 1993; Head, 1991; Homer-Dixon, 1991; Homer-Dixon, Batwell, & Rathjens, 1993). They have observed that citizens in the North, or industrialized world, are much more vulnerable to and dependent on what happens in the …