"This interlocking…is the new reality of the century, with profound implications for the shape of our institutions of governance, national and international. By the year 2012, these changes must be fully integrated into our economic and political life."

"developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma.  It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class -- involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing -- are not sustainable.  A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns."

"Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level.  But this will not come about easily.  Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched.  They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives."
  
"The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations.  It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.  What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful.  The global community must be assured of environmental security."