How do we take stock of the state and direction of the world’s environment, and what can we learn from the experience? Among the myriad detailed narratives about the condition of the planet, the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) reports—issued by the United Nations Environment Programme—stand out as the most ambitious. For nearly three decades the GEO project has not only delivered iconic global assessment reports, but through its multitude of contributors has inspired hundreds of similar processes worldwide from the regional to the local level.

This book provides an inside account of the evolution of the GEO project from its earliest days. Building on meticulous research, including interviews with former heads of the United Nations Environment Programme, diplomats, leading contributing scientists, and senior leaders of collaborating organizations, the story is told from the perspective of five GEO veterans who all played a pivotal role in shaping the periodic assessments. The GEO’s history provides striking insights and will save valuable time to those who commission, design and conduct, as well as critique and improve, assessments of environmental development in the next decade.

On the World and Religious Life (c. 1381) is the first surviving treatise of Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406), chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375–1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. The work was written for a lawyer who had left secular life to enter the Camaldulensian monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, located in the heart of Florence. The new monk prevailed on Salutati to write a treatise encouraging him to persevere in the religious life. His request led to this wide-ranging reflection on humanity’s misuse of God’s creation and the need to orient human life in accordance with a proper hierarchy of values. This work is here translated into English for the first time.