[Concepts of a preventive environmental policy]

To date, environmental policy has been primarily reactive and curative. For the most part, it concentrated on repairing damage already done--and this restricted to only certain sections of the overall complex environment/society interrelationship. Such an approach has numerous defects: for example, problems are usually solved only in restricted areas, only to appear again in a different form in a different area, space and time. It is thus becoming ever more apparent that environmental policy requires a completely new approach, the direction of which appears clear: on the one hand greater involvement of the population, on the other a shift to damage containment to damage prevention. From the point of view of this new preventive environmental policy, the question is investigated as to whether and to what extent ecological requirements can be integrated into such traditional areas of farming, technology and energy, and how ecological thinkcan be generally integrated within policy areas with environmental relevance.