Before the 1940s only a few individuals expressed environmental concern; by the 1950s there were some environmental lobby groups and NGOs. National governments had 3 passed pieces of environmental protection legislation since the eighteenth century or earlier and by the 1940s there had been a few international agreements. Richer nations had environmental management professionals (mainly trained as scientists with limited social or economic skills or political experience) concerned with pollution control, conservation, agriculture and fisheries by the 1930s. However, it should be stressed that before 1970 very few citizens knew the words ‘environment’ or ‘ecology’, environmental problems were seldom important political issues and economics wrote of environmental costs as ‘intangibles’ or unimportant. Environmental concern and management have come a long way since the 1960s.