In 1940, at the second annual meeting of the Euthanasia Society of America (ESA), its first president, Charles Francis Potter (1885–1962), rose to give a speech. “Euthanasia, or merciful release from suffering,” Potter declared, “is rapidly emerging from the stage when it was considered merely the obsession of a few left-wing social reformers to the period when it is being recognized as an important social measure in the same class with birth control and eugenics.” Almost thirty years later, at another ESA gathering, clergyman Henry Pitney Van Dusen said much the same thing. “Popular attention centers on the Planned Parenthood movement at the other end of life,” Van Dusen declared, and “[e]uthanasia is concerned with the responsible termination of life. The more we can relate these two movements practically the better, because they are both concerned with the responsible care of human life, one at its beginning and the other at its end.”

In the wake of India's May 1998 decision to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 1974, as well as arch-rival Pakistan's subsequent response, the attention of the world again has focused on nuclear nonproliferation policy as a means of maintaining stability in politically troubled regions of the world. The 1990s proved to be an uncertain time for nonproliferation policy. Pakistan acquired nuclear capabilities. Iraq displayed its well-known intransigence by refusing to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arms inspectors access to facilities suspected of manufacturing nuclear weapons. North Korea maintained a nuclear weapons program despite opposition from many Western nations. Troubling questions about nuclear holdings persisted in Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. New nuclear powers were created in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Even the renewal of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1995 failed to assuage the concerns of Western powers fearful of aggressive measures undertaken by rogue nuclear proliferants.

An important development in the field of environmental policy has been the growing acceptance and use of emissions trading as a cost-effective means to meet and maintain environmental quality standards. In the first half of the twentieth century, emissions trading programs not only would have been seen as unnecessary; they would have been inconceivable. The legal, bureaucratic, and technological infrastructure necessary to support such systems simply did not exist. Furthermore, most people did not see the release of pollutioncausing contaminants into the shared environment as transactions to be measured and monitored. Today, the use of emissions trading programs as a policy tool both reflects and represents the dramatic changes in pollution control policy that have since occurred.