The Guardian
For worse: world is suffering from broken promises
Thursday August 22, 2002
The green wave broke just before the last Earth
summit. In the late 1980s, environmental programmes played at prime time
across the television networks. Almost every child in the west possessed
a rainforest pencil case or a "Save the whales" T-shirt. In 1989,
the Green party in Britain - hitherto the most environmentally hostile
nation in Europe - polled 15% in the European elections. In the same year,
Margaret Thatcher made 67 public statements on green issues, more than
Tony Blair has managed since he took office.
By 1992, the issue had all but disappeared from
the political agenda. Public enthusiasm had scarcely diminished, but governments
and the media had turned their backs on the environment. When the Berlin
Wall collapsed, a new hypercapitalism proclaimed its invulnerability. The
corporations bribed and bullied their way out of regulation. The advertisers
demanded feelgood stories on the television. The middle classes refused
to leave their cars at home.
As the media responded to globalisation with an
unprecedented parochialism, campaigners in the rich world lost interest
in the damming of the Amazon, the logging of Borneo and the killing of
minke whales in the southern oceans. We began to work instead on preventing
the construction of new roads at home, or reclaiming our streets and public
spaces from cars and corporations. We kept the movement alive, but we also
neglected the international solidarity required to deal with the big issues.
But our greatest failure was that we permitted green consumerism to begin
to take the place of green citizenship: many people chose to believe the
seductive notion that we could buy our way out of trouble.
So at the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992,
the world's people allowed their governments to mangle the environment.
The summit was the largest gathering of national leaders in history, but
not all of them arrived with good intentions. Before it began, the rich
nations buried the UN code of conduct on multinational corporations. At
Rio, George Bush Sr toyed with the unilateralism which his son has now
applied to almost every aspect of foreign policy. The US delegation sabotaged
the climate change treaty, gutted and then refused to sign the biodiversity
convention, and, with the help of other rich nations, replaced a binding
forest protocol with a set of voluntary and deeply regressive "principles".
The rich world pledged some $7bn a year for environmental protection, which
was just over 1% of the estimated cost of the measures that the poor world
had been asked to implement.
Partly as a result of the failures of the 1992
Earth summit, the 1990s were an environmental catastrophe. We entered the
21st century with a climate protocol which the world's largest polluter
refuses to sign and which will have almost no discernible effect on climate
change. We have international conventions governing everything from the
shipment of hazardous waste to the protection of endangered species, but
every year they seem to become harder to enforce. We have a trade agreement
which is used by both rich and poor nations to wage war against environmental
protection. Many of the world's fisheries, forests and freshwater supplies
are vanishing.
But, 10 years after Rio, we also have something
which was desperately lacking before: a global people's movement led by
the poor world. While campaigners were obsessed with single issues in the
1980s, today they are seeking to pull together the concerns that had previously
held them apart, linking climate change and debt, deforestation and water
privatisation, corporate power and starvation, while acknowledging the
inseparability of social justice, human rights and the protection of the
environment.
Though this is perhaps the biggest international
movement in world history, its influence on governments is minimal, and
it expects almost nothing from the Johannesburg summit. While official
negotiators have proved staggeringly ineffective, the corporations have
moved with great foresight and panache, attempting to replace the rules
which prevent the rich from destroying the lives of the poor with "voluntary
commitments". Just as big business is less trusted by the public than
ever before, it is demanding that regulation is abandoned in favour of
trust.
To me, the successive failure of the world's environment
summits, starting with the Stockholm meeting in 1972, reinforces the notion
that we must find a means of bypassing the coercive, arbitrary and compromised
system of global governance and create a system of our own - a world parliament,
perhaps, with the moral authority and democratic legitimacy all other global
bodies lack. Until we can hold governments to account for their international
actions, we can only stand back and gawp as they permit the world to become
unfit for human habitation.
by George Monbiot
_____________________________________________________
George Monbiot is author of Captive State - the
corporate takeover
of Britain
From: resist@best.com
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