Despite all the talk about sustainable development, there was nothing particularly sustainable about the pre-summit preparations in Rio de Janiero. The government of President Collor-who months later would be driven from office in a corruption scandal-spent what many Brazilians thought were obscenely large sums to spruce up the city, inspiring endless comments about how the money might have been better spent in a country of desperate poverty and vanishing rain forests.
Officials laid out millions just to upgrade the summit site, a modernistic convention center in an exclusive beach suburb west of the city. They also built an expensive blacktop highway to whisk dignitaries from the airport -and to spare them any views of Rio's ubiquitous street urchins and favelas. The security was imposing, to say the least. The government stationed so many tanks and gun-packing soldiers on the streets that ordinary Brazilians began to wonder whether the military had quietly seized power again.
The bristling show of force was also a reminder of the refusal of most governments at the summit to acknowledge war and militarism as a factor in social and environmental destruction. The conflagration in the Kuwaiti oil fields after the Gulf War erupted in 1991 was only the most recent example. Other controversial subjects were either finessed or completely avoided in the summit documents. The Vatican and its allies succeeded in keeping the texts free of any specific references to family planning and contraception, while France, whose electricity is produced largely by nuclear generators, led a drive against any language relating to the production and use of atomic energy. In yet another conference room, Saudi Arabia and its oil-exporting allies repeatedly blocked debate on the use of fossil fuels, a major factor in air pollution and global warming. And the United States and most Northern governments closed ranks against any extended debate about their own wasteful patterns of production and consumption.
The conference managed nonetheless to address a multitude of pressing issues: it focused attention on the consequences of climate change; on the decimation of wildlife occurring in tandem with the destruction of the world's remaining forests; on transboundary pollution, global poverty, clean water, the degradation of the world's drylands and the special environmental vulnerability of small island nations. It affirmed the vital importance of women's rights, the prerogatives of indigenous peoples, the rights of children, youth and students. Negotiators talked about equity, about rich and poor, North and South, life and death. But ultimately the summit was about money-lots of it.
By: David E. Pitt, (excerpt from Safeguarding the Environment), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
