The industrialized nations represent only 20 percent of the world's population, yet they control 80 percent of its income, 75 percent of its energy, 85 percent of its wood products and 72 percent of its steel production-and they show little inclination to alter the situation.
Fifteen years after the first Earth Summit held in Stockholm in 1972, a blue-ribbon UN panel, the World Commission on Environment and Development, declared that the need for cooperation between rich and poor was essential to human survival. The commission, headed by Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, said it was no longer realistic to consider issues of environment, development, poverty and uncontrolled population growth in isolation from each other. "These are not separate crises," the Brundtland Commission told the General Assembly in its book-length report, Our Common Future, "They are all one."
Two months before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Brundtland Commission reconvened in London to reaffirm the urgency of putting the world economy on a path toward sustainable development.
"We know what we have to do; it is time to do it," said the commission, whose members included William D. Ruckelshaus, the US Environmental Protection Agency Chief Administrator in the early 1970s; Shridath S. Ramphal of Guyana, former Secretary-General of Commonwealth Nations; and Bukar Shaib, Nigeria's Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and Rural Development.
"Unsustainable forms of development have destroyed previous civilizations," the commissioners said, "but we have now endangered life on a planetary scale. Sustainable development, with its concern for the needs of people today and tomorrow, is ultimately a moral and ethical issue. Yet it unites virtually all human concerns: for security, a nourishing environment, economic progress, democracy, international cooperation and a safe future for our children."
Asserting that sustainable development is good for what ails the world is one thing; mustering support for a coherent program of action is another. The obstacles are both demographic and attitudinal: a bred-in-the-bone yearning for affluence and all that money can buy in the industrial countries; a likely doubling of world population, to perhaps 10 billion people by the middle of the next century; deepening disparities between rich and poor that have left more than a billion people, mainly in Africa and Asia, struggling just to feed themselves; and a globalized economic system that has taken no account of ecological costs or damage, touting unfettered growth as progress.
Meanwhile, the whole concept of sustainable development-defined by Maurice Strong, President of the 1972 Earth Summit, as "development that does not destroy or undermine the ecological, economic or social basis on which continued development depends"-came under flanking fire from a couple of formidable critics.
Edward Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, dismissed sustainable development as a contradiction in terms. Economic development, Goldsmith declared, had long been civilization's foremost organizing principle. The difficulty, he argued, is that development is also "a process which by its very nature must increase systematically the impact of our economic activities on an environment ever less capable of sustaining them, and ever more deeply degraded by them."
Jose Lutzenberger, a Brazilian ecologist who was briefly his country's environment secretary, was similarly blunt. If sustainable development meant more schemes of the sort the World Bank had traditionally financed, like dams and coal-fired generating plants, the human race was doomed, he said. Moreover, Lutzenberger insisted, there was no evidence that the 20 percent of humanity who control nearly all of the world's wealth was prepared to cut back on its wasteful consumption of natural resources-or to stop promoting its consumer-driven lifestyle as something the rest of humanity should aspire to.
"If the whole world had the consumption patterns of the US, Germany, Holland and so on, we'd all be dead," Lutzenberger said at a UN seminar in New York shortly before the Rio summit. He blamed business and political interests in his own country for laying waste to Brazil's rain forests. He also advised industrial nations to withhold environmental aid from developing countries unless they wanted to see it siphoned off by corrupt politicians. His candor did not go unnoticed in Brazil. Word of his remarks soon reached President Fernando Collor de Mello, and less than three months before the Earth Summit, Lutzenberger was booted from the cabinet.
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.
