ENVIRONMENT: Few Signs of Hope from Rio Plus Five

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 22 1997 (IPS) - The world environmental movement, and the world environment itself, are in a bad way, if the ten- day Rio plus Five forum which ended here this week was anything to go by.

Apart from the multiple divisions between the 500 delegates, which even blocked approval of final recommendations, the many contradictions and a lack of viable solutions for world problems only increased the sense of impotence.

Not even the concept of sustainable development came out of the meetings unscathed.

The Liberation Theologist, Leonardo Boff, speaking in a seminar led by Brazil’s Environment Minister, ambitiously entitled “Concrete Utopia,” disqualified the expression as a contradiction in terms.

Development is linked to the economy and does not even contemplate the limits of natural resources, encouraging “permanent accumulation, greed, competition and non-cooperation” generating increasing exclusion and unemployment – the complete opposite of sustainability, he said.

“It is not a scientific concept” but a norm in construction, countered Carlos Walter, in another parallel meeting attended by unions and social movements.

He said this is a new attempt to recover the concept of “anthropocentric, industrialist and consumerist,” development, to overcome the checkmate imposed by successive criticisms on its lack of ecological viability and its injustice.

Without expressing exactly these conceptual doubts, many environmentalists spoke only of sustainability, omitting development from their speeches and documents.

President Fernando Cardoso also recognised the impossibility of preventing the burning and felling of forests in Amazonia, an “area where there is practically no State control,” he said.

The leader said he was sceptical Tuesday of the effectiveness of a law he had signed only days before, banning mahogany exports for two years as it is an endangered species.

The most influential participants in the Rio plus Five forum were forced to admit the balance of the five years since the 1992 Earth Summit had been negative.

The problems are getting worse, said Federico Mayor, director general of the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO).

“We are still on the same road” to disaster stressed Maurice Strong, secretary of the 1992 Summit and president of the present forum, on repeated occasions.

Former Soviet president Mijail Gorbachov stressed the urgent need for changes in the paradigms which have led the world for the last three centuries, adding that the current path would lead to the end of humanity within 30 or 40 years.

Cardoso said there were difficulties in reaching this goal, as “the processes are slow, a law delays three or four years in being approved.”

However, he tried to offer some degree of optimism by indicating “advances in consciousness” criticising the politically “conservative” pessimism.

The worldwide processes of the present day, like globalisation, free trade and privatisation were all named as factors which aggravate environmental problems.

Sara Larrain, of Chiles National Environmental Action Network, warned that the Agenda 21 approved in 1992 recommended “promoting sustainable development through trade liberalisation.”

“The current conditions of (international) trade are irreconcilable and incompatible with any definition of sustainable development,” because they are used as instruments for a form of economic growth which exhausts natural resources and externalises environmental costs, she said.

The internal contradictions of the environmental movements own suggestions make the aimed for progress “from the agenda to action” even more difficult.

The draft Earth Charter, with 18 points aimed to produce world debate by the year 2000, is paralysingly eclectic.

It mixes issues as varied as the survival of humanity to the protection of “all creatures from cruelty and arbitrary annihilation” and to erradicate poverty, without saying how to achieve this without increasing water and energy consumption, both of which are on the brink of exhaustion.

President of the Host Committee which organised the Rio plus Five forum, Israel Klabin, classed the greenhouse effect and climate change as “key” issues in the process.

However, he did not answer the criticism of some of the most vociferous NGOs, who asked why these subjects had been left out of the meetings.

In the midst of so many controversies and shortcomings, the slight advances made over the last few years went almost unseen, like the reduction in ozone damaging gases and the local and community solutions and inititives around the world.