Looking for Icebergs

A report released last week by the United Nations, in anticipation of this month's UN-sponsored "Earth Summit" in Johannesburg, South Africa, paints an authoritatively dire picture of the 21st century on Earth as it relates to humans and most other life forms. Ours, we are told, will be a century of environmental devastation, shortages of food and water, and widespread poverty, a combination of entirely preventable conditions that will affect some areas mildly and render others nearly uninhabitable, with rising sea levels, deforestation, widespread chemical and biological toxins, more disease and more diseases, and always, more and more people.

It is by all accounts a gloomy tome. And yet the over 100 world leaders and 65,000 delegates that descend on Johannesburg beginning last Monday, August 26, are by nearly all accounts wasting their time. Johannesburg is a follow-up to the last Earth Summit, held ten years ago in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The agreement that came out of that summit's contentious negotiations has been widely ignored, and the biggest culprit in both the contentiousness and the ignoring, the U.S. government, is now controlled by a regime far more hostile to international agreements in general and environmental concerns in particular.

Nor is the Bush Administration the only hostile force at work. Most major environmental groups have pulled out of the Earth Summit, outraged that what can only be called catastrophic emergencies--described in endless detail by countless blue ribbon commissions, study groups, conferences, and reports like the one released yesterday--are either being subsumed to short-term economic interests or dismissed entirely by the draft plan that participating leaders will gather to discuss, modify, and adopt.

Groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have blasted the plan, a draft of which was finalized in June, as "weak in the extreme" (FOE's words), and lacking even the firm targets, financing, and enforcement mechanisms present in Rio -- elements that needed to be improved, not discarded, for any plan to have a chance to work effectively. The politics of the developed world's governments, and especially the concerns of the U.S. government, so completely dominated discussion of the draft agreement that delegates could not even agree whether to mention the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement in response to global warming that will go into effect later this year without the participation of the United States, the world's biggest greenhouse gas producer.

But Kyoto is only one of a panoply of ignored or discarded protocols and agreements. On a wide variety of issues -- globalization and family planning are two of the most glaring -- the politics of the Americans have overwhelmed the concensus concerns of the scientists, and therein lies the rub. The Earth Summit will not be about the environment at all; it will be about whether the world's economic elites are willing to accept any sacrifices at all in the short term in order to respond to environmental crises. And the answer, so far, seems to be: "Are you out of your mind?"

That leaves a whole lot of spare time to fill in a land far from home, and so the vast majority of environmental groups, especially the grass roots activists, are starting to see Johannesburg as an opportunity -- not, as in Rio, to rub shoulders with and hopefully influence world leaders, but to rub shoulders with and exchange ideas and plans with each other, while ignoring the hopelessly corrupted world "leaders" entirely.

The irony of Johannesburg is that far more in the way of practical and actionable ideas may come out of the summit, but they're not likely to be the ones in the official final summit report. They'll be generated and fleshed out in the side rooms, the hospitality suites, in hotels across town, and at parallel meetings being set up by groups wanting nothing to do with the watered-down, politically driven, scientifically compromised official Earth Summit proceedings.

Proposals are springing from everywhere but the official meetings, and they're being enacted elsewhere -- often locally rather than globally, between communities or constituencies or ecosystems rather than between governments. The problem is that there are some problems for which local activism cannot replace global consensus. Environmentalism's first law -- everything really is connected to everything -- means that local activism in Tahiti cannot stop rising sea levels. That requires concern in Washington and London and Beijing as well. Washington is where the Titanic's captains live, and at the moment, they're all out looking for icebergs. ("Hey, the polar icecap is cleaving off! Maybe we can sell the fresh water to Tahitians!")

Ten years ago, global warming was a contentious, poorly understood theory, and only a few lone voices were warning of the water shortages that are shaping up as a defining characteristic of our new century. Today, the challenges are enormous -- on those and many other fronts, some of which we only dimly understand today. And in some cases, policies need not just to be enacted, but reversed -- globalization's imperatives of the privatization of water supplies, for example, and the destruction of developing economies' capacity to provide food for themselves in exchange for raffling off their natural resources.

In America, the very word "environmentalism" conjures imagines of saving pristine wilderness, but that's the luxury of the wealthy; food and water are environmental concerns, too, and they're not aesthetic concerns -- they're life and death. Solutions can't ignore economic implications -- but then, economic imperatives have generated many of those catastrophies in the first place.

Poverty, and the widening gap between the world's wealthy and everybody else, is the engine driving not only many of our natural world's more dire problems (for humans and for countless other species), but the political impasses preventing their large-scale solutions. In many of these cases, we know what strategies will help alleviate, and even reverse, the problems; what's missing is the political will to enact them.

The lack of top-level concern merely postpones global policies that in the end will be not only inevitable, but vastly more expensive for the delay. In another ten years, perhaps the world's financial capitols will be ready to act -- but for the people, and the entire species and ecosystems, that will die before then, ten years is a long, long time to wait.