Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Cynicism will end up costing the EarthHello folks,
Thought that the following might be informative to some who may not be attentive to the Jo-burg summit conference.
Ray
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Cynicism will end up costing the Earth
A dark alliance of doom between the Right and left-leaning environmentalists is missing the point about the Johannesburg summit
Andrew Rawnsley
Sunday September 1, 2002
The Observer
Deeply unfashionable though this is, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for John Prescott. Whenever the cameras have beamed back from Johannesburg glimpses of the Deputy Prime Minister, his features have been tormented into a scowl even more thunderous than usual. What is the point of the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development? For many of those opining about the event, the point is to ridicule poor old Mr Prescott.
He has been chosen as the most succulent target for those who have decided that the vanity of the Earth Summit is only exceeded by its futility; a grotesque carnival of posturing and pretended concern for global poverty and the depredation of the environment which will satisfy nothing but the extravagant needs of its pampered attendees. Noting the number of limousines available to the British delegation, the tabloids have rechristened Two Jags as Five Mercs. Reporters droolingly regale their readers with the hundredweights of lobster and the buckets of caviar, the geysers of vintage champagne and the gushers of fine wines on the menu at the five-star facilities. They draw the obscene contrast with the impoverished families trying to scratch together a fragile existence in the slum shanty town beyond the police lines guarding the summit fortress. Little wonder that Mr Prescott has been wearing what his mum calls his 'ugly face' and lashing out against the 'cynicism' with which the summit has been treated.
When politicians complain about cynicism, my customary reaction is to reach for my gun. In this case, I think the Deputy Prime Minister has a point. Remorselessly negative interpretation of the Earth Summit guides its most crucial audience in the richer countries like our own to the conclusion that any effort to improve the health of our planet and the lives of its inhabitants can never be anything more than hot air. From some quarters, that is precisely the intention. It is not surprising that this agenda is pushed from the Right, especially the American Republican Right. George W. Bush disdains to attend from an ideological conviction that there is no obligation on the world's richest state to act on either global poverty or pollution. He will not be convinced that there is a threat from greenhouse gases until his Texan ranch is submerged a hundred leagues under the melted icecaps. Even then, free-market fundamentalists will not think that governments either have the role or the competence to do anything much about it.
In a dark alliance of doom with these reactionaries are the radicals who drizzle their contempt on the world's leaders for lacking the courage and the vision to save the planet. The pessimism of the Right holds hands with a mirror cynicism among elements of the Left and sections of the environmental movement. The likes of Friends of the Earth International, who decry the politicians as hapless puppets jerking on strings grasped by the multinationals, counsel despair about the ability of governments ever to do anything for the good.
It's not that the critics of this summit are altogether wrong. Your stomach is bound to churn when the delegates who will consume 80,000 bottles of mineral water cannot agree how to help the more than one billion people on the planet who lack access to safe drinking water. Yes, the noble platitudes about 'our common earth' jar with the self-interested scrapping around the bargaining tables. Yes, the agreements that are reached will often seem trivial compared with the awesome scale of the human and environmental degradation around the globe. Yes, many of the promises made at this summit will be broken. Yes, none of it is terribly edifying. No, none of that makes the Earth Summit a complete waste of space.
First, it is worthwhile for the leaders and publics of the West to be confronted with the gross imbalances of wealth on the planet. For a fortnight, the rich world is compelled to talk to the deprived world. The more often the West can be scourged for its hypocrisy of preaching the market to the poor while subsiding its own agriculture to the tune of more than $300 billion a year, the more likely it is that something will be done to turn free trade into fair trade. For the embattled American delegation, it is salutary for the world's only superpower to be confronted with the profundity of its isolation.
The summit is part of the ongoing education of the rich world about the state of the rest of the planet. In a mocking aside, the Economist remarks: 'No one in their right mind is against sustainable development.' Well, maybe not now, but 10 years ago, when the first Earth Summit assembled in Rio de Janeiro, the idea of sustainable development was still widely regarded as a cranky and, in many minds, dangerously revolutionary concept which would deny Western consumers all the goodies they take for granted. One of the more remarkable sights in Johannesburg has been the representatives of big oil firms, nuclear processing companies, chemical conglomerates and car giants making alliance with their historic foes in Greenpeace to issue a joint plea for governments to meet the Kyoto targets for reducing greenhouse gases. It was, until recently, utterly unthinkable that the eco-warriors and the multinationals would find common cause.
The cynic in you - and in me, too - may suspect that the corporates are applying some green cosmetic to make themselves look more planet-friendly to conscience-troubled consumers in the West. So what? It is a small victory, but an advance nevertheless, that multinationals now feel an obligation to be seen as advocates for the environment.
There will be further opportunities to jeer at the pitiful inadequacies of the world's political leadership as Tony Blair and the rest of the big boys turn up for the clinching negotiations and closing ceremonies. Yet the presence of more than 100 heads of state and government has a value. The minds of the planet's leading politicians, teeming with so many other issues and interests, are forced, at least for a few days, to think about the world. And their arrival in Johannesburg exerts additional pressure to come up with tangible achievements.
The summit has so far produced a deal to protect fishing stocks and the world's first international agreement to prohibit the use and production of toxic chemicals. Is that absolutely useless? Not when you recall that the catastrophic poison gas explosion at Bhopal killed more than 3,000 people in India and continues to destroy the lives of thousands more even today. The average family of four has difficulty deciding what to watch on the telly. Can you imagine how fiendishly hard it is to get 187 nations to agree to something?
Of course, some of the negotiations will fail and many of the agreements will be fudges. Of course, many of the signatories are paying lip-service to pledges they don't have any sincere desire to fulfil. Of course, compared with the towering challenge of our planet's problems, many of the responses from this summit will be pathetically puny. Hey, that's politics. In the absence of a global dictator, do you have an alternative method for finding a way forward?
This summit will achieve too little. That shouldn't support an argument that it was never worth staging in the first place, nor does it lead to the conclusion that it is pointless carrying on with the endeavour to make our planet a better place. One summit won't save the Earth, but it does more for the world than the counsellors of despair and the axis of pessimists who would have us give up altogether. What will doom the Earth is making perfection the enemy of any progress at all.
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