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[Mark Jones <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A summit that must succeed

It's been hammered by the media, savaged by squabbling eco-groups, and 
hijacked by self-aggrandising politicians. But the Johannesburg meeting 
holds the future of life on Earth in its collective hands

Can the earth summit succeed? Talk about it here or email us at 
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Worldview: Earth summit special

Jonathon Porritt
Sunday August 25, 2002
The Observer

'I went to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro with low expectations, and 
all of them were met.' Regretfully, those were the rather glib words with 
which I tried to summarise my feelings about the Earth Summit a decade ago. 
Ten years on, it appears that you'd have to be an insane optimist to have 
any expectations at all of the World Summit on Sustainable Development 
which opens in Johannesburg tomorrow.
Everybody has been so busy slagging off everybody else that the enormous 
significance of this summit seems to have been almost entirely overlooked. 
So much of the media coverage so far has been about junkets and jamborees, 
talk-shops and time-wasting, that you could be forgiven for having decided 
to blank it all out for the next 10 days. But behind all the squabbling, 
another defining moment in our gathering awareness of the need for radical 
change is struggling to get out.
Some of that squabbling has been entirely justifiable. The NGOs have been 
having a fine old time of it, leaving Government Ministers either outraged 
(Prescott-style) or personally wounded (Meacher-style) that they haven't 
found a single nice word to say about them. As a result, Ministers have 
been even more assiduous in talking up their own achievements than they 
might have been in the face of a more balanced assessment.
But balance is boring. For the Ecologist magazine to declare magisterially 
that this is the least green government we've ever had sounds impressive. 
The fact that it's utter twaddle is irrelevant. As it happens, from a 
broader sustainable development perspective rather than a narrowly 
environmental one, this is probably the best government we've yet had. Not 
only that, it's one of the few governments in Johannesburg that's going to 
have any kind of story to tell about progress made since the Earth Summit 
10 years ago.
And that just demonstrates the desperate straits we're in. Relative 
measures can be very deceptive. For a country to find itself near to the 
top of the champions' league when its actual record (assessed against what 
it should be doing, regardless of what anyone else is doing) would have it 
buried deep down in division two, makes impartial evaluation very 
difficult. A lot of the really good things (increasing aid budgets, 
leadership on debt relief, the climate change levy, a carbon emissions 
trading scheme, improved water quality, efforts to transform the Common 
Agricultural Policy, the annual Quality of Life report, and a lot more 
besides) inevitably fall by the wayside.
That's partly because there's a bigger problem. Sustainable development is 
not yet a central concern for this Government. At best, it's an 'every now 
and then' kind of thing, to be run occasionally and ostentatiously up the 
flagpole just to show willing; at worst, it's an irritating pressure point 
that cuts across more 'mainstream' agendas. Hence the tendency to dump 
things on the admirable Michael Meacher, but never get to grips with what 
sustainable development really means at Cabinet level or in No 10. Most of 
Mr Blair's advisers still see sustainable development as a rather fancier 
way of talking about the environment. Even fewer understand that it's 
actually about a robust economic paradigm for the future, social inclusion, 
public health, global security and real improvements in peoples' quality of 
life and wellbeing. In short, it's very much one of those elusive 'big 
ideas' - a great deal bigger in fact than any of the anaemic successors to 
the short-lived 'Third Way'.
As a result, though NGOs may often be wrong in the balance of their 
detailed commentary, they're right in their broad critique. Not that it's 
possible for government or big business ever to get it right as far as most 
NGOs are concerned. It's just so much easier for them to go on demonising 
multinationals as the principal agents of planetary destruction, 
responsible for continuing poverty, oppression, human rights abuses, 
corruption and every wickedness under the sun. There are no grey areas 
here; the moral absolutism of Star Wars rules supreme.
In fact, it's almost all grey out there. I would argue that some 
multinationals have genuinely become a 'force for good' - though they may 
well continue to get things wrong, often at the behest of investors keen to 
maximise short-term returns, or of consumers indifferent to the impact of 
their high maintenance life styles. By contrast, others are up to their 
illegitimate stock options in wrong-doing, asset-stripping, and short-term 
profiteering at the expense of both present and future generations.
Which is why the naïve adulation of New Labour for big business is so 
bizarre. While there's nothing wrong at all in having business leaders 
included in the UK delegation (along with NGOs, academics, and 
representatives of other sectors), it's demeaning and dead bad for 
democracy to see any government so uncritically endorsing corporate 
perspectives on the global economy, or on the best way of alleviating 
poverty. Hardly their strong point up until now.
The truth is we're all afraid to 'own' these ambiguities. Stick to the 
line; don't break ranks. Wouldn't it be just so refreshing, for instance, 
to hear some of the business leaders gathering in Johannesburg get out from 
behind the pretentious rubbish written for them by their PR departments, 
and acknowledge that today's 'crony capitalism' is a busted flush? That 
growth-at-all-costs globalisation is a bigger threat to their companies' 
future commercial success than any amount of 'undesirable' regulation? And 
I still live in hope that one day I'll hear one of those business leaders 
definitively disown the kind of intellectually dishonest drivel from 
right-wing think tanks and self-serving contrarians who purport to speak in 
their name.
Post-Enron, the fact that much of this ideological denial originates in 
America may encourage both politicians and business leaders in Europe to 
think again about the dominant American model of global progress. Indeed, 
the melt-down in corporate America should make us all braver in our 
condemnation of the United States administration. The fact that George Bush 
is not going to Johannesburg may well be a 'slur' on the best efforts of 
the summit organisers, but it's also a blessed relief. In its aggressive 
unilateralism, its contemptible denial of all the science now pointing to 
ecological disaster, and its war-mongering megalomania, there is no greater 
threat to fashioning an action plan for a more sustainable future than the 
current US administration.
Ten years ago, as a reluctant participant at the Rio Earth Summit, George 
Bush Snr gave warning of what has become the watchword of US foreign policy 
over the last decade: 'The American way of life is not negotiable.' By some 
astonishing sleight of hand, defence of that way of life has now been 
vested in the boardrooms of some of the most unaccountable, rapacious and 
corrupt companies on God's Earth. Ten years on, the single most important 
message that Colin Powell needs to take back to George Bush Jnr is that the 
future of life on Earth is not negotiable as far as the rest of the world 
is concerned.
It seems improbable that such sentiments will play much part in the Prime 
Minister's 10-minute contribution to the summit. But with memories of 11 
September last year becoming ever more present as the summit draws to a 
close next week, he does have a chance to remind people that the long-term 
security of even the richest nations on Earth depends not on the number of 
stealth bombers in their hangars, but on their collective ability to get to 
grips with the fact that a fifth of the world's population still live on 
less than $1 dollar a day per person, and to secure the ecological 
foundations (in soil, forest, fisheries, biological diversity, resources 
and so on) on which all our economic aspirations depend.
And having put sustainable development at the heart of his political vision 
in Johannesburg, he must then apply it, back here in the UK, with a great 
deal more consistency and purpose than has been apparent over the last five 
years.