Margaret D. Andrews
More than 100 world leaders and 10,000 delegates and observers took part in the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the largest international gathering in United Nations history, organized by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).
But while the Summit offered a reassuring vision of global cooperation, it convened with serious problems. For one thing, all the players were not sitting on the same side of the table. On one side is “The North” (as the developed world is commonly called in UN parlance)—the United States, Japan, and much of Europe—and on the other side are the poorer, less developed countries of the Third World, “The South.” Adding to the confusion, barely 25 miles from the conference hall just outside of Rio where the official delegates gathered, an alternative summit dubbed the ‘92 Global Forum assembled. An expected 20,000 environmental activists from around the world took part in the ‘92 Global Forum to ensure that Rio was more than “just a big global photo opportunity.”
The interests of the two sides represented at the official Summit may prove to be irreconcilable. The North called for global restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions; the South, struggling to develop an economic base to improve the standard of living of it’s people, responded that it is Northern overconsumption and inefficient energy systems that are the major contributors to toxic emissions. There was little actual negotiating in Rio; most of the rough and tumble took place at preparatory conferences held in Geneva, Nairobi, and New York that ran through last April. At those conferences, Third World delegates cited UN figures showing that the average person in the North consumes 10 times as much energy, and one-and-a-half times as much food, while producing 16 times as much air pollution as the average person in the developing world. The Northern countries must cooperate in narrowing that disparity, according to the Group of 77 who represent the Southern countries, before they are willing to cooperate on such matters as deforestation, limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and other measures necessary to contain the global environmental threat.
The very idea of Western economic growth, fueled by industries that pollute and products that deplete irreplaceable resources, was under heavy fire.
Some do try to find common ground. The point is obviously not to put the North against the South, but to show how interrelated we are. We are not the new enemy. We are trying to demonstrate that ecology is the permanent economy. The only way to organize a secure economy is ecologically.
Senator Al Gore, the author of a new book called
Earth in the Balance
, and the leader of the U.S. Senate delegation to the Earth Summit, commented in an interview that it is time to replace the old bipolar division of the planet with a new ideology of the earth. Just as fighting communism was the central organizing principle of the Western democracies over the past half-century, now that Communism has collapsed, the new organizing principle must be the effort to save the global environment. The scope and ambition of the discussions at Rio were staggering, touching upon every facet of the world’s ecology. From the reduction of chloroflourocarbon emissions that erode the ozone to the fate of dolphins in the ocean to the rights of indigenous peoples—all are slated for inclusion in an Earth Charter of general principles, a menu of proposed actions known as Agenda 21, and in separate treaties, covering climate change and biodiversity as well as a set of new principles for logging of the world’s forests.