No Ecology without Equity; No Equity without Ecology Earth Summit Anniversary from the Magazine of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies 2002      The Earth Summit 10th Anniversary Conference in Johannesburg at summer’s end was attended by 65,000 people, surely an indication that environmentalism is an enormous world concern. Nevertheless, most assessments of the global environmental record in the decade since the first Earth Summit are gloomy. As FES Dean Gus Speth recently wrote in Foreign Policy, deforestation and species lost have accelerated, irreplaceable ecosystems are being destroyed more rapidly than ever, genetic resources vital for farming and medicine are disappearing, toxic pollution has increased, and the planet is heating up dangerously fast.      Our own government has followed a policy of distance, denial, and delay. The U.S. is nearly alone among the world’s states in refusing to join the international Convention on Biological Diversity, launched at the 1992 Summit. Our country has failed to support the Summit’s other major treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, and has led the resistance by the world’s wealthy nations to meeting their Summit promises of substantial new environmental aid to the developing world. But rich countries do not bear all the blame: governments of many poor and middle-income nations have done as much to evade as to fulfill the commitments they made at 1992. Why?The 1992 Earth Summit was based on a fragile alliance between defenders of the “natural” (conservation) and advocates of the “social” (equitable development). Efforts to implement the Summit accords have been weakened by a near-fatal flaw: the treatment of ecological sustainability and economic development as conflicting goals. While alluding piously to the concept of “sustainable development” that is meant to unify these two objectives, many governments of the global North (the industrialized nations) and South (most of Asia, Latin America, and Africa) have hinted to their citizens that compliance with the Rio Conventions on biodiversity and global warming will require great sacrifices in their qualities of life.      The notion that there is a choice between environment and development has allowed governments to get away with anti-environmental policies, from mere avoidance to state-supported ecocide. Revenues and patronage from devastating mining and logging activities, from the tropical belt to Siberia to the U.S and Canadian west, have enriched those who are well-connected locally and have suited perfectly the interests of transnational corporations. Some business leaders are making sincere efforts toward greening their operations, but in the absence of strong state and citizen vigilance and full-resource-pricing policies, the best short-term bottom line for most corporations still results from grabbing resources fast and cheaply, letting nature and future generations pay the real price.      A further challenging in implementing the Earth Summit accords is that some of their most important goals may be thwarted by the liberalized trade and the World Trade Organization. WTO rules restrict the rights of countries and communities to regulate private investors, leaving them with little control over how, and for whose benefit, their land, water, and labor will be used and cared for. Some governments are already using fear of WTO-backed sanctions as an excuse for watering down their Earth Summit commitments. The irony in all this —but also a cause for real optimism— is that a livable environment and sound, socially just development, far from being a trade-off, are profoundly inseparable. In the North, this is already obvious. We have experienced decades of impressive but unsustainable development in which the costs and damages of the ways we produce our surfeit of goods are shunted away from the producers, through smokestacks, waste dumps, and tax write-offs, and onto the natural environment and the public purse. We suffer the consequences daily in the form of choking traffic, sterile landscapes, serious public health problems, and a deep unease caused by our loss of connection to the land and living nature.      It is dawning on world leaders and ordinary people that this model of fossil-fuel-driven industrialization, growth at all costs, and profit by any means is not replicable by the entire world: material resources are too few and there is no place left to export the system’s massive wastes. More importantly, growing numbers believe that pursuit of this model, with its dangers of social polarization and irreversible ecological loss, is also not desirable.      There is therefore growing interest in “alternative developments”: models of production, consumption, and social relations that are resource-light, energy efficient, and equitable. This new approach was sidelined in the official Johannesburg Summit. Instead, despairing of their ability to make governments keep their promises, U.N. officials fell back on a weaker substitute: voluntary partnering with business by governments, U.N. agencies, and non-government organizations (NGOs). But the theme of development alternatives based on ecological principles and partnerships among equals was predominant at the NGO “side events” surrounding the Conference. As any Summit veteran can testify, it as at these “side” venues that coming trends take shape. An inspiring example, well-represented at Johannesburg, is the international movement for food sovereignty and agro-ecology. Made up of farmers, fishers, and rural laborers from six continents, the movement’s goal is basic food self-reliance based on sound environmental practices that combine the best of the traditional and the modern. Their proposals are practical because they are drawn from the actual experiences of rural and coastal communities. At regional and international workshops, their representatives share information about successes and obstacles in increasing food production while conserving biological and cultural diversity. They have built alliances with organizations of indigenous peoples and women in developing countries who also see their survival as linked to the fate of the environment.      This movement welcomes “globalization” in the sense of lively exchange of goods and ideas among communities worldwide. However, its members are strongly opposed to global “free trade” rules that would require countries to open their doors to investors of all sorts, regardless of the social impacts and ecological costs of their activities, and to least-cost exporters of food. Transnational agribusinesses have been flooding world markets with a surplus of “cheap” foods that are really costly when their taxpayer subsidies, energy use, polluting wastes, and the ruin of small farmers are taken into account. Many of these companies are expanding their industrialized farm operations into the global South, displacing traditional food varieties and bringing the same model of high-chemical-consumption farming that has done so much damage in the North.      The specific alternatives posed by the food sovereignty movement are as diverse as the communities they represent. Indeed, a guiding principles is that sustainable food systems only work when they are adapted to the unique biophysical and cultural setting of each producing community. A second key principle is that of the right to food, best achieved by ensuring that family farmers have access to land, water, and other food-producing resources and that farm and fishing laborers are guaranteed fair wages and safe surroundings. A third principle is that governments should not be declared obsolete in favor of unfettered “market forces”; rather, governments must be held ecologically accountable for the activities they pursue or permit.      For these movements, there is no question of Environment versus Development. Sustainable development depends directly upon the ecological integrity of land, of lakes, rivers, and watersheds, of forests, and of vital coastal and marine zones. It also depends on the social well-being and empowerment of the communities that rely upon those environments and have a direct interest in their preservation. “No ecology without equity, no equity without ecology”, these grassroots-based alliances say. Many conservationists in the North and South alike have also come to understand that precious ecosystems will not be spared unless livelihoods are ensured and local people have both reason and ability to act as environmental guardians.      Alliances of grassroots-based movements have already done much to mold the flesh of firm commitments onto the bones of Earth Summit treaty language that calls for “fair” benefit-sharing, “prior informed consent” of local people as a condition of access to resources, and protection of the “lifestyles relevant to biodiversity” of local communities. The linked principles of equity and ecology that guide these movements must now be translated into action at the national and global levels.      Because most governments, international agencies such as the World Bank, and some divisions of the U.N. have yet to incorporate this linkage into their policies, the most promising developments since Rio are not yet visible at the level of high officialdom and multilateral meetings. A very different perspective —a view of environmentalism from the grass roots— offers tremendous reason for hope.  back to top