Objectionable sustainability

Just before the close of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, groups claiming to represent “civil society” withdrew from the summit and staged demonstrations against it.

The sudden change of heart from Friends of the Earth and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) need not be a shocker. Co-operation with government and business, and the second half of the term “sustainable development,” is outside their ken. Much better, instead, to rage against the machine, declare private-sector water projects to be “a crime against people and the earth,” and halfbrick a few riot police.

But not before living lavishly at the summit. It was estimated that each summit participant would be using 200 litres of water daily (about four times what an ordinary Westerner drinks and flushes in the course of a day), and that by the time the summit was over, he would have consumed 100 sheets of paper and produced seven kilograms of garbage.

These figures omitted the garbage summit participants might produce on paper; but that’s another story.

Nikhil Sekhran of the Global Environmental Fund, part of the United Nations Development Program, was evidently stung by some of the figures. He told the Associated Press “the system is completely new . . . Clearly a lot more education needs to be done.”

Yes, and not all of it should be about waste management.

Governments — First and Third World alike — have been tinkering with the wording of the conference resolutions so that they are not signatories to instruments that would oblige them to inhibit productive sectors of their economies. This has led activist groups at the summit to charge that it has been hijacked by corporate interests, or that governments are trying to block the summit’s objectives.

Certainly governments are blocking the activists’ objectives of shutting down all industry in the name of sustainability. It would be a very rash government indeed that would agree to measures that could hurt important industries, sustainability or no sustainability.

That governments — at least, those for whom votes are important — should find themselves in this kind of quandary illustrates how summits have become a completely unwieldy way of tackling global problems (and a few non-problems to boot). Conscious of the influence NGOs frequently have on the public, they have to display obeisance to the activists’ goals, whether wacky or not. But equally conscious that a significant hit to the economy may come from carelessly vetted government commitments, they try to steer away from anything substantive.

So nothing gets done; the NGOs cry foul; and a lot of time and money is wasted.

How much more could be achieved if, from the outset, the activists were seen off and governments tried to iron these things out at a diplomatic or bureaucratic level? There might have been no Kyoto treaty; but watch this space. There may, after all, never be one anyway.

How much more could be achieved if business and government looked for partners in civil society — the real one, not the one that shows up at international meetings in masks and hockey gloves — and developed a credible consultation process for development? Environmental activists who listen instead of shouting often find there is something more than the profit motive that makes people in industry tick.

How much more could be accomplished if governments abandoned, just for a change, the United Nations as the single credible forum for international consultation and action? For too long, the organization has been the captive of agendas set by Third World dictators and its own featherbedding bureaucrats.

We can close with one more lovely little irony: the luxury hotels and convention halls of Sandton are built on a city that exists because of gold and — gasp — uranium mining. We agree, Mr. Sekhran. The global sustainability crowd needs educating, and soon.