Posted on 10/25/2007 7:51:18 PM PDT by phatus maximus
With its Geo-4 report, the United Nations tells us that most aspects of the Earth's natural environment are in decline; and that the decline will affect us, the planet's human inhabitants, in some pretty important ways.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
So what, you might ask, is special about this report? Why is it worth any more than a cursory headline glance before returning to the party?
Well, first there is the sheer scale. Hundreds of researchers from a huge variety of disciplines have compiled, written and analysed its 572 pages; thousands more have reviewed the various chapters.
Second, Geo-4 covers the whole range of environmental issues, and the links between them.
In these climate-obsessed times, it is often forgotten that issues like forestry, fresh water supplies, agriculture, biodiversity, and the spread of desert land all connect to each other and to climate change.
In the language of James Lovelock's Gaia theory, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that have punctuated 2007 allowed us to take the planet's temperature; Geo-4 shows us what is going on in the blood supply, the lymph system, the intestines and the immune defences.
Third, it explores the links between social trends and environmental decline in a way that is not often done. Which other body, for example, asks whether the divergence we are seeing in the wealth of the richest and the poorest is good or bad for the environment?
And fourth, it is a staging post on a journey which in principle the international community embarked upon 20 years ago; a chance to see how far society has come, and in which direction.
Sustainable commitment
1987 was perhaps the year when the international community, through the United Nations, began to sound as though it were serious about the environment
It was the year that the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the then Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, delivered the gospel of sustainability.
When Mrs Brundtland presented the commission's conclusions to the UN General Assembly, in the form of a report entitled Our Common Future, they were well received.
The assembled governments declared they were "concerned about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development".
They agreed that sustainable development - by which they meant "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" - should become a central guiding principle of the UN itself, as well as its member governments.
They called upon governments - ie themselves - to "ensure that their policies, programmes and budgets encourage sustainable development".
Officially, it was now acknowledged that environmental protection and human development were inextricably linked; there could be no sustainable economic development without environmental protection, and no sustained environmental protection without equitable economic development.
The Brundtland Report set the scene for the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit five years later, which would deliver more specific global commitments on climate, biodiversity, desertification and forests, turning the commission's broad vision into narrower objectives, more measurable and so - perhaps - more achievable.
Our Common Future contained fine words, and fine sentiments; Geo-4 suggests they have not been acted upon.
Nature's poor
Almost everywhere it looks, Geo-4 finds evidence of decline in the years since.
From over-fishing and pollution in the oceans to climate-changing emissions in the atmosphere, it concludes that pretty much everything is going downhill.
More greenhouse gases, more widespread pollution, declining availability of fresh water, deforestation, degradation of farmland, ocean acidification - it is hard to come up with a more comprehensive and, frankly, a more depressing list.
Yet humans are living longer; and in most parts of the world, living standards are higher. Unep calculates that per-capita GDP has gone up from close to $6,000 to just over $8,000 over the last 20 years.
So what, you might ask, is the problem?
Marine fish stocks provide perhaps the clearest example.
Three-quarters of marine fisheries are exploited up to, or beyond, their maximum capacity.
Today's industrial-scale fleets deploy giant nets which could fit a phalanx of jumbo jets through their mouths, they use sonar to find shoals of fish and GPS to locate fertile fishing grounds.
Yet they are finding less and less to catch, because there is less and less there; eventually, there may be nothing at all worth hunting.
There could be no clearer example of a society engaged in unsustainable development; a society that is "meeting the needs of the present", but in doing so is very definitely "compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Humans might be living longer and richer lives now, this implies; but environmental degradation must at some point curb or even reverse the trend.
To use the jargon, the world's store of financial capital is rising at the expense of its natural capital, the bits of nature that humans rely on to provide food and water and to re-process our waste.
It finds that the unsustainable label sticks to everything examined by Mrs Brundtland's team: "There are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable".
Growing concerns
Since Brundtland, the world's human population has increased by 34%; although the rate of growth is slowing, it is a long way from stabilisation.
A larger population needs more land to live on and grow food, hence causing more deforestation and more encroachment into areas previously left for nature. It means extracting more water for drinking, industry and agriculture; more energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Brundtland suggested developing policies that simultaneously aimed to restrain population growth while reducing both poverty and environmental destruction.
If that was ever feasible, politicians and their advisors now generally consider population growth such a sensitive issue that it has virtually disappeared off the sustainability radar.
By pointing out that global population growth is a significant environmental issue, Geo-4 might just encourage politicians to bring it back out of the closet, so that it can at least be discussed again.
Human salvation?
Sustainable development is not the easiest concept to catch up with; certainly it is much harder for a government to measure whether greenhouse gas emissions are rising, or whether economic growth is accelerating than to evaluate whether its overall policy portfolio is sustainable.
Jonathon Porritt has argued on this website that sustainable development is not just a "boring catch-phrase", but the key to a better future for humankind and the natural world.
As he also argued, there has never been more talk about it; in fact, if a tree were planted every time a modern European politician uttered the SD-phrase, loss of forest would probably be a thing of the past.
Geo-4 shows us that if 20 post-Brundtland years have upped the rhetoric, they have done little to change the reality; despite a plethora of good intentions, global society is less sustainable than ever.
Without major changes in direction, we had better hope that the people who believe that human ingenuity, technology and economic growth will always solve our future problems turn out to be right.
As he also argued, there has never been more talk about it; in fact, if a tree were planted every time a modern European politician uttered the SD-phrase, loss of forest would probably be a thing of the past.
Well...then go plant the trees and shut yer cakehole! If all these “experts” and worshipers of the altar of the religion of global warming would just do something to save you and me from the impending doom of natural normal climate activity we could get rid of all these doomsday stories...
Sigh...what a messed up world we live in...
We’re doomed.
(Poster is being too lazy to apply comedic text formatting.)
Methinks I hear the sound of the rationer. Somehow, these men seldom do without themelves.
Ahhh, but there's the fallacy in your statement. With Liberals, it's absolutely, positively NEVER about them doing something. It's their "job" to simply care, but YOUR job to do something about it while they take the credit.
George Will recently put it best (paraphrasing): "Liberalism is the itch to boss other people around."
Liberalism is not sustainable. When manifested in political action, it must suppress free thought and speech to enforce its edicts and beliefs upon those who see reality truthfully. When manifested in economic policy, it must forbid people from declining to participate or prevent them from escaping to a liberty-oriented system. Liberalism never achieves sufficient levels of resources. It always has “unmet needs”. If it does reach economic sustainability, it never can sustain that condition for long, as its desire to interfere in private decisions knows no bounds. It must always run other people’s lives and control their decisions.
Talked to someone today who said she warned people 35 years ago that things were going to get bad due to overpopulation and energy shortages. Well, maybe they still will.
Liberalism + power = fascism.
More Chicken Little pronouncements from the left, which thinks it has far better ideas about how we should live our lives than we do.
Plug for socialism. You can stop reading after that sentence.
What nonsense, the liberals will surely find a way to tax us into sustainability and prosperity!
“Yet they are finding less and less to catch, because there is less and less there; eventually, there may be nothing at all worth hunting. “
Isn’t this the latest recycling of the Malthus theory. Malthus lived in the 1700’s and he is famous for his prediction that population would soon outstrip food supplies since population increases in an accelerating geometric growth rate but agriculture, by the conventional wisdom of the time, increases in a steady arithmetic manner. His plan to save humanity was abstinence and birth control among the working classes. Luckily that didn’t sound like much fun to the working classes, because Malthus failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s and by then it was the idle (sustainable) aristocracy that we needed less of.
In the 1960’s the alarm was sounded again by “ecologists” like Paul Erlich, and it was accepted as gospel that mass starvation and catastrophic depopulation would occur between 1970 and 1985 due to the unsustainability of agricultural production versus population. This was the global warming of it’s time. Just like Al Gore today, the social planners were screaming that the sky was falling and demanding that the world stand still for them so that they could control it and make eveything sustainable, even as the “green revolution” was going on under their clueless noses. People were much too smart then to listen to the alarmists and the development of genetically modified agricultural products made imminent starvation a non-problem, forcing our would be land lords to try to get a life. But now they’ve apparently learned how to say “marine fisheries”. It appears that they have not succeeded in finding a way to entertain themselves, so here they come again.
AGW™ ping
I have far more faithn in those people than I do in the UN bureaucrats who are consistently wrong about everything.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.