December 1999
DEVELOPMENT VS ENVIRONMENT
One of the biggest challenges facing governments as the new
century unfolds is how to balance environmental protection
with the demands of powerful multinational corporations.
By Danielle Knight
Washington: If deterioration of the global environment
over the past several decades is any guide, the coming century
does not hold out much promise for reversing these trends,
many environmentalists are warning as the millennium comes to
a close.
Rising Earth temperatures, record losses in biodiversity
and species extinction, increasing demands and dwindling
supplies of fresh water, only seem to be getting worse.
'If I look at the global environmental trends that we
have been tracking since we first launched the Worldwatch
Institute 25 years ago, and if I simply extrapolate these
trends a few years into the next century, the outlook is
alarming to say the least,' says Lester Brown, president of
the Washington-based think-tank.
On the up-side, the past several decades has seen
citizens and environmental groups, or non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), worldwide pulling together in
unprecedented numbers to pressure governments to pass laws to
protect the ozone layer, ban toxic chemicals in the
environment, reduce air and water pollution, and protect
endangered species and habitats.
Seeking a balance between economic development and
environmental protection, NGOs have played a major role in
shaping international environmental treaties, including the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto Protocol on
Climate Change, and the Basel Convention, which bans
exporting hazardous wastes from industrialised nations to
developing countries.
Yet as the millennium pulls to a close, the political and
financial structure of the world economy, which has become
increasingly dominated by powerful multinational corporations,
is directly at odds with efforts to promote a healthy Earth,
says Joshua Karliner, executive director of the Transnational
Resource and Action Centre, the San Francisco-based corporate
watchdog.
One clear example of this, says Karliner, has been the
success of powerful multinational oil and gas industries in
swaying the US Senate against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change, an international treaty seeking to reduce
emissions of heat-trapping 'greenhouse' gases.
Scientists believe that such emissions, caused by the
burning of fossil fuels, will warm the Earth and result in
drastic climate change, including increasing the intensity and
frequency of floods, droughts, and storms.
If current record-breaking warming trends continue,
average global temperatures could rise between 1 and 3.5
degrees centigrade by the year 2050, according to expert
studies.
'The challenge in the 21st century is to replace the
corporate-dominated paradigm that worships the bottom-line
with a framework that puts the environment, human rights, and
labour rights first,' says Karliner.
In the past several decades, NGOs have applied a diverse
array of strategies to counter corporate power including
promoting laws to protect the environment, developing lawsuits
against governments and corporations, and passing company
shareholder resolutions.
Citizens in Ecuador, who see their own country's court
systems as inadequate, for example, have been attempting to
hold US oil giant Texaco accountable for its past operations,
by suing the company in US courts. Similar suits have been
filed in the US court system against UNOCAL and Chevron for
their activities abroad.
While praising these efforts, Peter Montague, director of
the Maryland-based Environmental Research Foundation, says the
environmental movement must pay closer attention to how the
push for trade liberalisation is eroding the power of
nation-states.
'NGOs will become irrelevant if national governments lose
their capacity to govern because power has been transferred to
international trade bodies,' he says.
After the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), for example, a US firm complained that it
had been illegally prevented from opening a waste disposal
plant because of environmental zoning laws in the Mexican
state of San Luis Potosi.
Through NAFTA, Metalclad corporation sought some $90
million in damages since it said state authorities were -
against trade rules - prohibiting it from making a profit
since they declared the site an ecological zone and refused to
allow the firm to reopen the facility.
Similarly, many domestic environmental regulations -
which NGOs have worked very hard to pass into law - have been
challenged through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and
hence weakened or abolished, warn environmentalists.
The United States, for instance, gutted provisions of the
Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, and its
Endangered Species Act after these environmental policies were
challenged before the WTO, according to a recent report
released by Public Citizen, a Washington-based NGO founded by
consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
'This undemocratic trend must be reversed and power must
be returned to governments,' says Montague.
Citizen groups and environmental organisations have been
trying to guide global trade by pressuring governments to
attach environmental provisions to trade agreements and
pressure international financial institutions like the World
Bank, to adopt minimal environmental and social standards for
funding projects.
'In terms of reforms at the World Bank, I would say,
depending on how you look at it, the glass is half empty or
half full,' says Bruce Rich, senior attorney for the
Environmental Defense Fund.
While many destructive projects will not be funded by the
Bank since environmentalists like Rich pressured the
institution to adopt minimal guidelines, the Bank is still a
large centralised institution which favours large loans -
which often go toward large controversial energy projects, he
says. Some investment projects funded by global financial
institutions 'are what is fuelling climate change and losses
in biodiversity', says Rich.
Using lessons from studying these institutions,
environmental groups, including Indonesia-based Bioforum and
Friends of the Earth Japan, have begun a new campaign to
reform public export-credit lending agencies which operate
without social and environmental standards.
Designed to help a nation's firms compete for business
abroad, these agencies provide publicly backed loans,
guarantees and insurance to corporations seeking to do
business in developing countries. 'These agencies are often
financing projects - many riddled with corruption - that other
taxpayer-supported agencies like the World Bank reject as
environmentally and economically unsustainable,' says Rich.
Another challenge in the coming decades is genetic
modification and environmentalists say they will keep a close
watch on companies such as Novartis and Monsanto, which are
heavily pushing their new technological innovations in
biological engineering.
'We are in the midst of a radical, historic transition -
from the Industrial Age to the Biotechnical Age,' says Jeremy
Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation on
Economic Trends in his book, The Biotech Century.
Environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Union
of Concerned Scientists, worry that the mass release of
thousands of genetically engineered crops into the environment
will cause 'super-weeds' through unintentional cross-breeding
and hence irreversible damage to the Earth. Mass extinction of
plant, animal and insect species will also be a trend
environmentalists hope to reverse.
John Tuxill, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute,
says that as critical habitat is logged or developed,
extinction rates have accelerated this century to at least
1,000 species per year. 'These numbers indicate we now live in
a time of mass extinction - a global evolutionary upheaval in
the diversity and composition of life,' he says.
'What we need now is a rapid shift in consciousness, a
dawning awareness in people everywhere that we have to shift
quickly to a sustainable economy if we want to avoid damaging
our natural support systems beyond repair,' says the
Institute's founder Lester Brown.
Danny Kennedy, director of Project Underground, the
California-based international mining watchdog, says for such
a shift to happen, environmental organisations need to focus
on organising people at the community level and working
closely with other social movements, such as the human rights
and civil rights movements.
'The power of civil disobedience and mass movements has
been harnessed and then forgotten at different points in
the century,' he says. But the huge upcoming
challenge, adds Karliner, will be to ensure that discontent
with corporate-led globalisation is not captured by
nationalist xenophobic responses such as the rise of
right-wing militia groups in the United States, India's BJP
party or France's Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Instead, environmental and related movements need to work
hard to harness the discontent with corporate power to promote
democratic responses that value human rights and multi-racial
and multi-ethnic responses to solving the problems.
'We need to take the lessons learned from some of the
horrors of the 20th century and apply them to building an
alternative to globalisation in the 21st century,' says
Karliner. Otherwise, he says, we may repeat some of the past
centuries' more profound mistakes. - Third World Network
Features/IPS
-ends-
About the writer: Danielle Knight is a correspondent for Inter
Press Service, with whose permission the above article has
been reprinted.
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