http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0805-05.htm
Published on Monday,
August 5, 2002 in the Guardian of London
Sustainable Development is a Hoax:
We Cannot Have It All
Unlimited desire is bound to destroy a world of
limited resources
by Jeremy Seabrook
Wherever in the world
people experience the consequences of
ecological ruin, they say: "Things can't go on like this."
Every time we hear of the extinction of some fragile creature
whose name we scarcely know; whenever we learn that the past
year has been one of the hottest on record; when we see
oil-coated seabirds rescued from some spillage; each time
statistics are published showing that the highest rate of
growth in cancers is among those affecting the human
reproductive system - cervix, ovaries, prostate, testicles,
breast - we are roused to repeat: "Things can't go on like
this."
But when the bills
come in, when the mortgage payment is due,
the credit-card account, the holiday deposit must be paid;
when we see how far a new generation is bonded to perpetual
growth of the economy, we know things cannot possibly not
go on like this. They have to. Our income depends on it.
We must find refuge in the contradiction of a world where
livelihood is at war with life.
We have been living
for a long time in this dual consciousness.
The idea that change is vital for long-term survival must
coexist with the certainty that any change in the way we
answer need is unthinkable. Conserving the resource-base
on which all social and economic systems depend strikes
against the even more compelling need to protect the system
of wealth-creation, by the grace of which we buy our daily
bread or corn or cassava or rice.
This apparently insoluble
dilemma has led to a terrible
immobilism and political paralysis. People's feeling of
powerlessness turns them away from politics. Apathy, in
this context, should not be taken at face value. It represents,
rather, withdrawal, disengagement. Discussions on these
issues, if they take place at all, do so inaccessibly,
in cabals of experts, in secret places set apart from
daily experience. When the basic concerns of humanity
are excluded from a rigged and cloudy political "debate",
what could be more rational than opting out of it?
It isn't surprising
that people find it impossible to live
in this contradiction. Most desperately seek to escape.
Anything is preferable to oppression and impotence. We are
overwhelmed. We hope it will all go away, or be dealt with
by those more knowledgeable than we are. Maybe it can be
postponed to some future date - just as we have filed away
all the other unpaid bills. If we can defer the day of
reckoning in our daily lives - usually by borrowing more
- why can we not do so in the global arena?
But we know this is
only buying time - that last commodity
in the universal market. When George Bush the Younger refused
to sign the Kyoto convention on global warming on the grounds
that nothing must be allowed to interfere with US economic
interests, he was echoing the wisdom of George Bush the Elder,
who spoke his famous words before the Rio summit that
"the American way of life is not up for negotiation".
Their commitment to a fundamentalist economic salvation
simply writes the ecological imperative out of the scenario.
Yet it was believed
that the solution to the great clash
between ecology and economy had been discovered in the 1980s:
this was the idea of "sustainable development", triumphantly
enshrined in the Rio declaration. Intra-generational equity
would be balanced with inter-generational justice to
ensure that we do not take more from the Earth than
we give back to it. The excitement generated by this
formula
concealed the possibility that it might be a contradiction in
terms: when unlimited desire is unleashed in a world of limited
resources, something has to yield. The "fruits" of industrialism
turn out to be strange hybrids - perhaps, ultimately, inedible.
Like all the brave
concepts offered up by environmentalists,
sustainable development was doomed to go the way of the rest
of the treacherous lexicon of developmentalism - empowerment,
participation, poverty-abatement, inclusiveness, and so on:
ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to privilege.
Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear;
what originally meant adjusting the industrial technosphere
so that it should not destroy the planet has now come to
indicate the regenerative power of the economy, no matter
how it may degrade the "environment". Sustainable
is what
the rich and powerful can get away with.
And they have
got away with a great deal, as the statistics
of inequality tell. Capitalism - or, under its many criminal
aliases, globalization, industrial society, the economy
- must appear to reconcile growth with conservation.
The political management of the contradiction involves
reassuring people that we can painlessly have it all.
We can all get richer and grow greener at the same time.
It is even suggested that we need more wealth to protect
the environment.
Globalization
is premised on the promise that the poor
may become a little less poor only if the rich become
immeasurably, abusively richer: if it had been the intention
of humanity to wreck the Earth, no more effective formula
could have been imagined. If the industrial paradigm
were
to start with a recognition of the finite carrying capacity
of the globe, this would immediately raise the issue of how
resources are to be allocated; and distributive justice
- that old specter which wealth and power thought they had
exorcised - would come back to haunt the world.
In the decade between
Rio and Johannesburg, the conflict
between economy and ecology has become more acute.
Despite efforts to banish it from an increasingly banal domestic
politics, it haunts the consciousness of the age. While
some have turned away from politics, seeking a haven in
private life, others have sought more plausible answers;
to which the rise both of the racist right and of the
anti-globalizers testifies. The far right states with
admirable lucidity: we are privileged; they want in;
we will not permit it. The outlaw left equally disturbs
the control of politics by conservatives of all hues.
Xenophobic nationalisms are pitted against an internationalism
of social justice. This is the new struggle; and it rises
directly out of efforts to suppress it - the uneasy, and
above all, unsustainable, truce between natural and
human-made systems.
In defiance of all
the carefully wrought conventions,
the extremists are defining issues declared off-limits;
they are portents of the struggle to come. Whoever
believed that economic globalization would be without
political consequences that would tear through the tensions
and pretensions, and break out of the choiceless consensus
of the new order? No doubt the powers at Johannesburg
will do their best to dissimulate all this behind yet
more commitment to sustainability, poverty-abatement
and environmental integrity; the better to gain a little
more time for the paralyzing proposition that although
things can't go on like this, yet they must.
yrn63@dial.pipex.com
© Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2002
