It is coincidental that in the run-up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which begins next Monday in Johannesburg, much of the front-page news around the world has been environmental — floods, forest fires and droughts — rather than political. Only yesterday, the two lead stories for much of the world’s media were environmental: the forced evacuation of 600,000 people living around China’s Dongting Lake because of the possibility of it flooding surrounding cities and farmland and President Bush’s decision to ease logging restrictions, blaming them for the disastrous forest fires that have swept across much of the US this summer.
However,, there is no reason to believe that such a spate of disasters is going to make the world sit up and take the environment seriously, in particular the central issue of sustainable development. The world is divided into four groups when it comes to the environment question: those who try to minimize the problem or even contest there is one in the first case because they do not want to pay the price of dealing with it, those who agree there is a problem and think something has to be done, those who agree but think it is up to someone else to do something about it, and those who could not care less. Those who want something done were in the minority before the disasters and probably still are.
After President Bush’s comments about logging there can be no doubt where his administration stands (not that there ever was). His accusation that environmentalists are to blame for the fires that have destroyed more than six million acres of forest this year, because they were responsible for laws that restrict trees being logged and therefore for the fires spreading, is an open declaration of war against them and everything they stand for. His accusation is, of course, nonsense. The problem is not that too few trees are being logged, it is the underbrush not being cleared away — a separate issue. Bush is deliberately confusing the two and thus killing two birds with one stone: rewarding the timber industry which was so generous toward his 2000 presidential campaign while hitting out at the environmentalists whom he detests — and doing it oh-so-conveniently just in advance of the sustainability summit when the US media will be full of stories about environmental issues. Now he can claim that: a) environmentalists have caused nothing but problems; b) the issue is much more complicated then imagined; c) it needs much further study; and d) that nothing should be done in the meantime: the perfect recipe for inaction.
While the US — and alongside them, countries like Russia, Japan and Australia — will work to produce a stalemate in Johannesburg, the Middle East too needs to think far more seriously about the environment. We may not have suffered disastrous weather in recent weeks but this is a region where the environment can never be ignored, where there is absolute dependence on a commodity in increasingly shorter supply: water. Just because, thanks to oil revenues, we and other neighboring oil producers can afford today to pay for desalinated water is no excuse for not thinking about tomorrow — because, one of those tomorrows, the oil will run out. What then? Sustainable development is something we all need to think about — personally. It is our future.
