Global Sustainable Development

To environmentalists the concept of globalism is not new. Indeed the environmental movement is based on the realization that the environment and natural resources of the earth, which nourish and sustain life on our planet, are systemic in nature and intrinsically global in scale. Thus environmentalists tend to perceive even the most local of conditions as being linked to the complex system of cause and effect relationships on which the health of the environment of our planet as a whole depends. The processes through which human activity impacts on, and interacts with, this global system have accelerated to an unprecedented degree during the past century through the phenomenon we now call globalization. This can be seen by environmentalists as a mixed blessing. On one hand, it has vastly increased public awareness of the global nature of environmental issues and provided the impetus for international actions to deal with them. On the other hand, globalization has been driven largely by economic motivations which have served to accelerate the environmental deterioration that we have witnessed during this last century, particularly the latter part of it, and which continue to undermine the earth’s natural capital. Knowledge is clearly the principal resource on which the future growth, development and governance of our civilization will be based. Technology manifested in a galaxy of new products and services, design, management and information systems is the primary source of added value and comparative advantage in the global economy (Castells, this volume). It also offers the main ingredient for the transition to sustainability through patterns of production and consumption that are less physical in nature, and less materials- and energy-intensive. The value of a compact disk or a computer chip is primarily attributable to the functions and characteristics with which human intelligence and technology have endowed it, rather than to its material content. This dematerialization of economic growth is already evident in the fact that the biggest single export of the United States today, amounting to some $30 billion per year, is entertainment.

Global Citizens: Campaigning for Environmental Solutions

This chapter deals with three linked issues. First, the nature of modern campaigning, with particular reference to the work of Greenpeace and the solutions they offer. Second, the role of Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations from the not-for-profit sector. Third, the challenge and opportunities created by ‘globalization’ and what this means for global governance from an environmental point of view. For some years Greenpeace has argued that ‘solutions’ have moved to centre stage in the work of pressure groups, as they used to be known. The formative role of environmental campaigning organizations was to draw attention to problems, but by the 1990s, finding and demonstrating solutions, and getting them applied, became much more important (see Yearley, this volume). This has proved a long and hard road. Indeed, the gap between what can be done and what is being done has, if anything, widened. This is mainly because the technical potential has improved while, in Britain at least, implementation has moved much more slowly. It was once famously said of an incompetent British government that this is an island built on coal and surrounded by fish, but still it manages to run out of both. Similar things could be said today. The government has patently failed to protect fish stocks but that can be conveniently blamed on the EU Common Fisheries Policy. But no such excuse will wash on energy. Britain’s wave energy resource is more than 70 times the UK electricity demand. Britain’s wind resource is also vast. Offshore wind could meet Britain’s entire electricity demand three times over. Against this, the government’s unattained target of 10 per cent for renewable electricity is simply pathetic. Contrast Britain with Denmark, which is phasing out fossil fuel use in electricity generation and is on course for generating 50 per cent of its electricity from wind alone by 2030. Little wonder Denmark is reaping the benefits in terms of engineering jobs in wind turbines, an industry in which it is world leader. The story in Germany and the Netherlands is similar: yet Britain is far, far windier.

How Ecology Has Changed

During the past half century, ecology has emerged from its roots in biology to become a stand-alone discipline that interfaces organisms, the physical environment and human affairs. This is in line with the root meaning of the word ecology which is ‘the study of the household’ or the total environment in which we live. When I first came to the University of Georgia in 1940 as an instructor in the Department of Zoology, ecology was considered a rather unimportant sub-division of biology. At the end of World War II, we had a staff meeting to discuss ‘core curriculum’, or what courses every biology major should be required to take. My suggestion that ecology should be part of this core was rejected by all other members of the staff; they said ecology was just descriptive natural history with no basic principles. It was this ‘put down’, as it were, that started me thinking about a textbook that would emphasize basic principles, which eventually became the first edition of my Fundamentals of Ecology, published in 1953. In those early days ‘ecology’ was often defined as the ‘study of organisms in relation to environment’. The environment was considered a sort of inert stage in which the actors, that is the organisms, played the game of natural selection. Now we recognize that the ‘stage’ and the ‘actors’ interact with each other constantly so that not only do organisms relate to the physical environment, but they also change the environment. Thus, when the first green microbes, the cynobacteria, began putting oxygen into the atmosphere, the environment was greatly changed, making way for a whole new set of aerobic organisms. Also, when one goes from the study of structure to the study of function, then the physical sciences (including energetics, biogeochemical cycling and earth sciences in general) have to be included. And, of course, now more than ever, we have to consider humans and the social sciences as part of the environment. So we now have essentially a new discipline of ‘ecology’ that is a three-way interface.

Fragmenting Cosmic Connections: Converting Nature Into Commodity

Most contributions to this volume frame emerging ‘consciousness of connections’ through international politics, economics and trade, urban/ rural exchanges, social movements, environmental transformations, and global citizenship and governance. These views reflect a remarkably linear world-view of dialectics such as: past/present, growth/sustainability, internal/external, and production/recycle. Langton (Chapter 9), however, introduces the idea of symbolic environmental space, or spacialization, which is expressed in the Aboriginal concept of totem. Totem defines other dimensions of knowing that emerge from cosmic environments through connections with animal spirits. These non-lineal manifestations might be described as spiritual clusters that, unlike the electron clouds that enshroud an atomic nucleus, are literally grounded through centres that define human landscapes marked by cultural mechanisms such as sacred sites and song lines. Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world share with Aboriginal Australians this view of cosmic connectedness between living things and the Earth (see Posey and Dutfield 1996). Thus, human beings share life with all other living organisms, and, indeed, may be transformed into other transgenic forms through death, ceremony, or shamanistic practice. In this chapter, I want to explore how such world-views function to create and maintain anthropogenic and cultural landscapes that conserve ecological and biological diversity. I also hope to show how global trade and political initiatives are working to sever and fragment these cosmic connections by reducing the vast bio-diversity of nature to mere products for biotechnology and commercial exploitation. I suggest that the commodification of nature—especially through Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)—is one of the biggest threats to global security in the twenty-first century. This is because global consumerism is driven by market prices that ignore or obliterate the local cultural, spiritual and economic values of indigenous and local peoples, who still manage, maintain and conserve much of the biological diversity of the planet. Many of my examples will come from the Kayapó Indians, with whom I have lived and worked since 1977. The Kayapó inhabit a 4 million hectare (approximately 9 million acre) continuum of ecosystems from the grasslands of the Brazilian planalto to the tropical and gallery forests of the Amazon basin.

Global Networks and Local Societies: Cities in the Information Age

Cities are a major source of intellectual creativity and political engagement. We have not finished, and we will never finish, understanding the transformation of cities and the impact of this transformation on society and culture at large. The focus for this chapter is what I would call the great twenty-first century urban paradox—an urban world without cities. Let me try to explain first, and then go into the details of the analysis. I would say that cities have been throughout history sources of cultural creativity, technological innovation, material progress and political democratization. By bringing together people of multicultural origins and by establishing communication channels and systems of cooperation, cities have induced synergy from diversity, dynamic stability from competition, order from chaos. However, with the coming of the information age cities as specific social systems seem to be challenged by the related processes of globalization and informationalization. New communication technologies appear to supersede the functional need for spatial proximity as the basis for economic efficiency and personal interaction. The emergence of a global economy and of global communication systems subdue the local to the global, blurring social meaning and hampering political control traditionally exercised from and by localities. Flows seem to overwhelm places as human interaction increasingly relies on electronic communication networks. Therefore, cities as specific forms of social organization and cultural expression, materially rooted in spatially concentrated human settlements, could be made obsolete in the new technological environment. Yet, the paradox is that with the coming of the techno-economic system, urbanization— simply understood as spatial concentration—is in fact accelerated. We are reaching a predominantly urban world, which before 2005 will include for the first time in history at least 50 per cent of the planet’s population in cities. Core activities and a growing proportion of people are and will be concentrated in multimillion metropolitan regions. This pattern of social–spatial evolution could lead to what I call urbanization without cities. As, on the one hand, people concentrate in spatial settlements, at the same time suburban sprawl defuses people and activities in a very wide metropolitan span.

Social Movements as Problematic Agents of Global Environmental Change

By the end of the old millennium, social movement organizations (SMOs) had become the most popularly acclaimed and, in many respects, trusted agencies advocating global environmental change. They had won widespread public admiration because of their daring and heroic undertakings, because of the verve and symbolic acuity of their actions and because they seemed to be in the vanguard of environmental change. Of course, commentators noted that governments and inter-governmental agencies might have more power to set and influence environmental standards, that companies might be making the greatest impacts on the environment, that it was often scientists who identified possible environmental problems which were ‘off the radar’ of environmental groups, and that the daily consumer choices of the industrialized world’s massed citizens and commuters might outweigh their efforts. All the same, social movements represented the quintessential environmental actor. In cultural terms, environmental organizations stood for the environment in a way which the Environment Minister, the collected scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or Shell simply could not. Moreover, those movement organizations which focused on issue of global environmental change seemed particularly successful; in the late 1980s through to the early 1990s—around the time of the Earth Summit— they were rewarded with disproportionately rapid growth and cultural cachet (see McCormick 1991: 152–5 who cites Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in this regard). And their market prominence within the NGO sector has largely continued. At the same time, social movements commanded the attention of social scientists and commentators. For one thing, social movements and the associated movement organizations appeared to confound expectations. Far from politics as usual, social movements indicated how successfully and how enduringly people could be organized—or organize themselves —around non-conventional political objectives. Standard economic and political theories did not anticipate that people ‘ought’ to mobilize so successfully around a diffuse political objective such as global environmental improvement.

Introduction

Scientists, politicians, businesspeople and the wider public today have an increasing awareness of global environmental issues. This public awareness, and a certain amount of knowledge accompanying it, has been growing in depth and breadth. Such an awareness has been developing over decades, spurred by prominent publications such as Rachel Carson’s (1963) Silent Spring, the Club of Rome’s (1972) The Limits of Growth, and the Brundtland Commission’s (1987) Our Common Future. Major public events have also drawn world-wide attention to environmental matters, especially the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment organized in Stockholm, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, often known as the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, and most recently the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg. Global environmental problems were regarded as minor issues marginal to national interests until the 1980s. It was in the middle of the 1980s that the mass media began to pay increased attention to global environmental issues, prompted by events such as the Bhopal and Chernobyl disasters and the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. Since then, there has been a rising interest in such problems, particularly in the light of issues of global warming, along with unease over the emission of toxic chemicals, threats to biodiversity, desertification, the depletion of the world’s fisheries and the elimination of forest cover. There has emerged especially since that decade a world-wide attentiveness to common risks posed by radioactivity, pollutants and depletion of resources (cf. Beck 1992). Over the past twenty years, not least urged by public concern, scientific understanding of the global environment has developed considerably, occasionally feeding into public awareness. William C. Clark (2000: 87) describes the development of scientific awareness of global connections among environmental ‘stuff’: ‘As understanding of the earth system has emerged during the last two decades, it has revealed the planet’s environment to be shaped by complex linkages among atmosphere, ocean, soil and biota.’

The ‘Wild’, the Market, and the Native: Indigenous People Face New Forms of Global Colonization

Indigenous and traditional peoples world-wide are facing a crisis, one that supersedes that inflicted on indigenous peoples during the imperial age. Just as in the last 500 years, imperialism caused the encapsulation of indigenous societies within the new settler nation-states and their subjection to colonial political formations, loss of territory and jurisdiction, so have the globalizing market and the post-industrial/technological complex brought about another phase of profound change for these societies. The further encapsulation of indigenous societies by the global complex, to which nation-state formations are themselves subservient, has resulted in continuing loss of territory as a result of large-scale developments, urban postcolonial population expansion, and ongoing colonization of the natural world by the market. This last point is illustrated, for example, by the bioprospecting and patenting of life forms and biota by new genetic and chemical engineering industries (see Posey, this volume). Coincidental with the new colonization is the crisis of biodiversity loss; a critical issue for indigenous peoples, particularly hunting and gathering societies. The massive loss of biota through extinction events, loss of territory and species habitats, and environmental degradation, together with conservationist limitation of indigenous harvesting, constitute significant threats to indigenous ways of life. While aboriginal rights to wildlife are restricted to ‘non-commercial’ use, the pressures increase for indigenous peoples to forge unique economic niches to maintain their ways of life. Of particular importance is the vexed issue of aboriginal entitlements to commercial benefits from the utilization of wildlife arising both from developing standards of traditional resource rights and from customary proprietary interests. The new threats to indigenous life-ways in the era of the globalizing market have been brought about by the increasing commodification of features of the natural world, putting at risk the very survival of ancient societies that are directly dependent on the state of their natural environment. For instance, already in June 1978, Inupiat leader Eben Hopson, then founding Chairman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and spokesperson for the Alaska Whaling Commission, appealed to the London press corps for understanding and support in the legal recognition of Inuit rights: ‘We Inuit are hunters. There aren’t many subsistence hunting societies left in the world, but our Inuit circumpolar community is one of them.’

Cities, People, Planet

As urban areas become our primary habitat—three-quarters of the human population are expected to become city dwellers by around 2050 (Worldwatch Institute 2000)—it is of key importance to establish whether a sustainable relationship can be established between cities and the planet. The urgency of this task is only too evident: the size of modern cities in terms of numbers of citizens and physical scale is unprecedented: in 1800 there was only one city of a million people: London. At that time the largest 100 cities in the world had 20 million inhabitants, with each city usually extending to just a few thousand hectares. In 1990 the world’s 100 largest cities accommodated 540 million people, of which 220 million people lived in the 20 largest cities, mega-cities of over 10 million people, some extending to hundreds of thousands of hectares. In addition, there were 35 cities of over 5 million and hundreds of over one million people (Satterthwaite 1996). Urban sprawl is a major concern for environmentalists. It is typical of cities of increasing affluence in which people often prefer the spaciousness of suburbs to denser city centres. Metropolitan New York’s population, for instance, has grown only 5 per cent in the last 25 years, yet its surface area has grown by 61 per cent, consuming much forest and farmland in the process. In the USA and Europe, sprawl today is above all else caused by the routine use of the motor car. Los Angeles is famous for the way it sprawls along its vastly complex freeway system. Ninety per cent of its population drive to work by car and many live in detached houses surrounded by large patches of land. A city of 11 million people, it covers an area three times larger than London which has a population of 7 million. London itself, where semi-detached houses are the norm in the suburbs, is several times larger than Hong Kong which has 6 million inhabitants and where most people live in high rise blocks. Not surprisingly, Hong Kong uses space far more efficiently than either LA or London.

International Trade and Environment: Towards Integrative Responsibility

The rise of environmental awareness and the advent of globalization have emerged as two of the most important forces shaping international trends in the new century (Taylor and Thomas 1999). Interest in environmental and trade issues is not new; however, the intensity with which these forces are considered to be in conflict with each other is new. These two forces represent two seemingly different stylized epistemological outlooks. On the one hand, international trade is driven by technological innovation and expressed as discrete and reducible entities such as products and prices. Environmental concerns, on the other hand, are linked to the growing understanding of the complex relationships between natural and cultural evolution. As globalization continues to rise, growing efforts are under way to ensure that international trade be consistent with other societal goals, such as environmental conservation. Finding complementary goals for these two regimes has been challenging in the past (Repetto 1993). This is not just an academic exercise but a serious attempt to create international agreements on how to integrate environment and trade activities. The results of such efforts are codified in the Rio Declaration1 and Chapter 2 of Agenda 21, as well as reflected in a number of international environmental agreements dealing with toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms. These treaties contain provisions that seek to ensure that international trade and environmental protection are mutually supportive. These agreements are also matched by efforts at the national level to integrate economic and environmental considerations. Such efforts received global legitimacy with the adoption of Our Common Future, the report of the Commission on Environment and Development released in 1987 under the chairmanship of Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The report advanced the principle of integrative responsibility, which became the basis for the work of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). UNCED adopted Agenda 21—forging the most elaborate effort yet to provide guidelines for implementing integrative responsibility. Also adopted were the Rio Principles on Environment and Development, which also articulate and push for integrative responsibility among these two factions.