Beneath the Green Cover

Third World environmental movements seem preoccupied with tree-plantings and ceremonial observances. Meanwhile, the underlying political issues relating to global and local environmental issues are ignored.

June 5, World Environment Day, came and went in South Asia as elsewhere, leaving behind hundreds of speeches given at numerous functions — expressions of the ascendancy of the green fashion the world over.

This year, not only did we mark World Environment Day, we also added another day of celebration: 22 April Earth Day. Beyond this, a series of regular meetings are being held in many parts of the world to discuss preparations for the forthcoming World Conference on Environment and Development, to be held in Brazil in June 1992. This mega-event on the environment is being planned and organized from a sprawling villa in Geneva, Switzerland.

Officials of international agencies, as well as institutions that the guru of alternative development Marc Nerfin calls the "Hilton-brand NGOs" are busy making trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific flights to talk about ozone layer depletion, global warming, tropical deforestation, and so on. The term "sustainable development", whose actual meaning remains elusive, is sure to die through sheer repetition between now and 1992. Of the term, a noted British environmentalist has said that "its very strength is its vagueness: Sustainable development means different things to different people."

To comprehend the undercurrents of this situation, where every erstwhile protagonist of the growth model of development has suddenly taken a "greener than thou" attitude, it is necessary to examine the process through which the environment arrived at center-stage. Following the universal application of the growth model of development, especially in foreign-aid development activities, a broad critique emerged, questioning the efficacy of the growth model in the fight against poverty. There was talk of accentuation of inequity, enlargement of the debt trap, centralisation of knowledge and information and environmental degradation, etc.

From the 1970s, however, criticism based on environmental issues have been propagated on such a large scale that other significant elements of the critique of the growth model became marginalised. Following the 1972 Stockholm Conference on Human Environment, there followed publication of the World Conservation Strategy and, more recently, the widely publicised report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Report). There has been impressive growth in voluntary environmental activism while major supporters of the growth model, financial institutions such as the World Bank, have now committed huge funds for the environment.

The situation indicates an impressive victory for the environmentalists. Environmental movements established deep roots, in Third World countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, if there is any well-coordinated international pressure group in a position to influence decisions or public opinion, it is the network built up by the world's environment movements. The strength of these movements lies in the direct links established by the activists with the millions of marginalised and threatened people, and in their commitment and courage to fight the governments and the international financial institutions on the issue of ecologically destructive development. In the socialist world, the movement has not yet been too articulate, although green groups have become conspicuous in the recent efforts and successes of democratic forces in Eastern Europe.

Over all, the enhanced awareness of environmental threats, has emerged at the cost of tracking away from some equally important elements of development critique. The Brundtland Report did take some political stands. It recognized sustainable development as "a process in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony, and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations." On the surface everything seems fine, and this is how the Brundtland Report probably succeeded in satisfying everyone — governments, NGOs, and the development financing institutions — each putting its own interpretation on the paper.

The strongest criticism of the Brundtland Report is based on its support of traditional economic growth and its sustainability. In her foreword to the Report, Brundtland stresses the need for "a new era of economic growth –growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable." Its inability to qualify the specific needs of growth, in specific regions, among specific groups, for specific resource bases, lends obvious support to the same laissez faire model of economic transformation, largely negating the very purpose of the Commission's establishment. "Sustainable development", thus, may in practice become "sustainable economic growth", together with a package of technological fixes for solving environmental problems. Environmental mobilisation the world over may end up as merely a search for new technologies rather than a search for a new way of living and relating to nature. This is where the original significance of the World Environment Day needs to be re-established, otherwise the environment will be the "business of the 21st century", supervised by environmental managerialism.

The environmental struggle is, thus, far from over and there is little justification to be satisfied over ceremonial tree-plantings by ministers or officials as a sign of environmental commitment. The core of philosophy, practice and culture in the growth model of development is shrewdly protected behind the green cover of tree planting and vague slogans for sustainable development.

An example is the most talked-about issue of the "greenhouse effect". There is little discussion about controlling the heavy fossil fuel emmissions in the industrially advanced countries while world attention is focussed on the less important contribution of tropical deforestation. The projected doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in next 50 years will come mainly from the industrialised countries.

Globalising the marginal issue of third world deforestation, and marginalising the main issue of an energy-intensive lifestyles in the First World (and soon the Second World too), is not a matter of chance — it begins to look more and more like an organised process. A new and much more difficult task lies ahead for environmental activists — to actually provide an alternative way of achieving socioeconomic transformation. The Brundtland Report is a halfway house towards "another development" in which basic needs are satisfied and ecological stability ensured. Let us go below the decorative green cover — in search of green development.

Bandyopadhyay is an environmentalist who has been involved in Doon Valley activism.