We are living through a particularly ugly period in world history. As Naomi Klein explained in her book “Shock Doctrine”, in late stage capitalism deregulated corporations and financers don’t just seek to maximise profit at the expense of both people and the planet, they actively exploit disaster.
We can see it in the way the partial collapse of the financial system has been used to force national economies to march in lockstep to the neoliberal drum beat. Cuts to public expenditures and public services open the way for private investors and corporations to profit from services that were previously off-limits to the private sector, such as healthcare and policing.
And we can see it in the way that Klein’s “disaster capitalism” wants to cash in on the environmental crisis. The market approach – pushed by the likes of BP and investment banks – that has failed to solve the problem of climate change is now being pushed as the solution to deforestation and the escalating destruction of the natural world. In UN conference-speak, the privatisation of the atmosphere is known as carbon trading, the privatisation of the world’s forests is known as REDD (“Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”) and the privatisation of everything else known as “payment for ecosystem services”.
An event with tremendous symbolism is now upon us. The Rio+20 Earth Summit in June has to be seen as a testimony to the failure of national governments – captured by corporate interests – to address the environmental problems that prompted the first Earth Summit 20 years ago. Climate changing greenhouse gases are rising at unprecedented, unforeseen rates, and so are rates of biodiversity loss.
The draft declaration for the conference itself recognises this failure. It reads: “Unsustainable development has increased the stress on earth’s limited natural resources, and on the carrying capacity of ecosystems [...] Food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss have adversely affected developmental gains. We are deeply concerned that around 1.4 billion people still live in extreme poverty and one sixth of the world’s population is undernourished, pandemics are omnipresent threats.”
The whole thing is such an embarrassment to the global community that it has been reduced to a three-day event where heads of government – such as our own David Cameron – aren’t even expected to turn up. The draft declaration that world “leaders” are being asked to sign up to is just twenty pages long and has virtually no substantive content.
This “Zero Draft”, as it has come to be known in the NGO world, was summed up as by a statement of “Zero Ambition” that a few organisations published recently to criticize the preparatory work for the summit: “The whole text breathes only the voluntary approach, which countries can accept or just leave. It is all up to nice and interesting partnerships, good intentions and promoting green consumption. When you read in detail you can find some good ideas, but most are not really new: other indicators, stop harmful subsidies, civil society participation; all said and agreed on a decade or two ago.”
This is the same failed voluntary approach that came out of the original Earth Summit 20 years ago. That summit produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – which has been the basis of the UN climate talks ever since – and the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Rio+20 agenda in its current form has nothing to offer except more of the same failed medicine. The agenda is full of voluntary pledges and empty goals with no means of fulfilling them.
As part of the agenda-drafting process, dozens of civil society groups from around the globe have submitted their ideas and proposals alongside those of national governments. Some of these initiatives have been discussed in the Occupy London working groups focussed on Energy, Equity & Environment and Environment & Economics, and we think deserve the serious consideration of Occupy London as a whole.
First, is the proposal to recognise planetary boundaries. A heavyweight paper in the scientific journal “Nature” in 2009 drew together what we know about Earth’s natural systems and how far we can push them. The paper identified nine boundaries (more may be identified as our knowledge develops). Three of these boundaries have already been exceeded (atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, rate of biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle). A group of public interest lawyers have started a campaign to have these boundaries recognised and respected by international law.
Second, is the proposal to make ecocide the fifth international crime against peace. This would make CEOs, board members, government ministers and heads of banks personally liable for large-scale damage to ecosystems such as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the production of oil from the Canadian tar sands.
Third, is the proposal to recognise the rights of nature. This draws on the work of Bolivia – which drafted a proposed Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010 – and also on the philosophical tradition of such thinkers as Thomas Berry and the Wild Law community, who propose that the Earth (rather than humans or corporations) should be at the centre of our legal system. This is echoed in the words of Rowan Williams, who said that “the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment”, and in the writings of progressive thinkers such as Susan George, who argued that inverting our current priorities so that the environment comes before humans and the economy is the great task of our age.
There are other proposals for an International Court for the Environment, and an Ombudsman for Future Generations, for example, which we should also consider supporting. And none of these approaches can take hold unless we focus on the other half of the equation: the capture and effective derailment of the UN process by corporate and financial interests.
By Phil England
