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June 1997 Editorial: The Road from Rio By Martin Rowe

It has been 27 years since the first Earth Day. It has been 25 years since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, brought environmental issues to global attention. Twenty years later, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, and commonly known as the Earth Summit, produced an action plan - Agenda 21 - framed to encourage the guiding principles established in a report by former Norwegian premier Bruntland written in 1987 and entitled Our Common Future. Earlier this year, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world met to address what had been achieved since Rio (Rio Plus Five). This month, government delegates will go to the U.N. in New York, as they did in Rio five years ago, for a special session of the General Assembly to assess how much has been achieved since 1992.

A lot has changed in 27 years. The world is certainly more aware of environmental issues than it used to be. Water and air in the U.S. for one is cleaner. Fossil fuels have not been exhausted and the threat of nuclear war has receded. Population growth rates are slowing, especially in some key developing countries, providing more optimistic prognoses for the world in general over the next 30 years. Concerted action by developed nations in the late 1980s and early 1990s to reduce the emission of CFCs and other gasses implicated in depleting the ozone layer has in the main been successful. 1996 saw a record amount of grain grown. Human infant mortality rates continue to decline worldwide and human life expectancy increases. The mantra of Our Common Future - sustainable development linked with environmental protection - has entered if not the practice then certainly the rhetoric of governmental agencies around the world.

Yet there are lots of troubling trends. Twenty-seven years ago neither AIDS nor Ebola, nor the re-emergence of infectious diseases, were predicted. And, as Anthony Barricelli writes in his book review in this issue of Satya, global warming has only recently become a world political issue, as has the hole in the ozone layer. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, as does the average global temperature. CFCs are still being used extensively by the rapidly developing nations of China and South Asia. The amount of arable land continues to shrink and deserts grow larger. The rainforests are disappearing at the same if not greater rate. The very poor are getting poorer and the richer nations are getting richer. A shocking number of people do not have access to clean water or enough food. Although a huge number of fish were caught last year, fish stocks are generally thought to be at their lowest levels ever. In spite of the amount of grain produced, if all grain production stopped, the world's supply would run out after a mere 55 days. And the human population has finally outstripped the population of all the other 232 primate species combined.

One particularly disturbing trend that does not bode well for the maintenance of a global commonweal - and was skirted over by Agenda 21 - is the patenting of biotechnology, in 1992 still not well understood by governments. As Vandana Shiva says in this issue and in her book Biopiracy, multinational corporations have gone beyond any governmental regulation by buying patent rights on indigenous peoples' products and methods of production to try and create a global monoculture. This is making a mockery of U.N. attempts to harness increasing globalization for the benefit of all peoples and diversity in general. In this spirit, NGOs at Rio Plus Five called for (among other things) binding agreements on carbon dioxide emissions and toxic chemical use, bans on anti-personnel mines and nuclear weapons, and making the World Trade Organization somehow accountable to multilateral environmental agreements - all by 2002. That's the date NGOs would like for another conference to discuss implementation of Rio Plus Ten.

If all these conferences, statistics, and the high-sounding rhetoric that accompany them leave you, as it sometimes does me, feeling both furiously overwhelmed and impotent to change the course of the world's headlong rush into oblivion, then don't panic. As Kathy Lawrence and Constance Lynn Cornell show, there are things you can do to make your daily life supportive of your own bioregion. These measures are small, but they are effective, and they can only grow and help. By supporting organizations that foster sustainability and boycotting those that don't, you set in motion an irresistible force whereby even the biggest organizations can be stopped. You can also hold politicians of whatever stripe accountable to the laws they pass supposedly in your name by writing them or organizing to vote them out of office. After all, we have as much right to live on this planet as they do.

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