Voice of the Environment

Our Unsustainable Course

In the words of University of Ottawa professor Michel Chossudovsky, "Humanity is undergoing in the post-Cold War era an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population." While this flies in the happy face of business and political propaganda, it is nonetheless the truth. Things are going in the wrong direction.

by DAN HAMBURG

On November 1, 1999 US News & World Report offered the standard opinion that, "For the moment, the movement against free trade seems to have little traction in the United States." One month, an embarrassed president and a deposed police chief later, Seattle proved them wrong.

Two major tracks emerge from the stunning events in Seattle. One is about the just distribution of the fruits of the world economy. As film producer Michael Moore wrote, "November 30, 1999 was the day the people got tired of having to work a second job while fighting off the collection agents and decided it was time the pie was shared with the people who bake it." Especially tired are the big losers in the new global economy--formerly well-paid, mostly union workers whose jobs are going to the lowest overseas bidder and family farmers overwhelmed by the twin forces of agribusiness and biotechology. In order for capital to meet the unrelenting demand for profit, primarily for the purpose of keeping stock prices and CEO compensation soaring, the best labor is cheap labor, the best farmer the corporation.

The other major track emerging from Seattle reaches beyond the serious, but limited problem of "slicing the pie." It holds that seeing the world's resources and economic output as a pie to be sliced is in itself a huge part of the problem. It challenges the entire corporate capitalist, industrial/technological model of wealth creation and economic development. It questions whether more, even more equitably distributed, can possibly be better when the planetary environment is under assault. More profoundly, it questions whether, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, we are "confusing standard of living with standard of being." Even the staid World Bank, whose "structural adjustment" and other economic austerity measures have been the bane of the poor worldwide, just launched a study to analyze why rising GNP often fails to correlate with an enhanced state of human health and well-being.

To counter their critics, the corporate free-traders usually point to the expanding pie. If we continue down their road, there will be more wealth, longer and better lives for more people. Neither wealthy individuals nor wealthy countries need to share more, we simply need to create a bigger pie. This idea, dubbed "trickle-down" during the Reagan years of expanding corporate dominance, dictates that only by freeing the hand of the capitalists (i.e., "producers") do we move civilization forward. Though sometimes challenged, it has dominated western, and now global, thinking ever since the bourgeoisie overthrew the kings and created the logic we live under to this day.

The idea of an ever-expanding pie is colliding headlong with the reality that while the desire of humans to consume is infinite, the ecological system that fills these desires is finite. A report in the December 7, 1999 issue of The New York Times by William K. Stevens presents a gloomy picture of CO2-induced Arctic thawing that "could result in a sudden, long-term drop in the North Atlantic region's temperature, a climatic disruption that would probably reverberate around the hemisphere by altering large-scale atmospheric circulation." Stevens gloomily reports that international negotiators have all but given up on preventing a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Making the changes required to slow global warming significantly would be, he wrote, like "trying to turn a supertanker in a sea of syrup."

According to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Program, the rate at which humans are destroying the planetary environment is accelerating right along with the unrelenting march of transnational capital and globalized free trade. About 20 percent of the world's population lacks access to safe drinking water, and 50 percent have no access to a sanitation system. This state of affairs will deteriorate as the world's population, now over 6 billion, increases by the expected 50 percent over the next 50 years.

Eighty percent of the world's original forest cover has been cleared or degraded, and logging and mining projects threaten 39 percent of what forest remains. A quarter of mammal species are at risk of extinction while more than half of the world's coral reefs are threatened by human activity.

Disasters such as hurricanes and forest fires are increasing in frequency and severity, and have killed 3 million people in the past three decades. Armed conflicts and refugee flows are causing greater damage to the environment than ever before.

There is also mounting evidence that humans are seriously destabilizing the global nitrogen balance. Huge amounts of nitrogen are being deposited on land and in water through intensive agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels. Eventually, according to a Reuters News report in the September 22, 1999 edition of the Boston Globe, this problem could make fresh-water supplies unfit for human consumption around the world.

"The full extent of the damage is only now becoming apparent as we begin to piece together a comprehensive overview of the extremely complex, interconnected web that is our life support system," said Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and head of the United Nations Environment Program. The UN Report calls for a long-term target of a 90 percent reduction in the consumption of raw materials in industrialized countries. Without it, "hundreds of millions of people will be condemned to a life of suffering," the report concludes.

This is extremely serious stuff! This is not a science fiction thriller plot, where Harrison Ford or Will Smith rescues us through grit and techno-wizardry. This is a clear and present threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet earth! The retort of our political and corporate leadership to these issues is not to deny them outright but to claim that it is only through intensifying the current breakneck economic growth and development schemes will we be able to solve these problems. But they have offered little of tangible value to back up their claim. According to Toepfer, "The gains made by better management and technology are still being outpaced by the environmental impacts of population and economic growth. We are on an unsustainable course."

One of the groups that stood on the frontlines in Seattle was the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment (ASJE). This coalition between environmentalists and steelworkers was recently formed around a common antipathy to the destructive machinations of junkbond lord Charles Hurwitz. ASJE promotes the unassailable notion that the dichotomy between jobs and the environment is false, that unless we protect natural resources, economies will fail as we suffocate in our human-made filth. But it would be wishful thinking to imagine that these two groups comprehend the world in the same way--one group, despite its misgivings, still sees corporate-led economic expansion as the key to its future, the other believes that such expansion is a huge "part of the problem." A common enemy does not a common agenda make.

Stacking up the need for economic expansion against the need to protect the environment, the two aren't even close in terms of their relative importance. As Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows stated in a recent pre-Seattle St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial, "Breath and life and health are infinitely more legitimate than corporate expansion. Making deals, shipping stuff, globalizing the economy is a sometimes useful, often destructive preoccupation of a small, self-important minority of the human race. The environment is our life support system."

Yet, according to the currently dominant paradigm, without economic expansion based on an increasingly globalized economy, life is hardly worth living. Only an ever-expanding economy keeps the mills and mines and factories going, the cars, trains, boats, and planes moving along. Just to keep up with an exploding human population, we must produce more and more, or so the logic goes. Ignored is the fact that poverty is worsening worldwide even as the environment is compromised, perhaps beyond our power to repair the damage.

The point is not to disparage business or economic concerns. The "fair profit of able dealing" is a time-honored, even laudable activity. The point is to call for a new balance between economic concerns and the requirement of civil liberties, safe and healthy working conditions, and a sustainable environment. This is the new paradigm that must emerge from the recent events in Seattle.

But of course it isn't really new. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, enshrined these ideas more than a half century ago. On October 25, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This covenant calls for fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind, a decent standard of living for workers and their families, reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, the right to form trade unions and to strike, the right to adequate food, clothing, and housing, the right to the enjoyment of the highest achievable standard of physical and mental health, and the right to education. Among the major industrializaed countries, only the United States has failed to ratify this covenant. By what authority does the World Trade Organization, and the US in particular, place its free trade agenda above legal declarations of the United Nations and the international community?

Recently, the Montana Supreme Court held that that state's constitution guarantees all Montanans a fundamental right to a "clean and healthful environment" and protects the state's resources from potential harm as well as from actual, proven damage. "Our constitution does not require that dead fish float on the surface of the state's rivers and streams before its farsighted environmental protections can be invoked," wrote Justice Terry Trieweiler on behalf of the court. If Trieweiler's opinion becomes the legal backbone for halting potentially damaging projects that are "trade-related", Montana's constitution could be declared illegal under the WTO. Sixteen other states have similar articles in their constitutions.

Twenty states have recently submitted a joint friend of the court brief to the United States Supreme Court asking the Court to uphold Washington state's oil spill prevention program against efforts by global oil companies and the federal government to strip US states of their power to regulate the tanker industry. Intertanko, an international trade association that represents most of the world's oil tanker owners, has sued to throw out Washington state's oil tanker laws. Regardless of how the US Supreme Court rules in the State of Washington v. Intertanko, Washington's stricter standards regarding tanker safety could be deemed "illegal constraints of free trade" by a WTO tribunal.

These are just two of many examples where the WTO's enforcement powers over "non-tariff trade barriers" threaten and stifle international, state and local jurisdiction. According to WTO rules, "Each Member (i.e., each country) shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures with the obligations as provided in the annexed Agreements." In other words, countries and states are compelled to homogenize standards downward to a lowest international common denominator. By what authority do federal governments presume to sign away the rights of state and local governments, and ultimately the rights of their own sovereign citizens?

The WTO represents the most severe threat to the sovereignty of the United States as a whole, and to the powers of individual states and localities, in the history of the republic. To challenge the legitimacy of the WTO is to stand up for rights enshrined in other documents--federal and state constitutions, UN declarations, environmental and health and safety laws--that clearly must be afforded greater weight. It is also to stand up for the power of existing organizations like the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) that have been effectively neutralized by the WTO.

The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." At the end of the 20th century, it is transnational corporations, not human beings, who are gaining all the protections. This is being done in furtherance of a corporate vision of "progress" that none of us voted for, and many of us deplore. People will only take so much before they finally take matters into their own hands.

A rebellious Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1775, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility to all forms of tyranny over the minds of men." He could have been talking about the tyrannies of transnational corporations and global environmental ruin. We can be confident that he would have been on the frontlines, marching right alongside the family farmers and environmentalists, in Seattle.

Dan Hamburg is a former Mendocino County supervisor and member of Congress. He was the Green Party candidate for governor of California in 1998. Currently, he serves as executive director of Voice of the Environment, a Bolinas-based nonprofit. Dan can be reached by e-mail at vote@pacific.net.