Riders on the storm

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Environment days come and go. But our blighted towns remain. And our stinking rivers flow. Solemn declarations do we make. But they cannot change our fate.

While styles of lives are at fault. We fool ourselves by talk and talk. No lasting solution would we find.

Unless we have a revolution in our mind.

HAVING WATCHED the contemporary scene from the days of the Stockholm Conference (1972), I have composed the above lines for the World Environment Day which is observed each year on June 5 with a great deal of fanfare. As in the previous years, this year’s Environment Day is not going to make any material difference to the current conditions.

Environmental issues, by their very nature, encompass virtually the entire ambit of human existence on earth. They are deeply embedded in modern cultures, modern polities and modern lifestyles. Neither law nor technology can tackle them by itself. What is required is a reorientation of contemporary civilisations and a “root and branch” reform of systems and sub-systems that shape the life of communities all over the globe.

By way of historical backdrop, it may be recalled that after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, a realisation dawned upon a large section of the international community that “nations’ farms, factories and vehicles” were turning into “seed-beds of pollution” and causing rapid deterioration of environment all over the world. To deliberate upon the issue, a high-level United Nations Conference was held at Stockholm in 1972. Many heads of governments attended it. Mrs Indira Gandhi was one of them. It was here that she made her famous observation: “Poverty is the worst pollutant”, adding a new dimension to the issue.

Soon after the conference, the United Nations Environment Programme was founded and hundreds of conferences, seminars and symposia were held on the subject all over the world.

In 1983, Brundtland Commission was set up. In its report published under the title, Our Common Future, the commission recommended a pattern of sustainable development.

In June 1992, the UN Conference in Rio de Janerio created a record in the massiveness of its attendance and publicity. Agreements on important issues were arrived at and Agenda 21 was drawn up for sustainable development. Then came the World Summit on Social Development (1995), Habitat II (1996) and host of other conferences on allied items — water, sanitation, soil, forestry, climate change etc.

But what has been the net outcome of all these conferences? Paradoxically, more people are now living in absolute poverty, more inhabit stinking slums, more elements of life-support systems are under stress, more eco-systems are on decline, more species are facing extinction and more ominous looks the specter of climate change than when the aforesaid conferences were held. That is why some critics have dubbed UN conferences as “festivals of hypocrisy”.

In fact, these conferences could be likened to a mythical road on which the traveller moves two steps forward only to find that the destination has receded by four steps. Take, for example, the Water and Sanitation Decade of mid-1970s and 1980s. During this decade, national governments and international agencies committed themselves to “making safewater and sanitation accessible to all by 1990”. But even today, that is after 19 years of the deadline, 2.4 billion people of the world have no facility of sanitation and 1.7 billion don’t have access to clean water.

Likewise, the United Nations Conferences on Habitats, commencing from Vancouver Conference of 1976, have been passing resolution after resolution, affirming their resolve to rid the world of slums and squatters settlements. But all the while these settlements have been multiplying.

They now house a population of a billion people.

All this is happening at a time when top-level experts and international agencies have been warning repeatedly about the grave damage that could be caused by climate change.

According to a report of the Global Humanitarian Forum, released a couple of days ago (May 29) by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “Climate change is killing about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disaster, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half-amillion by 2030”. Economic losses amount to over $125 billion annually — more than the aid from rich to poor nations.” How is it that the international community is continuing to close its eyes to the “gathering storm”? A fundamental flaw of the current form of capitalism is that in quite a few areas of economy, it virtually manufactures desire and makes people buy what it has to offer, thereby swelling its profits.

It is inherently iniquitous in its impact. Nor is it compatible with sustainability. It causes continued expansion of desires. This flaw has to be removed. If an invisible hand does not act, a visible hand has to come in. The system has to be made socially and environmentally accountable. The second reason which is far more basic than the first pertains to the very character of Western civilisation which is dominating the presentday world and whose predominant ethos are rooted in acquisitiveness. These ethos push the individuals towards the pursuit of economic affluence alone and create no inner prompting to maintain the integrity of the earth and respect the limits that the nature imposes on the use of its resources.

■ JAGMOHAN is a former governor of J&K and a former Union minister