At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)
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AT THE EDGE TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999) |
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Global Environmentalism: Seeking Common Ground |
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Addressing environmental issues increasingly demands the cooperation of governments and civil society transnationally. Nowhere is this more evident than in the linkages between natural resource depletion, atmospheric pollution and global climate change. Panelists were asked to discuss the advent of 'global environmentalism' and obstacles to be overcome, Chairperson:Hermann von Hatzfeldt Co-hosted by Both Ends Hermann von Hatzfeldt introduced the session by saying that there is no such thing as 'environmentalism' in that, unlike, for example, capitalism or communism, there is no one ideology. There are different approaches to a shared concern about the human destruction of our own life support system as well as a shared concern for finding solutions to the questions of (un)sustainability. The topic is particularly suitable to TNI. The most pressing environmental problems are transnational in nature requiring transnational cooperation between civil society organizations. In this sense there is a global movement. The globalization of this movement started with the Rio Earth Summit and, in my opinion, the culmination of years of work and had its high point with the successful campaign against the MAI. At this moment there is a tremendous build-up of international cooperation for the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle. The WTO is no doubt the greatest threat to the environment at this moment. There are also local causes, and consequences, to global environmental problems. Take, for example, deforestation in the South caused by the way that we in the North live where we each bear some responsibility. It is possible to trace trans-boundary pollution in the ways we use energy in the North. The inter-linkage between the local and the global is key in the debates and has implications for community and for international development. The environment is linked to all of TNI's concerns:
Ranil Senayanake runs an NGO in Sri Lanka and works with Counterpart International (Washington DC, USA), Rainforest Rescue (Quito, Ecuador), with a forestry group in the Philippines, plus grassroots community development in Columbia and California. He is also Professor at Monash University (Australia). He raised two themes. One is his concern about carbon trading, or as he calls it 'carbon laundering', by an 'Unholy Alliance' of energy and forestry TNCs and governments. There are two cycles of carbon on the planet: the fossil cycle which occurs over tens of millions of years, and the biotic cycle which takes tens of thousands of years at most. The same value is being put on the fossil cycle as the biotic cycle, and this is flawed. Carbon must be given a value based on the time that it is locked up for. The TNCs are benefiting from this laundering, but he is also setting up a company to trade in carbon "to direct this flow of cash to do the right job". It is not only the TNCs and government bureaucracies, which are keeping out the 'small people'. The recent Global Bio-diversity Forum in Sri Lanka was supposed to be open to the grassroots, but almost none of the local Sri Lankan NGOs knew it was happening, and those that did had to pay a fee they could not afford. The multinational environmental NGOs are taking the space that the national or local NGOs should occupy. It is an alarming trend fostered also by funding patterns from official aid programmes. We should be concerned about building a global dialogue between equal partners, which includes small NGOs, farmers and peasants, as they are the watchdogs of biodiversity in their localities. Agus Sari is Acting Director of Pelangi Indonesia, a policy research institute for sustainable development, is part of the TNI's energy project, and is involved in building a coalition of developing country NGOs for the forthcoming conference of parties to the climate convention. Taking Indonesia as a case in point, the environmental movement of the South is not an 'Environmental' or 'Green' movement but a social movement and a direct response to and consequence of state control. It is a development and a human rights movement. The difference between the environmentalism of the North and the South is between 'stomach-full' and 'stomach-empty' environmentalism. Re-afforestation can be about whose land is being taken. Just as development can be coercion, so can conservation. Environmental NGOs in Indonesia are part of what is known as the 'water melon' movement, green on the outside and red on the inside. There are many pressures for Southern NGOs to get involved in global environmental issues such as climate change. But such issues can be foreign or abstract. No one really knows if it should be a priority. Yet, the pressure on developing country ecology, eco-systems, economies and politics is real. Demands for environmental services from developing countries are increasing as Northern countries look to diversify and pay for their supplies. How should developing countries respond? Should they take up the offer or not? There is a risk, though, that Southern NGOs are also becoming multinational NGOs. There is a risk that Ranil, for example, will become jet-setting environmentalists or conference-hoppers using up fossil fuels with all his traveling. These ten years of climate change negotiations have come to no real conclusion and we are worried that nothing might happen in 2000 when the most important negotiating session, CoP VI, will be held in the Netherlands. The challenge now is to link the local and the global. We must look at the local contexts of global environmental problems and skip entirely the national political 'bullshit'. There are many more crossovers between local and global interests, compared to local and national interests or national and global interests. Climate change has been addressed using the wrong approach in talking about state actors, the North-South division-as if we are talking about a battle between rich countries and poor countries. This is not the issue. We are talking about the North in the South, and the South in the North, about battles between rich people and poor people, in the North as well as in the South. It is not about whether the USA or the Netherlands will do something, but it is about what Shell or BP will do and whether local communities are to pay for or gain from these exchanges. Daphne Wysham is a member of IPS (USA) and TNI. She grew up in India, and works on energy issues, particularly in a network of global activists who are challenging the international financial institutions and the export credit agencies on the human rights and environmental implications of fossil fuel investments. The USA is the No.1 producer of greenhouse gases and it developed the idea of 'carbon trading'. For 3-4 years the USA has had a scheme called 'pollution trading' where sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide are traded between states within the USA. Some regard it as successful because pollutants have been reduced overall faster than expected. However, some communities are challenging the pollution-trading model. They say it is racist, resulting in higher pollution emissions in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. Thanks to one US NGO the idea of carbon trading is now being pushed on the entire planet as the solution to a problem, which the 1988 Toronto Convention on Climate Change called the most serious global problem after nuclear war. This means entrusting the market to solve a problem that the market itself has created with a solution, which some believe has failed. At the Kyoto Conference, only one NGO supported carbon trading, and it was an NGO that had access to the White House. The White House was running the show and carbon trading became de facto part of the climate negotiations. This example raises serious questions about the accountability of NGOs to the most disenfranchised communities affected around the world. The US environmental movement of the 1980s was largely white, middle/upper class. In the early 1990s, communities of African-Americans, along with the churches, produced a report showing that virtually every toxic industry was sited in communities of low-income and/or people of colour. They challenged the environmentalists to take this on board. Some have done so and have worked with people of colour and are rethinking their strategies. However, most of the big green groups in the USA who appear, for example, at climate negotiations have not met the challenge of the environmental justice movement. Environmental injustice is being played out in the USA and also globally. Toxic industries are migrating to poor communities in developing countries and energy intensive industries are moving to developing countries because of the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol. Very few Northern groups are working on these issues. Greenpeace's campaign on the trade in hazardous wastes to Third World countries has been cut even though it resulted in the Basle Convention. There is common ground between the environmental justice movement in the North and the environmental movement in the South. They mobilize people around survival issues such as the right to clean water and to land. A recent delegation to the Niger Delta included African-American activists who live next door to Shell and Chevron oil refining facilities in the USA and are taking on the companies about the explosions and toxic emissions that regularly occur. It was a very powerful experience, making connections between communities who speak from the heart, between African-Americans and Africans dealing with the same TNCs. For the African-Americans it is a much slower and insidious destruction targeted at their communities. Chevron has admitted supplying helicopters and boats to Nigerian troops who shot and killed unarmed demonstrators against gas flaring and pollution. We are working on getting a Congressional investigation to into this incident. Those of us working on fossil fuel issues should be happy because Shell has pulled out of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project. It is rumored that Elf will too. This is largely due to a very successful campaign waged by both Northern and Southern activists putting pressure on the World Bank, the underwriter of this project. Perhaps Exxon will now be alone in defending this project. Hermann von Hatzfeldt commented that we need more such success stories to boost our confidence. Another example concerns the biotech companies. Concerted action by the concerned communities - in this case the consumers of genetically-modified food - has resulted in the biotech company Monsanto being negatively re-evaluated by Wall Street. Both Monsanto and Novartis are thinking about spinning off their GM trading divisions, as bad for profits. This would not have happened without concerted consumer action in Europe, which is now being taken up in the USA and elsewhere. Environmental issues are political and social issues, about issues of power and justice, intimately tied into the old questions of the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless. Ranil Senayanake reminded the meeting that Laurence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, once said that it was better to export polluting industries to the South because the economic value of the life of a poor person there is lower. Such appalling ideas have been accepted and governments follow suit. Development has been sold as a bill of goods, tied to the consumption of energy. The people in developing countries identify development as the ability to have a TV, a radio, a motorbike or a car. The global energy system has been turning countries into energy addicts. It is a syndrome, which has affected the whole planet. Unless we deal with this squarely, we are skirting around the edges. Agus Sari spoke of the difficulty of finding a common vocabulary. What is termed 'environmental' in the North might not be so in the South. It might be a human rights issue - whose land is being taken and whose settlements are being confiscated, for example. Or we might be talking about a purely economic issue, in that people have to pay while corporations profit. It is particular a challenge for activists in the North and the South to understand the cultural and social dimensions of this movement rather than only the technical issue. Given the success of Southern movements the use of local languages and vocabulary, rather than English, might give the global movement a greater possibility of success. Daphne Wysham felt we are skirting around the issue of how we as NGOs achieve our goals. Those of us who want or have access to power and decision-makers might compromise those who are resisting adamantly. In Washington there are those who have access to the White House and wish to keep for themselves their privileged information. Then the White House can say they have consulted with environmental groups. There are interesting ways of resisting institutions like the World Bank through North-South campaigns. The IPS calculated all the fossil fuel investments by the World Bank and all the greenhouse gas emissions that would result. They released this information in four languages right before the Earth Summit +5, and Wolfensohn, the president of the Bank, had to rewrite his speech to include recalculation of emissions. In this way we can raise public consciousness about the huge public capital flows that are going into 'development' projects in the South. If we can combine the information that is available in the North with the mass mobilisation of the South this it can be a very powerful relationship. However, Northern groups can sometimes act too fast for the Southern community-based groups. They can be too fixated on media coverage or on cutting deals, which undermine activities in the South. The issue, which Agus raised of language is very important. We can be living in very different worlds. The more we can experience each other's world and lives, the better our movement will be. Hermann von Hatzfeldt: It is one of the functions of the TNI to make such a learning process possible. Discussion Much of the discussion focused on the relationship between environmental NGOs, the different values and agendas that drive them, and the negative impact of dominant models of environmentalism coming from governments and certain NGOs of the North. One participant agreed that Northern NGOs seem to be becoming professional lobbyists and losing their orientation as mass grassroots movements. Ranil stressed his annoyance that official aid programmes seem to be making Southern NGOs go through Northern counterparts. This causes the Southern groups to lose their access to lobbying, while the Northern groups become cut-off and ossified. A representative from Oil Watch in the Netherlands explained that they have a different model. They act as a help-desk for a South-South network, reacting on their issues and campaigns, helping them to find funders, etc. The balance of decision-making comes from the Southern partners. But this does not mean that they are working for them, but moreover with them taking into account that the effects are greater in the South and so the weight of decision-making should be there. According to Hillary Wainwright, we need to recognise, not in an ideological or dogmatic way, that these are political issues. We must understand the source of effective knowledge and whose input is valuable and whose is discredited. There are those who have the inside, practical knowledge about environmental needs, and that points to the local. One also needs the 'expose' types of knowledge and that demands independence from governments and TNCs. Cooption of NGOs is happening in more and more skilful ways and finds success where the culture of NGOs is apolitical. (and this is often within the Environmental movement) These are issues of power and about who is an effective agent of change and, who is just after a job. Jules Marshall, a journalist, thought that, in emphasising the political and economic, the spiritual was being left out. The anti-roads campaign in the UK had been highly successful partly because it took a more fundamental and spiritual approach. Daphne Wysham agreed that one of the strengths in India, for example, is the spiritual connection to the water, the land, etc. Even the Indian Constitution is written so that everything has the right to life, resulting in successes in the Supreme Court for some lawsuits. Similarly, the Ogoni struggles have appealed to people because of their spirit of non-violence in the face of violence. These ethical aspects are very important. Ranil added that there is no monetary gain in ethics. 'Economic values' is the new god, the new spirituality. We have to move away from seeing spirituality entombed in commercial structures. It is only in the past couple of hundred years that this has been so, based on an economic model that is using fossil fuel energy borrowed from the future. Muslims say that speed comes from the devil. Agus Sari worried that global environmentalism might disturb these local spiritualities and cultures. Another participant agreed that environmental treaties do not recognise that they pose a Northern agenda and concept of environmentalism, one that sees issues of 'the environment' more important than sustainable development. Daphne Wysham quoted a speaker from the Earth Summit who developed a powerful agenda that she felt all of us could consider for our own environmentalism:
Ranil commented that with globalisation we are moving toward a need for a common definition of environmentalism. As always, it is a question of who has the right and the power to define the term. However, with democracy we tend to look for the points we can agree on and avoid or dismiss the other elements where there is no agreement. We have to be careful not to turn ourselves into what Vandana Shiva has called a 'monoculture of minds'. We must recognise global society as being a plurality rather than a homogenous mass. The TNCs, banks, embassies etc. only look at how to rationalise flows and this creates a monoculture. We must have a different perspective over what globalisation means: a monoculture or a plurality. Book Launch Forests for the Future, edited by Paul Wolvekamp, Both Ends/Zed Books (1999) Paul Wolvekamp introduced the book as a collection of case studies of indigenous forest management. It shows the high potential for communities to preserve their forests, their local economies, cultures and spiritualities. Over half a billion people in the world are dependent on forests. Hundreds of local organisations are confronting the mining, oil, plantation and timber companies and state bureaucracies. Yet rarely are they heard or have an opportunity to present their case to governments. The book gives positive examples of the preservation of bio-diversity, employment, cultures, habitations, etc. Seventeen organisations in thirteen countries undertook collaborative research addressing the fundamental question of how local communities can maintain a balance between their needs and those of forest sustainability. All the case studies show that:
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