The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy Read Online Free PDF Page B

rainforest, with its miraculous numbers of species, into nutrient-poor, soon to be exhausted farmland: We Need It!
    What the defenders have tried to do, therefore, is constructa convincing response, to find an answer to the simplistic mantra of human necessity, which might bring to a halt the unthinking destruction of the natural world. There have been two serious attempts at this. The first has been the theory (or the project) of sustainable development. It has been a failure.
    Mothered into the world by Gro Harlem Brundtland, sometime prime minister of Norway, via the 1987 United Nations’ report on linking environmental and developmental concerns, ‘Our Common Future’, sustainable development seeks to let the mammoth human enterprise carry on growing, essentially to relieve poverty, without trashing its natural resource base. Some times referred to as ‘green growth’, it is officially ‘development which meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Again, this is admirable, and it can probably be done, as long as you think hard about it, and try; moreover, the theory accurately diagnoses both the problem and the potential solutions. The weakness is in the implementation. For sustainable development relies on the goodwill of people, and by extension, governments, to be put into practice; it relies on them changing their behaviour. It does not take into account that people are not necessarily good – and as such it was a perfect fit for liberal secular humanism, which does not take that into account either – and that people do not voluntarily change, if that means, stop acting out of self-interest. You might as well ask cats to stop chasing birds.
    It would of course be unthinkably glib to dismiss out of hand the efforts of thousands of dedicated people, and the pursuit of sustainable development has made a real difference: above all, it has embedded, in governments and companies, the crucial idea, as a policy objective, that the environment must be taken into consideration, which was not there before. But what it has not done is alter fundamentally the general direction or the pace of the destruction of the natural world. It was thought that thatmight be possible when, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, more than one hundred world leaders came together to endorse the theory and the gigantic work programme put together to implement it around the globe, Agenda 21; there was a moment of high hope and self-congratulation, as if drawing up the detailed solution to the problem were the same as carrying it out. I remember it vividly. I was there. But two decades later, in the follow-up conference, Rio+20, nothing was clearer than how complete, in terms of Saving The World, had been sustainable development’s inability to deliver.
    By 2012 little if anything had got better: with an additional 1.5 billion people added to the world, annual emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide had increased by 36 per cent and were rushing upwards, another 600 million acres and more of primary forest had been chainsawed, pollution was soaring, especially in the developing world, and more species than ever were being threatened with extinction. Although there might have been successes at the margins, the main direction of destruction had not been diverted, and Rio+20, which convened in the Brazilian city once again and was the biggest meeting ever held by the UN – attended by 45,000 delegates, observers and journalists, including 130 heads of state and government – made a very weak, renewed commitment to sustainable development as a principle, and then was forgotten the instant it was over.
    However, the second attempt at finding the answer is not yet a failure, and is currently sweeping the globe.
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    Sir Arthur Tansley is by no means a household name, certainly nothing like as familiar to us as his inventive contemporaries Ernest Rutherford, John