Summit Fails! Enviros Outraged

Michael S. Coffman

 

The World Summit sought to promote the idea of cutting back on energy consumption, water use, industrial production, fertilizer use in agriculture and a host of other human activities essential for wealth and civilization, while somehow miraculously eliminating global poverty. The developing nations didn't buy it. None of the environmental representatives were able to explain how people could be lifted out of poverty when the entire concept of sustainable development UN style would deny them the very tools needed to achieve that noble goal.

The World Summit became the battleground between the haves of the first world nations and the have-nots of the developing nations. For good reason. Environmentalists made their romantic goal of pure, unaltered ecosystems so inflexible that there is literally no room for human life. Leon Louw, President of the Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg told CNS news, "The Third World should tell the first world [developed nations] to go to hell if they want swamps and jungles which they romantically call wetlands and rainforests" at the expense of economic development.

The alternative to the green, socialistic UN Agenda 21 is Freedom 21. Freedom 21 spells out in detail why sustainability, as defined by Agenda 21, cannot work and will plunge the world into poverty, not the reverse. Using UN data, Freedom 21's Alternative to Agenda 21 explains why the earth is not suffering from overpopulation, global warming, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals, fresh water shortages and a host of other ills proclaimed in a drumbeat of accusations by environmentalists and the UN.

Louw suggested a novel idea of how the northern developed nations can prove they are willing to suffer for the environment. "The North can rehabilitate their [natural places] by bombing New Orleans and bombing Rotterdam and restoring the Rhine and the Delta [rivers] and getting rid of Belgium and Denmark and France and turning them back into swamps."

While tongue-in-cheek (sort of) Louw puts his finger on the rub the southern developing nations are feeling. The environmentalists and their obedient kowtowing governments in developed nations want to magically obtain a pure environment reminiscent of the earth-worshipping days of old, without sacrificing their economic prosperity. It cannot be done. Someone has to be sacrificed. And the environmentalists at the World Summit made it clear that it would be the poor that would be sacrificed. It is no wonder the developing nations said 'no way'!

The environmentalists were stunned and outraged. For the first time in their colorful and deadly history, they were shunned by having limited access to the summit meetings. Their meeting room was 30 km away from the summit site, with no transportation provided. Their acrimonious, hate-filled diatribe sounded shrill. And, no matter how hard they tried, they were generally ignored. Even their hate-filled interruptions of Colin Powell on the final day of the World Summit received only minor publicity outside the Sandton Convention Center where the summit was being held. Perhaps for the first time in forty years they were treated like they were public enemy number one. And they are! It is about time the world realizes it.

The environmentalists don't know what to do with this mammoth failure. in frustration, Michael Green of the Center for Environmental Health blurted out, "I was ashamed for my country because the people representing us were acting like selfish children.... As an American, I was so embarrassed...that the U.S. delegation is obstructing very important environmental issues like global warming and the WTO (World Trade Organization)."

Green and other environmentalists may actually have their hearts in the right place. Green added, that "the U.S. has blocked important environmental policies that would have helped the earth and helped poor people." Yet, Agenda 21 and the efforts to achieve sustainable development he and other environmentalists support will do just exactly the opposite. Their version of sustainable development requires a command and control socialist approach to solving problems, which means establishing a huge corruption-prone bureaucracy and controlling private property rights.

According to the principles laid out in the Freedom 21 alternative to Agenda 21, however, there is overwhelming evidence that wealth production and environmental protection require minimal government regulation and maximum private property rights. In their ignorance, Green and others like him are supporting a plan that will do just the opposite of what they desire. The Bush administration seems to realize this and took every opportunity to block the goals of this misguided summit. Ironically, the Bush administration and the U.S. delegation are the real heroes of the World Summit.