Bruised Planet

An international commitment to “sustainable development” is proposed by the World Commission on Environment and Development. It is advice that nations will ignore only at great risk.

The principle of sustainability has been raised by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington in each of its annual State of the World reports since its survey of world resources was instituted in 1984. Perhaps this new endorsement from a prestigious commission, created by the United Nations, will facilitate acceptance of the principle and a more adequate commitment by world leaders to its implementation.

“To secure our common future we need a new international ethic that looks beyond narrow and shortsighted national ambitions,” Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, chairman of the 21-member commission, commented. “It is the only way we can pursue our own self-interest on a small and closely knit planet,” she added.

She is right. This global sensitivity to the environment is certainly the only secure way to pursue national policy in an interdependent world. But most nations obviously are ignoring the advice as they plunder precious rain forests, waste diminishing petroleum reserves, threaten the Earth with toxics and radioactive waste, and engorge storage bins with unwanted, unneeded farm surpluses.

Brundtland said that the commission was offering governments and international organizations “a challenging agenda for change,” and that it is. It is challenging above all because it would force nations to reexamine programs now locked into national political schemes because they serve powerful domestic special interests like the developers of the Amazon Basin, the American and European Community subsidy-dependent farmers, the gas-guzzling elements of the American and European auto industries, the military-industrial complexes that consume $1 trillion a year when whole continents are starved for resources.

The report offers a particular challenge and opportunity to the United States, still the richest of all the large nations. Under President Reagan there has been a tendency to treat environmental matters as the preserve of addled idealists rather than the cement of survival. In international terms Washington has been negligent on both of its frontiers, failing to halt the acid rain that is destroying Canadian forests or to purify the Colorado River’s heavy salinity as it courses into Mexico. But there remains, despite official procrastination, a commitment among Americans to reform, a willingness to respond to leadership, an understanding that the economic well-being and security of the American people is inextricably connected with other nations, including the impoverished nations of the Third World. This report, and its personal presentation by Brundtland to Reagan, may facilitate an appropriate response before another opportunity is lost.