COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Better a Failure in Rio Than a False Front : The battle remains one of people seeking environmental justice from the elites.

The problem with the Earth Summit is that it simulates with eerie fidelity the “global warming” paradigm that forms so large a part of its agenda. High-minded rhetoric becomes trapped under the ceiling of political reality and circulates futilely inside a closed-end system. Overheated expectations generate excessive disappointments.

Many people hope that somehow, in some spirit of creative compromise, the Earth Summit will reach agreement on some minimal environmental agenda. In fact it is far better that the summit accurately reflect irreconcilable differences than that these brute realities get swaddled in platitudes about the planet.

The Bush Administration has never made any secret of its hostility to notions of “global management.” A particularly forthright expression of its posture came a couple of years ago in a speech by Budget Director Richard Darman. “America,” Darman instructed his Harvard audience in a prepared lecture, “did not fight and win the wars of the 20th Century to make the world safe for green vegetables.” To “those who would fight for more than green vegetables and ‘global management’, “ Darman offered “market-oriented growth, technological advance, pluralistic tolerance and expanded opportunity.”

In accord with this ideological construct, the Bush Administration sees the environment and Third World development through the prism of capitalist markets and capitalist property rights. No matter that deforestation in the Amazon is greatest on acreage held in private hands; land held in common must be privatized as a matter of principle. No matter that indigenous peoples may have developed cultivars and modified raw plant materials that provide the starting points for many of the new bio-engineered crops; nothing must intrude on the private patents and royalty rights of First World corporations and laboratories. In accord with this outlook, environmental regulation is left to a market in pollution credits. The market is all.

The end logic here is exactly what President Bush stated in the months before the summit: His government would sign no treaty that might inhibit U.S. economic growth. The value of the environment as “a good” is placed effectively at zero, so its destruction has no cost and no negative implications for current or future production. This line of thought achieved its ultimate parodic form in the famous memo of World Bank vice president and chief economist Lawrence Summers, when he remarked that many Third World countries are in fact “underpolluted.”

But let us be equally clearheaded about the credentials of many of the Third World nations taking the podium at Rio to denounce the exploiters from the North. The corrupt elites in Malaysia or Indonesia--among the more loquacious nations at the summit--have needed no lessons in exploitation as they degrade their resources, as they harass and gradually exterminate the indigenous peoples of their own forests. In the eyes of their own peoples, such governments are often seen as servile executors of austerity programs demanded by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank as the price of loans that spell further corruption and theft of indigenous lands and resources.

In such a perspective, many of the participants in the unofficial gatherings in Rio--the Global Forum and the Earth Parliament--have an entirely justified suspicion about state-to-state agreements. The state is seen as either irrelevant or pernicious. This is indeed probably the best one could say for the Earth Summit, that it has offered a crash course in the illegitimacy of states as arbiters of environmental responsibility and equitable economic development.

How can an Earth Summit contrive a plausible agenda for the 21st Century when existing models of development and environmental regulation have so clearly failed, for reasons that most participating nations will not discuss? For to do so would be to expose patterns of exploitation and theft best left unexamined in a polite setting. The formal conference in Rio is structurally incapable of addressing the real world, whether it pertains to the degrading of timber, soil and water resources in California, or the murder of forest dwellers in Malaysia. The final fakery would be something promoted as a “successful” outcome.

The summit’s real accomplishment is to define for us the political battles for environmental justice that have to be fought by people against the states that misrepresent them.