Unsaid summit
By Barry Brown
The 1992 UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro is seen by many observers as destined to fail. A great danger exists that a hollow agreement will be thrashed out among the nouveau green political leaders in response to global demands for stronger action on global warming.
Public pressure from environmental youth groups and others has been strong and resourceful but certainly not enough to place the Keatings and Bush-rangers of the capitalist world onto the exit lane of this planet's freeway to destruction.
Consider the workers of APPM in their struggle against the combined might of the timber lobby, the new right alliance of the Coalition and Labor industry hacks like Walsh and Button, and the reactionary J-curve media. But for the lone voice of an ACF spokesperson, not a mention was made of the long established fact that paper mills, and Kraft bleaching pulp mills in particular, are considered forerunners in the Bare Earth Society's hot tips for the 2000 handicap. It is a dirty industry. The chlorine bleaching mills are responsible for perhaps the worst ecological disasters this side of Chernobyl.
Air, soil, water and the creatures like us that exist in and eat from them are all affected adversely by the old breed of pulp mills. The proposals for north Tasmania are similar to the defeated scandal of Harris-Daishowa in Grafton just before the last federal election.
What should be obvious, but are not, are the links between the APPM dispute, the Forest(ry) Protection Act, the new police powers in Tasmania, the ecological weakness of forestry advisers at the UNCED conference and the following statistic — figures provided to the Fraser Island inquiry revealed that North America consumed seven times the paper and paper board product of all these combined: all of Central and South America, what was the USSR, all of Africa, India and China. Two Scandinavian nations consumed six times that figure. That is what the "South" countries mean when holding the "North" to equity action before global environmental action.
Maximo T. Kalaw Jr, the president of the Philippines' oldest and largest environmental group, the Haribon Foundation, believes the Earth Summit should address the dual realities of imperialism's resource exploitation: "One is that there are limited resources for the planet and therefore you have the social equity/poverty problem. The other is the realisation that these resources have another function which is to maintain a life-support system for the planet or for our ecological security."
The conference is a perfect opportunity for world leaders to ry integrity and cooperation with each other. The cafe chats will prove more useful to that process of political lobbying and the plight of the planet than the media showpiece it promises to be. Australia will be well represented, not by the government entourage at UNCED, but by various NGOs and indigenous people and supporters at the alternative conference under way now.
[Barry Brown is spokesperson for Friends of the Earth Brisbane]