permaculture

["Kirby Fry" <peace@totalaccess.net>]

Here are a few excerpts from (and a link to) one of ZNet / ZMagazine's
electronic commentaries about the U.N.'s recent efforts towards sustainable
development.

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-09/04d'souza_.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Sustainable Development: An Expensive Trip To Nowhere? September 07, 2002
By Radha  D'Souza

It is here. It is real. It is on our TV screens. The WSSD has come to our
living rooms. Once again the police are out on the streets and images of
protestors are everywhere. The real business has begun, but this time around
the context of the meeting gives it an eerie surreality. The summit on
sustainable occurs in the context of increasing attacks of countries and
peoples of the ex-colonies now re-designated the 'Third World'.

*snip*

Institutionally, 'sustainable development' is the responsibility of the
Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) within the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC) of the UN. The architecture of the UN is based on three
pillars: the Security Council (the political wing), the Specialised Agencies
(dealing with economic and physical infrastructure for capital) and the
General Assembly. The ECOSOC is perhaps the most important institution
within the General Assembly.

*snip*

Much of the thinking and planning that went into the 1972 Stockholm
conference on Human Development arose as a response from the failure of the
post-war 'development' agenda. The Founex Conference On Environment and
Development, held preparatory to the UN Stockholm Conference, in 1971 in
Switzerland, held that 'the kind of environmental problems that are of
importance in developing countries are those that can be overcome by the
process of development itself'.

The Stockholm Conference set out 26 principles for sustainable development
and passed 106 resolutions on the future tasks and programmes: 18 on
housing, 50 on environment and natural resources, 15 on marine pollution, 6
on education and 7 on environment and development.

Each of those resolutions and principles led to a proliferation of a new set
of institutions: the Global Assessment Programme or Earthwatch, that
includes programmes such as Global Environmental Monitoring Service, (GEMS),
International Referral System for Sources of Environmental Information,
(INFOTERRA), Global Resource Information Database, (GRID); older UN
agencies, the World Bank, the FAO, the WHO, that were part of the failed
'development' of the post-war type were now mobilised to contribute to the
post-Stockholm 'sustainable development'.

*snip*

Human ingenuity and intellectual creativity seems to be on a no-exit street.
The proliferation of organisations and the deluge of regurgitated
information have left us with a curious paradox. The more we do the less we
are able to do things to improve our conditions.

The more we know the less we are able to deal with the conditions of our
existence. The causes of underdevelopment appear as the cure. The critique
of imperialism and capitalism continues, but it seeks to fix the problems
through the very same legal and institutional mechanisms that have spawned
and nurtured capitalism and imperialism through its long and bloody history.

*snip*


Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-09/04d'souza_.cfm