THE ROAD TO RIO

FORGING A NEW ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS WORLD ORDER

Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute based in Washington, DC,
talks with Steve Lerner about the impact of the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (UNCED).

Lerner: You have said that the principal message to emerge out of UNCED may be
that we can no longer separate the future habitability of the planet from the
current distribution of wealth. Brown: There has been an economic gap between
the industrial and developing countries for a long time. Up until now, a major
rationale for rich nations assisting Third World countries has been the East/
West ideological conflict. Providing assistance to Third World countries has
been used to get them to line up on one side or the other of the ideological
divide. There has also been a certain humanistic rationale for providing
assistance to Third World countries. But I think we are moving into a period
where the nature of the relationship may change because poor countries now have
something that rich countries need: namely, their cooperation in helping to
protect the earth's basic life-support systems.

One of the differences between the Rio conference and its predecessor in
Stockholm in 1972 is that the Stockholm conference focused largely on industrial
pollution of both air and water that was largely seen as a local problem,
although even then there were some transboundary issues evolving. The principal
issues at Rio will be global warming, the need to protect the earth's remaining
biological diversity, and, to a lesser degree, the depletion of the
stratospheric ozone layer.

No country can solve these problems alone. These are threats that can be
successfully dealt with only by collaborative international action. If, for
example, a single developing country of some size were to continue to
manufacture and use CFCs, it would eventually deplete the stratospheric ozone
layer over the entire planet.

There are many people in poor countries who are trying to survive until the next
harvest. And not all of them make it. For them, the stratospheric ozone
layer-that they have never seen and don't understand-or the protection of
biological diversity, or the stabilization of climate, are rather remote
problems. These issues don't have anything to do with surviving the next
several months. These circumstances, in effect, define the challenge. The
question is: How do you create a situation in which people who are preoccupied
with short-term survival needs can begin to think about the long term?

Finding a solution to this issue will require new thinking at the international
level. It will require a focus on satisfaction of basic human needs, creating
conditions that will lead to population stabilization, which in turn will mean
raising education levels, improving health care, and providing opportunities for
women other than child bearing. It will also require some new thinking about
working together to ensure the future habitability of the planet.

Lerner: What will distinguish the Rio conference from those that have gone
before? Brown: I see the Rio conference as the event that will officially mark
the transition from the old era, which was one dominated by the East/ West
ideological conflict, to a new era that will be dominated by the need for
ecological sustainability-the need to build an environmentally sustainable
global economy. This effort inevitably brings together the two great issues of
our time: namely, poverty and environment. And it brings them together in a way
that they have not been brought together before except in a conceptual sense.
Many people have recognized the environment/poverty link. But these two issues
have not officially been linked in the way that I think they will be at Earth
Summit. The Rio conference, I believe, will underline the extent to which we all
now share a common destiny, something that we may have talked about from time to
time in the past but which we have not really faced in a real way.