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Dream
and Reality
BY
JULIO GODOY
BERLIN
(IDN) - In his unclassifiable book 'Invisible Cities', Italian writer
Italo Calvino tells the story of Leonia, a fictive city inhabited by
insatiable people, who readily confess that their main passion is
"the enjoyment of new, different things".
Every evening, the inhabitants of Leonia throw away the debris of their
day's glowing "new, different" goods. The city is surrounded
by growing mountains of these yesterday's leftovers -- it is these
mountains which make the city invisible from outside.
And even though the Leonians are terrified by the growing mountains of
their own debris, they do not realize their responsibility. Only Marco
Polo, a traveller strange to the place, who tells the story, comprehends
that the Leonians' main passion is to throw away the recurring
impureness caused by their own voracious consumption.
Practically since its birth more than 60 years ago, development has been
an elusive concept. When U.S. President Harry Truman in his legendary
four-point speech in January 1949 called for "making the benefits
of … scientific advances and industrial progress available for the
improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas" of the world, he
practically coined the word.
Certainly, "development" and "underdevelopment" had
been used before, but never as directly as by Truman.
It is indeed not an exaggeration to say that since then, and despite its
elusiveness, "development" has been the concept most debated,
and in all its varieties the costliest political programme most applied
in modern history.
Universities and other research centres, international organisations,
political parties, governments, popular movements -- all have one way or
other addressed the issue, and continue to do so. Trillions of dollars
have been spent in studying, debating, and "promoting scientific
advances and industrial progress … (in the) underdeveloped
areas…"
And yet, 60 years later, both the "developed" and the
"underdeveloped" countries appear to have come at the end of
the road. In the former, the abuse of nature as "resources"
for unquestioned economic growth and industrialisation has led to the
present environmental disarray.
If anything, global warming should mark the end of this economic model
Truman -- and many others, both at the political and at the academic
level, across the continents -- once considered the paradigm for the
whole world.
Evidence and their scientific evaluation make clear that the forms of
energy generation, industrial and agricultural production, and
consumption prevalent in the "developed" world, are not
"sustainable", to use another fancy word of our times. In the
latter, in the "underdeveloped" world, with very few
exceptions, for all the talk and money invested in
"development", poverty and injustice, now paired with
environmental destruction, continue to be the fate of most.
IMBALANCE
And yet, during the recent debates in Copenhagen on a new international
regime for reducing greenhouse gases emissions, the leaders of the
"developing emerging" countries -- an euphemism for the heavy
polluters China, India, and to a lesser extent Brazil -- have in the
name of "development justice" defended their right to pollute
as the industrialised countries have done since more than two centuries.
There is no question that justice is a key word in the debate: The
industrialised countries must settle the bills for mitigation and
adaptation to climate change -- simply because they are by far the main
culprits for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, for
the depletion of natural resources, and have so far reaped practically
all benefits of this pollution and exhaustion.
To use but one indicator of the "developed" countries'
responsibility for the exhaustion and enjoyment of nature: the
ecological footprint in the Anglophone countries in North America and
Oceania, in Western Europe, and Japan has now reached almost seven
hectares per capita. The world's average is less than three hectares, in
the poorest countries only one hectare. The sustainable ecological
footprint amounts but to 1.5 hectare per capita.
This dramatic imbalance in the use of nature has been growing since the
1960s -- so to speak since the heydays of "development". At
the same time, the poorest countries of the world, virtually faultless
in global warming, are already carrying the burns.
However, this imbalance of environmental justice does not justify
"emerging developing" countries to repeat the errors committed
by the "developed" countries since 250 years, and thus adding
to the climate mess the latter have provoked.
Even though it is a tautology, it has to be repeated that pollution is
not a condition sine qua non for human wellbeing. On the one hand, we
know for sure the consequences of following the "development"
model industrialised countries have applied since 1750. On the other
hand, new, successful technologies -- in the energy sector, to name but
one -- are available now and can provide the basis for economic growth
without those environmental hazards.
These technologies, however, are mostly the property of industrialised
countries. To settle the environmental justice bill, these technologies
-- from solar thermal and wind energy generation, to electric
automobiles, to low-energy consuming industrial and domestic electronic
equipment, to intelligent electricity grids -- must be put at
disposition of the industrialising and poorest countries without cost,
to support their economies to become carbon-free.
The Chinese leadership, the main defender of "environmental and
development justice", appears to be very aware of this. During the
last couple of years, the government in Beijing has been heavily
investing in the renewable energy sector -- official figures indicate
that the Chinese installed capacity in wind energy doubles every year.
China might have surpassed the U.S. as the worst polluter of the world
-- but it has also learnt the lesson, that environmental protection is
not luxury developing countries can get by without, but rather a
necessity. That the Chinese government in international debates insists
in defending its economic and environmental independence is surely a
signal of a stubborn sovereignty -- and a reminder also of the much
heavier responsibility of Western Europe and North America in the making
of the climate disaster to come.
Considerations similar to the energy sector are valid for other aspects
of economic life.
Take agriculture: Traditional intensive agriculture, based on the use of
chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and the like, heavily contributes to
pollution, especially of ground water, and to the exhaustion of soil.
Concerns on climate change set another constraint to agriculture:
The surface of land used for agricultural process cannot be expanded at
will, for mere geographical reasons, but also without risking a further
deforestation and increasing global warming.
Furthermore, output of traditional intensive agriculture stagnates over
time. To give two examples: According to the Food and Agricultural
Organisation, output by hectare of paddy in Chine stagnates since 1997,
after having grown steadily since 1960. In France, wheat output per
hectare has been falling since ten years.
And yet, human kind needs either a higher agricultural productivity to
feed the nine billion people expected to be around by 2050, or new forms
of social organisation and consumption.
Organic agriculture is a solution to the pollution problem -- but not
necessarily to the output stagnation. This leads again to the imperative
consideration of justice and climate change. Justice among countries,
but also within societies. The readiness to limit the own wellbeing to
rational standards, to renounce to superfluous consumption, and to share
the benefits of clean economic growth now and in the future, to give
developing countries the necessary latitude to meet their human needs.
LEONIA
Calvino's story of the not so fictive invisible city of Leonia was
published in 1972, practically simultaneously to actions by
environmentalists of the first hour, such as the now almost forgotten
original UN Earth Summit of Stockholm, the Club of Rome's release of The
Limits to Growth, and the Rumanian-born economist Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen, who had just put out his own reflections on the Earth
as an entropy-closed system.
Calvino's fictive invisible cities have been interpreted as premonition
of our present world, stalled by brainless consumption and growing
rubbish. Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has called the mountains of
yesterday's debris that siege Leonia "the leftover of dreams".
We all are Leonians -- but in contrast to the fictive inhabitants of the
invisible cities, we know the causes and the effects of the leftovers of
our development dreams.
[Source:
IDN-InDepthNews
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