Fingers Not yet Burnt: Only when the global environmental crisis is perceived as a direct existential threat will humanity take the steps necessary to address it. By then, of course, it will be too late.
WHO NOW REMEMBERS the 1992 “Earth Summit” meeting in Rio? Am
I right in recalling that Al Gore was present? And weren’t we represented by
the National Party’s smartest-ever cabinet minister – Simon Upton? It was all
very worthy, not to mention predictable: the rain forests were disappearing;
indigenous peoples were threatened; more and more species were endangered. And,
as if that wasn’t enough, the Summit’s “Climate Change Convention” warned
humanity that fossil-fuel emissions were heating up the Earth’s atmosphere.
All very important and urgent, but New Zealanders had other
things on their minds back then. The effects of Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of
All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s benefit cuts were all around them, and unemployment
was only slowly coming off its 11 percent peak. For a great many people the
survival of the planet came a poor second to the survival of themselves and
their families.
Twenty years on and another Rio Summit is warning us that
the condition of the planet’s wafer-thin biosphere, humanity’s incredibly
delicate survival-suit, is deteriorating rapidly. And, again, the effects of a
global economic crisis are dominating the headlines, banishing important
environmental stories to the inside pages of our daily newspapers.
Do we care that global temperatures continue their
relentless upward swing? Do we lament the extinction of entire species? Do we
understand the dangers of out-of-control deforestation in the planet’s tropical
zones? Of course we do. It’s just that we care about holding onto our jobs,
paying our bills and looking after our kids a whole lot more.
As a species we are genetically programmed to recognise and
repel immediate existential threats. The leopard in the long grass of the
savannah; the firestorm swallowing up the forest; the cave bear rearing out of
the darkness: these we can deal with. But the slow encroachment of the desert
sands; the gradual decline in the river’s flow; the changing migration paths of
woolly mammoths or caribou: these things proved more perplexing.
In the days before men drew lines on maps, people simply
moved on to where the grass was greener, the rivers flowed more swiftly and the
herds could be tracked and attacked in the same old ways. But today, one hundred
millennia removed from our hunter-gatherer past, the human species numbers
seven-thousand-millions, and moving on is not an option.
We must fight for our survival from where we are – and for
most of us that means fighting in a city. It was only a few years ago that more
than half of humanity ceased living in the countryside. If the planet is to be
saved, it will be by people living in its urban environment.
The 2,400 representatives from Non-Governmental
Organisations who attended the 1992 Rio Summit understood this very well. China
and India were industrialising at break-neck speed and simply could not avoid
drawing millions into the urban environments that manufacturing on a massive
scale inevitably creates. They urged the developing countries’ governments to
avoid the resource-depleting, pollution-generating automobile cultures of the
West by prioritizing the provision of public transportation. Anyone attempting
to navigate the streets of New Delhi or Shanghai will grasp how emphatically
the world’s fastest-growing economies declined to heed their advice.
The determination of these economies to afford their
consumers a Western life-style is entirely understandable, but it is also
strip-mining Australia, Africa and South America of their natural resources,
and sucking dry the world’s dwindling oil reserves. Unless the urban
environment undergoes changes as dramatic as those which set this global
environmental crisis in motion, its insatiable appetite, not only for minerals
and fossil fuels, but simply for food and water, will crash the entire system
of industrial civilisation.
The political representatives of late industrial capitalism
seem incapable of understanding these existential threats. The only bears
they’re willing to fight are those currently stalking Wall Street. It is to the
representatives of enlightened humanity that we must, therefore, turn if the
enemies of our common future are to be overcome: the Greens and those
social-democratic parties still capable of stepping-up to the challenges of
radical change.
Given New Zealand’s remoteness, and its relatively tiny
population, the contribution we can make to saving the world will, necessarily,
be limited. Perhaps the best gift we could offer our fellow human-beings is a
positive example of the practical changes that need to be made.
The devastated city of Christchurch could play a vital role
in this regard by modelling the sustainable urban environment the world needs
to copy. There’d be a state-of-the-art public transportation system; ecologically
intelligent architecture; urban gardens, self-sufficient small-scale energy
generators connected to the national grid; water recycling schemes; and the
conscious creation of resilient urban communities. (Hat-tip to Leanne Dalziel.)
The oft-quoted environmental slogan: “Think globally, act
locally” could hardly be more relevant.
Let the future begin right here.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 26 June 2012.
