Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review August 29, 2002 / 21 Elul, 5762

Robert W. Tracinski

Tracinski
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports

"Sustainable" development's unsustainable contradictions


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The U.N.'s "sustainable development" conference in South Africa has been characterized, so far, by what the press calls "divergent agendas," a confused contest of competing interests and an attitude of futility. One speaker summed up the expectations for the conference: "They'll talk and talk and talk, then they'll agree to talk some more at a later date and go home."

Both the conference's dignitaries and the protesters who rail at them blame these results on hypocrisy and dishonest political maneuvering. If only the nations in attendance would take "sustainable development" seriously, the conference could "live up to its promise of being a fitting culmination to a decade of hope," in the words of South African President Thabo Mbeki.

But the confusion in Johannesburg is precisely the result of taking "sustainable development" seriously -- with all of the contradictions inherent in the notion.

For environmentalists, the campaign for "sustainable development" is not motivated by a legitimate desire for development. Instead, it is an attempt to put a respectable face on their anti-development, anti-industry, anti-technology philosophy. The environmentalists want to pretend that strangling industrial civilization would not consign the world to a permanent hell of poverty, starvation and mass death. They want to evade the monstrous consequences of their ideas.

Thus, they tell us that there is something called "sustainability," a magic mechanism that will help the Third World achieve prosperity -- even as the environmentalists restrict the only known conditions for prosperity: free trade and industrialization. The way to achieve this contradiction, or at least to achieve the illusion of it, is the central idea of the Johannesburg conference: the demand that industrialized nations pay out massive aid subsidies, putting Third World countries on the dole rather than helping them develop their own economic production. It is an attempt to give the Third World some of the results of industrial development without actual industry or development.

But even the promise of aid is a lie, because Western money can do no good when the greens have outlawed all elements of industrial development. For example, there is much talk in Johannesburg about using Western aid to prevent famine, to halt the spread of disease and to provide Third World countries with clean water and sanitation. But it is the environmentalists who have campaigned against the construction of hydroelectric dams, a major source of electric power and clean water. It is environmentalists who have tried to block the use of genetically modified crops, which are more resistant to drought and disease. And it was environmentalists who stopped the use of DDT, allowing the resurgence of malaria, which once again kills millions in the Third World each year.

These campaigns are proof of the greens' real motives. They want to stop development and keep the Third World in a state of poverty -- while they work to bring the same ideal of poverty to industrialized nations. Most environmentalists embrace this goal, but few dare to admit it openly -- so they peddle a variety of ruses to hide their meaning, ranging from "sustainable development" to "shrinkth," a term suggested by the editor of Earth Island Journal as a less negative-sounding "antonym for growth."

The fact that the environmentalists are getting away with this ruse on such a grand scale, with international summits devoted to their evasions, is inexcusable.

History has amply demonstrated what kind of development is truly good for human life. For two centuries in the West, free markets, property rights and the industrial civilization they made possible have produced an ever-increasing -- and indefinitely "sustained" -- prosperity. The environmentalist mythology paints this as an era of deadly pollution, when, in fact, the advent of industrialization doubled the average person's lifespan. It's not hard to see why: the Industrial Revolution brought us all of the development goals set forward at the U.N. conference -- clean water and sanitation, the elimination of disease, plentiful food -- and much, much more. These were enormous achievements in making man's physical environment healthier, and they were all made possible by industrial capitalism.

But we have yet to see an international "capitalism summit" or "industrialization conference."

It is common these days to blame the West for all of the world's ills. Yet there is one sense in which the West is to blame: we live in the midst of the greatest prosperity in history, yet our intellectual leaders refuse to acknowledge the source or even the value of that prosperity, and they refuse to let the world know what is really required for sustained development: capitalism.

Enjoy this writer's work? Why not sign-up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.




Comment on JWR contributor Robert W. Tracinski's column by clicking here.

08/22/02: The photographing of public art and architecture has apparently been deemed a threat to the Republic
08/14/02: Talk vs. ideas
08/12/02: Blood for oil
08/06/02: The welfare debate we're not having
07/30/02: Newsflash: Hauling CEOs away in manacles makes market soar!
07/23/02: Clearing the way for real airport security
07/16/02: The war on CEOs
07/09/02: Small-time crooks
06/27/02: Martha and the tall poppies
06/21/02: The post-colonialist famine
06/12/02: America's Maginot Line
06/07/02: Time's up for Pakistan
05/28/02: Freedom's defenders
05/22/02: What they knew and when they knew it
05/16/02: The mixed-economy monster
05/08/02: Conference in Cloud Cuckoo Land
04/25/02: The 'Palestinian" victims?
04/18/02: Why Israel must not withdraw
04/09/02: LIVE FROM RAMALLAH: The Theater of the Absurd
03/26/02: Campaign finance corruption
03/21/02: Who is George Bush?
03/14/02: The prophets of defeatism
02/21/02: The war on terrorism and the war on reality
02/14/02: Multilateralism's one-way street
02/05/02: The Powell Problem
01/29/02: A profligate and irresponsible distortion of congressional priorities
01/22/02: Liberal conspiracy theories
01/15/02: Fading shock and fading resolve
01/08/02: Argentina's intellectual collapse
12/31/02: The real person of the year
12/26/01: With friends like us ...
12/19/01: Ending the "peace process war"
12/11/01: The ruthless grip of logic
12/04/01: War powers without war
11/27/01: An Afghanistan Thanksgiving
11/20/01: The end of the beginning
11/06/01: The phony war
10/30/01: A war against Islam
10/23/01: The economics of war
10/16/01: A culture of death
10/11/01: An empire of ideals
10/01/01: Why they hate us
09/24/01: The lessons of war
09/20/01: What a real war looks like
09/17/01: America's war song
09/12/01: It is worse than Pearl Harbor
09/11/01: Out of the fire and back into the frying pan
09/05/01: The UN Conference of Racists
08/28/01: Waging war on profits and lives
08/20/01: The Bizarro-World War
08/08/01: The death toll of environmentalism
07/31/01: Where does America stand?
07/25/01: Barbarians at the G8
07/17/01: The carrot and the carrot
07/11/01: The real Brave New World
07/03/01: The child-manipulators
06/19/01: The scientist trap
06/11/01: The National Academy of Dubious Science

© 2002, CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.