Introduction: The Rich Wage War, The Poor Die (apologies to Sartre)

The acceptance of globalisation, of universal neo-liberalism, particularly by much of the left, has allowed its consolidation to go uncontested. In promoting their world view, Clinton-Blair-Giddens have silenced the reactionary right, but only at the cost of striking dumb the struggle for social justice. Democratic rights are not a substitute for social justice and social justice itself cannot be delivered without tackling property relations – for that purpose we have to create a deeply embedded network of collective institutions for the twenty-first century.

An essential part of that creative process must be to address the issues of sustainability, particularly in the matter of rights to global commons. Ultimately, this will mean organising against, challenging and transcending the globalising dialogue. We accept Goldman's point that strong states are not simply being replaced by markets, tradition by modernity and the local by the global. Quoting Hadaway, he argues that 'local' does not mean provincial, limited or unscientific understanding, but understanding which is located, situated and partial; 'global' does not mean universal, general and apolitical understanding, but understanding which is distributed, layered and equally partial. Both understandings demand realism not epistemological relativism. This is why we explore, no matter how briefly, cultural canons as well as case material in order to criticise transnational corporations (TNCs) and international financial institutions (IFIs). That approach also makes us question that dea ex machina, the international NGOs (INGOs) who see themselves as the solutions, as civil society and as the fountain of good governance.

Both the authors of this book were engaged in and around the debate of the '10 Years after Stockholm', held in Nairobi in 1982, and one of them was present at it. It was the occasion when the global powers, under a Reagan-Thatcher hegemony, reviewed environmental progress, or rather the lack of it. The centre of attention was the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), locally translated as the United Nations Egyptian Programme (since its director, at the time, was M.W. Kassas, an Egyptian national) or sometimes, more appropriately given its lack of impact, the United Nations Entertainment Programme. UNEP had offered, as its two striking successes, its Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) and its Regional Seas Programme. Since neither of them had much to do with people and their problems, we feel that they hardly add up to a success. But during this environmental menagerie, one of us was invited to two famous meals in which the future of global environmental policy was determined.

The first, a dinner party given by a member of the Swedish Embassy, was a rather splendid affair and the splendour was in the conversation. It was about creating, and maintaining in being, a social-democratic global initiative linking environment and development, which should be financed separately from both the UN system and the Reagan-Thatcher axis and beyond the control of either. Representatives of the Nordic countries present at that dinner applauded the idea as it emerged and declared themselves to be strongly in favour of it. That conversation subsequently led to the creation of the Brundtland Commission, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The second was a private lunch in which a leading American scholar informed us that the US had already decided to respond to global environmental issues, also quite separately from the United Nations. A leading research institute, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, was to be established; it is now known as the World Resources Institute (WRI). The environment had suddenly become politics.

Sustainability was at the centre of the Brundtland Commission's work. The concept was deliberately ill-defined to prevent unnecessary and destructive objections and much of this book is concerned with the problems produced by that diplomatic vagueness. Three broad areas of concern were covered by the Commission – ecological, economic and social – and each of them brought its own agenda. Ecologists were driven by the work of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) which, guided by the second law of thermodynamics, addressed the tendency of systems to be entropic. They sought to maintain ecological sustainability by maintaining the complexity and variability of systems, by emphasising the non-reducibility of organisms and by paying attention to uncertainty, spontaneity and collectivity in nature. Economists looked at the environment as so much capital stock and pushed a form of analysis, macro and micro, that proposed the polluter (user) pays principle. Social concern amounted to little more than nice words designed to lower expectations, but little guidance to building stable, resilient and equitable communities was offered.

After the Brundtland Report and its follow-up, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), these areas of concern have consolidated. Ecological concern focuses primarily on rural issues and the global commons without paying very much attention to urban settlements where most people live. The denial of urbanisation, a product of the romantic tradition which we discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, is found well beyond what is commonly understood to be 'literary' work. Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore and, more paradoxically, Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape,6 both came abruptly to an end when they arrived at the Industrial Revolution and its attendant urbanisation. It took E.P. Thompson, mimicking Hoskins' title, to carry the tale forward in The Making of the English Working Class, in which he abandoned rural idylls for urban reality. Nature, for Thompson's predecessors, was everything not industrialised or urbanised, a mistaken view still pursued by much of today's environmental movement.

Similarly, economic concern was reduced to a very particular economic argument – external costs, resource exhaustion, discounted cash-flows, common property, valuation, regulation and cost-benefit analysis all led to an understanding of the environment as a market problem, not to an analysis of the market as an environmental problem.

Social issues, which should have focused on community, failed to emerge, not least because Brundtland tried to square the circle of ecological and economic concerns by arguing for growth with equity – the infamous canard of 'trickle down'. We confront the issue of social justice and its meanings and address those organisations, particularly international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), which frequently claim to provide solutions. Table 1 summarises the argument and the logic of this book; it is, after all, our way of seeing our world...