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World Politics and the Environment
| Article
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20298 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,711 Words |
| Author
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Thomas W. Wilson, Jr.
Thomas W. Wilson, Jr., is a Washington-based author and
consultant. He has served as political adviser to the U.S.
mission to NATO, as consultant to the UN Conference on the
Human Environment, and director of the Aspen Institute's
Program on the Environment and the Quality of Life. His books
include Cold War and Common Sense, The Great Weapons Heresy,
and International Environmental Action. |
World politics has acquired a vibrant new dimension that reaches from the grass roots to the global summit and back again. It is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century and a portent of the next stage in the evolution of international affairs. This is the politics of the human environment, that overarching global arena in which the works of mankind interact strategically with the works of nature.
It is difficult to exaggerate the pervasive effects of this new realm of political concerns. In June, more than a hundred heads of state convened in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit. There, they discussed the most pressing environmental problems and struggled with the agonizing issue of how to reconcile the imperative need for economic progress with the compelling need to protect the natural systems on which economic progress depends. At the national level, environmental issues have penetrated the political process almost everywhere, including the presidential and congressional elections in the United States this year. State legislatures, county planning commissions, city halls, and town councils all are engaged in one way or another with the impact of environmental problems upon human communities and their political, economic, and social institutions and traditions.
It is difficult to overstress the unprecedented nature of the agenda of environmental issues now demanding political decision and action. There is nothing in the annals of diplomacy, for example, to offer guidelines for international cooperation to protect the ozone shield in outer space, defend the global climate system, preserve the biological diversity of living species, or manage the earth's tropical-forest belt; yet, these were among the most urgent topics on the agenda of the Rio conference. In short, governments are faced with problems that have not existed before and are asked to do things that never have been done before. Still, there is no great mystery about how these novel issues have overtaken world politics in the past two decades.
At some indeterminate point in the mid-to-late century, the total human enterprise began to explode in one direction after another. In rapid-fire order, the wonder drugs of modern medicine cut deeply into infant and child mortality, lowered the death rate abruptly, and left the most populous areas of the world with a runaway rate of population growth, triggered by the abnormal combination of traditional birthrates and modern death rates. At about the same time, a "revolution of rising expectations" swept the same areas. People rejected the fatalistic acceptance of chronic poverty and demanded material progress in
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