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The UN's Environmental Power Grab
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10794 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,617 Words |
| Author
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James M. Sheehan
James M. Sheehan is a research associate at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington,
D.C. |
With President Bush's signing of the UN--brokered Global Climate Treaty, the United Nations was granted unprecedented authority over the global environment. As the Senate made the United States the first industrialized nation to ratify the treaty on October 7, 1992, the United Nations was planning to follow through with an international conference on population and the environment, to be held in 1994. The United Nations has found a powerful issue, and it is on a roll.
The June 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), otherwise known as the Earth Summit, represented the most ambitious attempt ever to globalize environmental policy. The summit has been called a cross between an environmental Woodstock and the historic Yalta Conference. Indeed, it contained elements of both; as the pulsing masses in the sandals-and-beads crowd celebrated the occasion with dancing, singing, and drum beating, the world's leaders went behind closed doors to determine the fate of the earth. The agenda endeavored to lower a green iron curtain around portions of the world in service to the mob's call for a unique and all-encompassing ideology, a new world order to replace the destructiveness of Western capitalism.
This Earth Summit was considerably larger than the first, called the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and held in 1972, which prompted most nations to create environmental ministries and agencies such as the UN Environmental activists would like to see a similar impact from Rio, preferably a full-scale integration of environmental and economic ministries worldwide.
The concept of "sustainable development" supported by the summit's organizers is a vision of the world in which environmental and economic planning is combined as a single government function, driven by changes in economic and fiscal policies. Maurice Strong, UNCED secretary-general, describes sustainable development as "the integration of the environmental dimension into every aspect of our economic life from planning and policy making to patterns of production and consumption."
At the summit's opening ceremony, Strong called the human race "a species out of control." Rio was convened largely to provide more control over this destructive pest. To Strong, the Earth Summit represented "not an end in itself, but a new beginning--a new beginning in bringing about transformations rooted in our deepest spiritual, moral and ethical values." As the United Nations expands its scope over the environment, the fortunes of various connected interests can be
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