Environmentalism and the disaster strategy.

• Author: Nespor, Stefano
• Position: Erroneous environmental disaster forecasts

I.

INTRODUCTION

Thinking about the third generation of international environmental law means trying to forecast the future. Many assume that this is an impossible task and that the rule "no prophecy, especially for the future" is to be strictly observed.(1) But it is an activity which many groups love: economists, political scientists, and social researchers on the one hand; environmentalists and environmental lawyers, on the other. However there is a difference between the two groups. For the expert of the first group, the future is not necessarily worse than the present: it could even be better. On the contrary, environmentalists and environmental lawyers constantly imagine the future ranging from bad to very bad.

This attitude is not a new development. It is deeply rooted in environmental thinking. Beginning with the prediction of Malthus in 1798 that starvation in Great Britain was imminent, there has been an endless chain of predictions of catastrophe concerning irreversible environmental damage and unavoidable scarcity of food, minerals, water and other natural resources.

A few examples are sufficient. In 1865 Stanley Jevons predicted the end of coal in Great Britain in a few years. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines reported that oil reserves would last no more than ten years. According to official reports of the US Department of Interior published in 1939 -- and again in 1951 -- oil reserves would last slightly more than one decade. In 1972 a world famous book, The Limits of Growth, predicted a coming shortage of world reserves of oil, natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminum, copper, lead, zinc and many other resources.

All these predictions were completely incorrect.(2) Then in 1973 the World Watch Institute started its yearly forecasts of scarcity of food production. Year-by-year, predictions go on, almost always later proven inaccurate.

Since 1961 the world population has doubled. And food demand has increased rapidly: every year there are 90 million more human beings to feed in the developing countries alone. Demand also increases because people in developing countries are wealthier: they have developed a taste for meat; and to fatten livestock it takes a considerable amount of grain.(3) But food production has more than doubled. Although the greater increase of production occurred in developed countries, while the population increases mainly occurred in underdeveloped ones (this makes evident that the problem is not so much of production, but of redistribution of the resources and of protectionism measures adopted and strictly implemented by rich countries against poor ones),(4) the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPI) and the World Resources Institute are persuaded that agriculture can cope with a growing population(5) for many decades to come.

A similar history can be traced for pollution. During the Seventies the enemy was nuclear energy; during the Eighties, chemicals and acid rain. Chemicals were considered the principal cause of the increased incidence of cancer. However, recent medical statistics agree that the rate of mortality from cancer not related to smoking has actually declined since 1950.(6) The decline of the forests in Germany and in the U.S., confidently attributed in the past to acid rain and considered irreversible, reverted its trend years ago. FAO reports that forest cover in Europe (excluding the Former Soviet Union) increased by more than four percent between 1980 and 1994 and grew in the first half of the Nineties by three percent; in the same period growth in the United States was two percent.(7) Few today attribute the previous decline to acid rain. With cautious terms, the problem is now described as follows: "Over the years, scientists, foresters, and others have watched some forests grow more slowly without knowing why. The trees in these forests do not grow as quickly as usual. Leaves and needles turn brown and fall off when they should be green and healthy. Researchers suspect that acid rain may cause the slower growth of these forests. But acid rain is not the only cause of such conditions."(8)

The same considerations can be applied to other well-known issues, like desertification and deforestation. In 1984, a United Nations report asserted that the desert was conquering 21 million hectares of land worldwide every year. Reports published ten years later declared that there was no net advance of the desert on a world scale. In some areas the desert has gained; in some others it has shrunk. Claims made in the 1980s about deforestation in the Amazon also today are considered gross overestimates: not 20% of the total and 80 million hectares per years (as asserted) but 9% and 21 million hectares per year during the Eighties, reduced to not more than ten million hectares in the late Nineties.(9) In particular, in the Brazilian Amazon, the annual deforestation rate declined from a peak of more than 20,000 square kilometers in 1988 to just over 11,000 square kilometers in 1991 (however, data from the Brazilian government show that it rebounded to more than 29,000 square kilometers in 1995, before declining to 18,100 square kilometers in 1996).(10)

In the last ten years, the focus of the environmental emergency has shifted toward other issues: climate change and biotechnology among them. But these issues too have proven extremely controversial and the dangers predicted by environmentalists again look exaggerated.(11)

I am, of course, not asserting that environmentalism has produced only erroneous disaster forecasts or that environmental policy always worked on the basis on incorrect assumptions. Nor am I arguing that acid rain, desertification, deforestation, and climate changes are not environmental problems. They are. And there are numerous reasons to be concerned about the future of the global environment. Moreover, it must be said that in many cases, as for acid rain and the greenhouse effect, environmentalists have achieved positive results, forcing governments and institutions to address environmental problems. Much environmental improvement, especially in the rich Western countries, can be attributed to the efforts of the environmental NGOs to draw the attention of public opinion and the governments to specific issues.

My aim rather is to argue that environmentalism has been strongly characterized by a disaster strategy, an over-dramatization of future environmental world emergencies, using inaccurate and unchecked scientific data, while forgetting present environmental disasters. After considering the rationale for and the effects of this attitude, the article will point out that changes that have occurred in the world in recent years suggest the adoption of a different strategy for environmentalism and consequently for environmental law.

THE EFFECTS OF THE DISASTER STRATEGY

The worldwide effects of the strategy are several.

1. Distortion of Environmental Law and Environmental Policy

   Law, lawyers and legal policy follow and implement the general policy outlines set for the sector and transform the outlines into regulation, at the national and at the international levels. In the international arena, a great part of the efforts of environmental legal experts has been to respond to issues stressed by environmentalism, that is to focus on the issues selected by the disaster-strategy. More specifically, since these issues concern huge catastrophes set in some distant future, efforts of the legal experts have been to build up international legal systems, financial devices, and cooperative conventions to promote legal and institutional processes to avoid the future catastrophe.(12) Resulting at the international level is a diversion of attention of environmental lawyers. Also, environmental policy has been diverted from the numerous environmental problems affecting today's world that require legal solutions for resolution.

2. Distortion of Economic and Financial Budgets

   In the same way, the disaster strategy adopted by environmentalism diverted financial resources of the States and of international organizations towards huge and controversial projects in order to avoid or to limit possible negative future effects, sacrificing progress on present environmental problems. Today's environmental problems, which can be confronted and mitigated, if not solved, receive no or low priority because they do not seem as disastrous as future problems. The latter, not subject to contemporaneous verification, can be described in terms as gloomy as anybody wishes. Of course, there is no rational or ethical way to support this choice, given that the financial and legal investment in today's problems makes better economic sense than any other equivalent investment. Apart from this comparative perspective, there is no method to be sure that investments on a project to be realized in the distant future make economic sense at all. In fact, in measuring benefits in the distant future (say, more than 30-years from now) economic forecasts are weakened by uncertainty about what will be the state of the world, the people's preferences and values, and available technology.(13)

3. Loss of Public Support

   The disaster strategy is a vicious circle. The strategist is forced to create new and greater disasters to hold the attention of the public. The strategist cannot allow people to say, "Oh, another one," and turn the page of the newspaper. He needs to have the public constantly upset, following the issues, campaigning and financing. Of course, that reaction cannot continue forever. There is a point where people, seeing no concrete results whatever they do with regard to future environmental crises, and perceiving concrete results of day to day environmental policy and from tighter regulations adopted throughout the industrialized world, become insensitive to the strategy. They no longer care what environmentalists say...