New leadership from the South.

• Position: Editorial - Environmentally minded ministers in Kenya, Brazil, Mexico - Editorial

International environmental leadership is a scarce commodity at the moment. The vacuum was evidenced most dramatically by the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and then by the complicity of many governments in the weakening of environmental and social commitments being negotiated during the run-up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.

Against this backdrop, the world's environment ministers gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, in early February for the UN Environment Programme's Global Ministerial Environment Forum. Although the official agenda of the meeting was a post-mortem on the Johannesburg conference, this topic generated less enthusiasm than did some recent political developments right in Kenya.

In late December, the Kenyan People had unseated President Daniel arap Moi's Kenya African National Union Party, which had been in power since the country's independence from Great Britain in 1963, in a peaceful political transformation via the ballot box. Wangari Maatthai, founder of Kenya's famed Green Belt Movement, was named assistant environment minister. Beaten and jailed just a few years earlier for her efforts to protect the country's threatened forests, Maatthai is now a key figure in the new Kenyan government's efforts to protect the country's ecologically rich forests by cracking down on illegal logging, charcoal production, and other harmful activities.

Encouragingly, recent events in Kenya appear to be part of a larger pattern in which democratization in the South is bringing to power a new generation of environmentally minded leaders. In Brazil, the 2002 victory of Luiz ("Lula") da Silva's Worker's Party led to the appointment of Marina Silva as...