Cav's Place

A week ago, I was briefly listing my top five demands regarding environmental issues, which are not negotiable and would be the shortest list I’d put on the table with the occasion of any meeting or conference dealing with such problems, such as the Rio+20 Summit. Obviously, they’re also courses of action that’ll never even be considered as long as people in general, whether we’re talking about world leaders, be they those we know or those who pull the strings from the shadows, or about the masses, have any say in it, which makes any such summits at best pointless, and perhaps even harmful. But that’s just the point…
Why are we flying so many diplomats and negotiators all that way, providing them with quality food, luxury accommodations, security and so on, consuming a large amount of resources and generating significant emissions and pollution in the process, if we already know that nothing noteworthy is going to happen? Why bother to claim that anything meaningful might happen when any commitments that may be announced during such summits are either voluntarily undertaken by individual participants or agreed upon by all of them and those very participants are responsible for the current situation and clearly unwilling to actually do anything about it? What’s the point of this masquerade?

What happened now was the same thing that happens whenever something like this takes place: The first item on each participant’s agenda seemed to be to ensure that nearly all real solutions are ruled out from the very beginning by looking at everything from a purely anthropocentric perspective, even when that very perspective is why the problems appeared in the first place. And then, of course, once that matter was settled, those with the most influence, who would have the most to lose if the status quo would be changed in any noticeable way, stepped in and stamped out nearly all remaining hopes by bringing economics, tradition and organized religion into the game and therefore also ruling out even the options that’d indirectly create some minor improvements despite being mainly aimed at improving people’s lives instead of tackling the problems that actually need to be tackled first.
So all we’re left with are a bunch of voluntary commitments, which amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done and which could have been made just as well without the need for a summit, and a watered-down declaration that’s worth about as much as the paper it’s written on. What’s more, the anthropocentric perspective is so pervasive that, at a quick glance through said declaration, particularly through the first few pages, you’d have every reason to believe that the summit was all about poverty and human rights, not about the environment and sustainability!

I was planning to actually read the whole thing carefully one of these days, but right now I don’t even think it’s worth the trouble. As I keep saying, the solutions cannot and will not be found through politics, diplomacy, negotiations or conferences, but only through the direct actions of that small number of dedicated individuals determined to do absolutely whatever it takes to solve these problems at all costs, to themselves and to humanity as a whole… If it’s not too late even for that.