Republican News · Thursday 22 August 2002

other world is possible

Environmental destruction, global warming, famine, poverty, corporate misdeeds and impending wars are just some of the issues that make the impending World Summit on Sustainable Development, dubbed the 'Earth Summit', one of the most critical worldwide gatherings ever held.

The UN summit is set to be the largest international conference ever. 65,000 delegates, including 60 heads of state, ministers and civil servants, from 185 countries, will converge on the South African city of Johannesburg.

Apart from the 12,000 journalists this meeting will attract, there will also be a massive turnout from environmental and development lobby groups and, lurking in the fringes, big business will be holding its own mini-conferences in an attempt to influence politicians. Mass protests against exactly that - the manipulation of policies in the Third World by tycoons and politicians from the West - will converge outside the conference.

Johannesburg is a fitting setting for this event. It is a city in which the world's extremes of obscene wealth and desperate poverty are on full display, within a few minutes' walk of the summit's headquarters in a plush Johannesburg suburb. It's the world's murder capital, its cheapest capital, and South Africa's most polluted. It is a place where democracy and constitutional politics seem irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming tyranny of global economics.

Leaders will discuss a world that starts up in indignation when affluent white farmers are threatened with eviction, yet nods itself to sleep to the news of famines and disease that kill millions every year; a world where household pets in some parts are treated with more dignity than human beings in others.

"A movement against invisibility" is how a Dublin sociologist at Puebla University in Mexico, John Holloway, aptly encapsulates the common goal of resistance to this established order throughout the world. He speaks of the invisibility of the billions of the world's most impoverished and oppressed inhabitants, in the eyes of its most powerful and wealthy.

Though George Bush, and others, have confirmed this invisibility by refusing to attend the conference, those who are willing to open their eyes must now ensure that the Earth Summit is not just another talking shop or junket in the itinerary of a world in deepening crisis.