A Signal Failure: Ecology and Economy After the Earth Summit

Abstract

Six years after the 1992 Rio Summit, it is perhaps time that we came down from the Earth Summit, and looked around at the landscape stretching out before us.1 At the conceptual level, we see that ‘sustainable development’ has become enshrined as the working language for everyone from environmentalists to real-estate speculators. At the international level, environmental accords that were reached at Rio — the Climate Convention, the Biodiversity Convention and Agenda 21 (the extended blueprint for common international action) — have been ratified and are beginning to be incorporated into the international bureaucracy, not without some backing away from the original commitments. The international environmental movement is in substantial disarray, seemingly unable to rearticulate its vision into a new politics for the late 1990s. Nationally, environmental issues have taken a back seat to the problems of an economic system that is steadily diverging from the old certainties of growth as the promise of full employment and security for the middle class.KeywordsEcological SystemEconomic OrderMaximum Sustainable YieldEnvironmental MovementBlind PersonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.