Lifelines

That is what was really at stake in Johannesburg: indiscriminate access to basic categories of sustainability: health, water, biodiversity, agriculture and energy. Health means survival, crossway between life and death. Water provides people with a lifeline with the present environment. It is the lifeline between people, nature and resources. Biodiversity provides men, women and children with a lifeline with the past as wll as the future. It is the ultimate guarantee of the continuity of life. Agriculture stands for life itself. Agriculture provides people with food, work, an income and a home. Energy is the lifeline with progress: a more efficient use of resources, more food, more work, a better home, a higher income, the preservation of life and the postponement of death. Water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity  -  WEHAB  -  they form a string of lifelines. Together they give human survival a meaning and life a sense of direction, by freeing people from the fight for mere survival, to overcome the constraints set by space and time, to enable them to prevent and conquer misery and to develop instead, to reflect on the sense and meaning of human existence, to divide labour and exchange the fruits of  labour, to philosofize, write poetry, make love, create images, tell stories, collect knowledge, play games. A sustainable world society means that people are free to do all this together with other people, witihin the family and with partners in society, coming from different backgrounds, with different cultures: different experiences, different insights, different languages, different  poems, stories, images and games, and to share all that with each other.

Water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. Together they are the lifeline between people and the planet. They shape the essential conditions for a sustainable development of human life, provided of course that they themselves are being preserved, sustained and developed in equilibrium with each other. That is crucial if we are to cut poverty in half or eradicate it all together. But those conditions for sustainability can only be met if there is a common determination towards the goal,  common values and a shared belief corncerning the system within which the endeavour should take place, full agreement about rights and duties, a willingness to comply with the norms and to live up to the pinciples, being confident that all this will be adhered to by everybody else, whether rich and powerful or not. Not only the task itself  is complex, to achieve sustainable development  including poverty eradication, but so is the setting within which the task has to be accomplished. That can not be imposed by a government or a bureaucracy. It cannot be ordered from above. It can only be achieved together with all other partners in society, bottom up, in a participatory approach, so that each and every individual and all peoples groups can trust that all will benefit more or less equally from a common endeavour to make life worth to be lived, now and in the future.

 If we look backward to the last decade of the previous century, we must admit this was not the decade fulfilling the promises of 1989 and 1992, when we were optimistically heading towards the end of the Millennium. It was not a decade of new international sustainable development cooperation. During that period we saw globalisation resulting into ever-greater ecological distortions, a sharpening of inequalities, a greater conflict potential and a weakening of the capacity of the polity to deal with these concerns, rather than a strengthening of that capacity. One might call that stumling into disaster. Economic conflicts have been complicated  by religious and cultural conflicts, violence could not be contained but has spread around the globe and all this became further complicated by the violence of terrorism. 

Since the 1th of September 2001 the world stands at the crossroads. The choice is between two paradigms: security or sustainability. Security is exclusive: ‘our’ security, which we presume to be threatened  by others  -  outsiders, foreigners, potential enemies  - and which we try to protect through exclusion. The other paradigm, sustainability, is inclusive: a safe and secure place for all human beings, a safe habitat, a safe job, secure access to food, water and health care, secure entitlements to resources which are essential for a decent and meaningful life, worthy of human beings. Sustainability as an inclusive concept implies the mutual thrust that justice will be maintained and secured for all people, without any discrimination, the ultimate guarantee of mutual security.   

In international policy security is all the go now. This implies a predominance of inward attitudes, more exclusion, pre-emptive strikes, retaliation, more violence, more terrorism, war. Going for absolute security kills. Embracing sustainability means sowing the seeds of life.

 

Jan  Pronk

Pastrana Borrero Lecture

United Nations Environment Program

New York

19 November 2002