It has been comforting to think of the Earth as so vast and forgiving that it could absorb mankind`s abuse without any lasting harm.
But look around.
Overhead, man-made chemicals are dissolving the ozone layer that protects against the sun`s most harmful rays. Exhaust from automobiles and factories threatens to alter the global climate catastrophically.
Plant and animal species are becoming extinct faster than ever before. More than 3 billion acres of land-think of China and India combined-have been seriously degraded by poor farming practices and deforestation. Pollution is killing coral reefs in the Caribbean and off Asia and Australia.
No one knows how many people the planet can reasonably support. But the population has doubled to 5.5 billion since 1950 and is expected to exceed 10 billion by the middle of the next century, threatening irreversible environmental damage and a declining quality of human life.
”There are so many of us that things are starting to go wrong,” says Michael Gwynne, director of global monitoring for the United Nations Environment Program.
It is against this backdrop that President Bush and nearly 100 other world leaders will be in Rio de Janeiro for the conclusion of an extraordinary Earth Summit, a 12-day extravaganza beginning Wednesday that will draw as many as 40,000 diplomats, scientists, environmentalists, journalists and hangers-on.
In the end, the Earth Summit could mark a global turning point or become, as one European diplomat said, just a ”carnival of declarations.”
There will, in fact, be something of a carnival air about the conference, with Earth Summit T-shirts, rock concerts, movie stars and a model village constructed by Amazon natives.
But the political stakes are high; this will be the largest gathering of world leaders in history. Nations will try to carve out enough areas of agreement to declare the effort a success-or at least to avoid the perception of failure.
In a grandiose effort to deal with virtually every known environmental problem, they probably have taken on too much. And the outcome is clouded by U.S. foot-dragging, tensions between rich and poor nations and a general unwillingness to set aside national self-interest in order to achieve common goals.
Most of the bargaining was completed in the two years of preparations for the meeting, known formally as the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Final negotiations this week will precede the arrival of the leaders June 13-14 to sign declarations and treaties, foremost among them a global-warming accord.
For the first time, countries will agree to develop plans for reducing greenhouse gases, but the accord sets only a vague, non-binding goal of rolling back emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
Environmentalists label the climate treaty a major disappointment because the U.S.-alone among Western nations-fought a proposal to require cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Other initiatives, intended to protect endangered species and preserve forests, are hopelessly caught up in a North-South conflict between developed (rich) and developing (poor) nations. And a proposed Earth charter-a sort of Bill of Rights for the planet-has turned into a declaration on the right of poor countries to economic development and the responsibility of richer nations to help them.
The leaders will take home an 800-page action plan known as Agenda 21, which is intended to guide policies into the next century.
”There is a danger that this will be the high point, and the world will come down from the summit to continue business as usual,” said the conference organizer, Canadian oil millionaire Maurice Strong.
The conference was envisioned as a way to bring global environmental problems, no longer overshadowed by the Cold War, to the diplomatic forefront. ”The effort to save the global environment must become the central organizing principle in the post-Cold War world,” said Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), who has helped promote the conference and is leading a 13-member Senate delegation to Rio.
The Rio conference comes 20 years after the UN convened its first major environmental gathering, the Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm.
Also chaired by Strong, it drew only two world leaders, Olof Palme of Sweden and Indira Gandhi of India. It was boycotted by the entire Soviet bloc, whose toxic legacy of environmental neglect is only now becoming fully evident.
Since then, there have been some environmental improvements in individual countries, but conditions have deteriorated for much of the world.
The narrow focus two decades ago on local pollution-the U.S. was just developing its first clean-air and clean-water laws-did not take into account the global consequences of industrial and automobile emissions, deforestation and population growth.
It wasn`t until two years after the Stockholm meeting, for instance, that scientists in California discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a family of man-made chemicals widely used in refrigeration and electronics manufacturing, rise to the stratosphere and trigger a reaction that destroys the ozone, which blocks the sun`s dangerous ultraviolet radiation.
The U.S. and other countries are phasing out CFCs under a 1987 treaty signed in Montreal. But scientists project an ozone loss of 5 to 10 percent over the U.S. and other mid-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere by the year 2000. Such a loss, they warn, will lead to increases in some skin cancers, cataracts and immune-system disorders.
Former Carter administration diplomat William Nitze, who is president of the Alliance to Save Energy, says environmental dangers such as ozone depletion, climate change and deforestation, by their nature, require international action.
”Global environmental issues will rise to the top of the foreign policy agenda,” he says. ”I think they are already more than halfway there, and I think these issues will occupy a position rather similar to arms control during the 1960s, `70s and `80s.”
Indeed, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Bush recently spent an hour on the phone discussing not the crisis in Yugoslavia or Russia`s economic collapse, but the fine print in the proposed global warming treaty.
Not surprisingly, the conference has its critics, who view the whole thing as a massive case of hype that is only the latest Third World scheme for redistributing the world`s wealth.
And Bush was whipsawed by advisers for weeks over whether to take part in the Rio summit, with budget chief Richard Darman warning that the president would be sandbagged by demands from poorer nations for increased financial aid.
But Bush eventually bought the argument by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly that it would be embarrassing (and presumably a domestic political liability) for the self-proclaimed ”environment president” to skip it.
Darman, though, has a point. The developing countries do have their own agenda for Rio.
For them, tomorrow`s environmental nightmare seems less urgent than today`s environmental tragedies, such as the deaths of more than 3 million children each year from diarrhea-related diseases that could be largely avoided by clean drinking water and basic sanitation.
Their environmental problems begin with poverty, and they insisted that the Rio declaration set an explicit goal of ”eradicating poverty.” The clear expectation is that rich countries will help pay the cost of so-called sustainable development-managing their development in ways that do no permanent harm to the planet.
Environmentalists are distressed that the declaration`s first principle puts human beings ”at the center of concerns,” by inference making the environment secondary. And the Bush administration is unhappy with language asserting rich countries, as the biggest polluters, bear the responsibility for cleaning up.
The developing world is betting it will derive new bargaining clout from the concern among rich countries about global environmental perils. Yet whatever the rich countries do to clean up their pollution could be offset by the developing countries` cutting down their forests, building new coal-fired power plants, and driving more cars and trucks.
China, for instance, is expected to become the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in coming decades as it burns increasing amounts of coal to power its economic growth. And if the West wants to avoid that, countries like China say, the West will have to provide the money and technology for alternatives.
”Just as (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev once threatened to bury the West through the inevitable triumph of socialism, the major developing nations are threatening to bury the North with pollution from their economic development,” Nitze says.
The U.S. and the other leading industrial powers in the so-called Group of Seven have recognized that any global environmental deal will require passing out new financial assistance. The 1987 Montreal Treaty, which calls for phasing out CFC production and use, created a $240 million fund to help developing countries adapt alternative technologies.
UN officials estimate that developing countries would need $125 billion a year to implement the kind of sustainable development measures contained in Agenda 21.
But that is three times the current foreign aid spending by the G-7 nations, and no one is talking seriously about anteing up anything near that much.
Japan is considering a pledge of $10 billion to $15 billion a year to support sustainable development in the developing world. And the Europeans are expected to promise new aid in Rio. The Bush administration has accepted the notion that ”new and additional” aid is required but is looking for others, particularly the World Bank, to take the lead.
That is unlikely to satisfy the developing countries, which recently have made their views known.
Malaysia, for example, blocked a forest convention that would impose outside restriction on logging of its tropical forests. It argued that the U.S. and other countries themselves grew rich exploiting their own forests.
Other developing countries are demanding that any treaty protecting biodiversity-establishing safeguards for endangered species-provide profits for them when businesses from rich countries exploit their unique plants or animals for seeds, medicines or other uses.
Negotiators from 97 nations broke a long impasse and agreed a week ago on a treaty to preserve the world`s endangered wildlife to be signed in Rio. But France said it would not sign because the treaty language is too ”soft.”
Late Friday afternoon the U.S. also said it wouldn`t sign. The Bush administration has objected to language that would limit biotechnology and provide for transferring money to the poorer nations.
A memo, leaked from Vice President Dan Quayle`s office and circulated by environmental groups, cites concerns that the treaty would require the U.S. to toughen its own Endangered Species Act at a time when the Bush administration is seeking to weaken that landmark environmental law.
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Next: Pollution in Eastern Europe.
