A Sustainable Europe?

The environmental movement demands a reorientation of the industrialised countries. A sustainable future needs to be built where each country adjust itself to use such an amount of ecological space that it is not above the level which can be justified as their global fair share. Everyone has the same right to an equal share of the natural resources, but should also take responsibilty to uphold a sustainable society.

In 60 countries Friends of the Earth have been carrying out a campaign called Sustainable Europe. It has recieved quite a lot of support from the EU and other established institutions. Greening EU has been a popular idea among both politicians and many of the less EU-sceptical environmental organisatioons outside Scandinavia and Spain. Greening the whole world through sustainable development, as promoted by the UN Conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992, has been a similar popular but less radical idea.

In spite of the wide support, the practical outcome of EU environmental politics and changes towards a new sustainable society model in Western Europe has been lacking. EU promotes mainly market-oriented solutions, while prohibitions or changing society collectively is marginalised, if at all heard of.

TNCs turns protests into profit

At the same time, the well-organised corporations use the main part of the decisions in favour of further unsustainable development. Motorways through urban areas and forests become even more resource consuming motorways underground, due to the environmental protests. Protests against nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe are turned into state subsides to save the Western European nuclear industry, by giving EU money for aid to Eastern Europe so that Western companies can reconstruct the plants and make them more efficient.

The promises made to new Scandinavian countries becoming member states in the 1990's, with a better environmental and health legislation than the rest of EU, are today vanishing. State prohibition is not an issue when the main aim of the EU to promote economic growth might be in danger. Scandinavian health protection measures against toxic colouring of food, or border control against infected meat is torned apart. Patents on life is heralding a new frontier of environmental and health risks. If long-time research is made in EU countries on the effects of gene technology, the scientists are dismissed and no other serious research is carried out in its place. It is the goal of economic growth through free trade, supported both by the EU and the Rio conference, that makes it hard to protect EU countries from import of food regarded by the EU as a health risk. The import restrictions on hormone meat can be hard to maintain when the result is an escalating trade war between EU and the US, threatening the goal of economic growth. When there are examples of succesful prohibitions, like in the case of car exhaust regulations in Southern Europe, this is not only carried out at the price of lowering the levels in more advanced countries bu,t more important, the restrictions never keep pace with the over all expansion of the total emmission of hazardous pollution.

Market-oriented consensus

The remaining main EU road to sustainability is thus market-oriented technological efficiency and corporate self-rule, combined with informing individualised consumers. The sustainable Europe eco-space concept has been both accepted and destroyed in the same moment by politicians and corporations see-mingly willing to accept this road towards a sustainable society. This is done by separating the social justice component from the concept and replacing it with a technological eco-efficiency vision called factor 10. This has led to the vision of reducing the use of natural resources in products with a factor of 4 or even 10 or more. A reduction of 75% would be enough to save the environment, if we continue maintaining the present world order with its unequitable distribution of wealth.

So, why is the popular factor 10 approach problematic? There are at least four reasons for this: 1. We do not live in a socially neutral world. On the contrary conflicts arising from growing social gaps both domestically and internationally make it impossible to find solutions to the environmental crisis without changing the power relations between the rich and the poor. Otherwise it is not possible to build a sustainable culture. It cannot be done by technology alone, or through continued social injustice. 2. Good technological examples from one kind of products cannot automatically be used as proving technology for the solution to environmental problems for most kind of products. The social and cultural situation is not the same. 3. The example from one kind of product may also be falsely presented as the result mainly of industrial technological efficiency, when it in fact is the result of broad political, cultural and social mobilisation. This was the case when the Swedish environmental movement was able to defeat the Swedish export paper industry and could establish by municipal political demand a production of less environmentally destructive paper production in 1987. This case is often presented as the result of individual consumers demands and the automatic technological efficiency market response by the industry to this, by those promoting consensus on the market as the solution to the environmental crisis, but this is a false description of what happened. Behind technological efficiency gains there is always a social reality. 4. The gains from making each product more resource efficient might be lost. It does not help to make products more efficient when the total consumption, and with it the total amount of environmentally destructive use of natural resources of the products, are rising higher then the efficiency gains for each product.

The problem is worse than so. Industrial eco-efficiency is often popular in rich economies, which with accelarating speed leave poor countries behind. This is not only destroying the environmentally positive effects of efficient products as the accelerating total economy constantly also accelerates the environmental destruction. We also have the risk of establishing an ecological class society. Well established upper middle class people can consume meat without hormones or ecologically efficient cars, while the majority have to do with poorer quality. In the mean while the ecologically conscious upper middle class destroys the nature more then low-income households proclaimed to be less environmentally conscious. This ecological class society is of course even more problematic when looking on international differences where the countries with ecological awareness upper middle class often can become even richer by forcing poor countries to get even less for their natural resources and labor.

UN consensus failure

A market-oriented consensus is not giving us a sustainable Europe. The UN strategy has failed as well, due to the same reason. Selfregulation of TNCs and free trade was presented as the main road to sustainable development at the Rio conference. Additional strategies has failed even more explicitly. The promises made at the Rio conference to internationally fund the sustainable development Agenda 21 by doubling aid from the industrialised countries from 0.33 % to 0.7 % was followed by a totally contradictory reality. The year after the conference was the first since the beginning of monitoring aid when rich countries started to diminishing the aid, something they have continued to do with the result that instead of the doubling of foreign aid we now have reduced aid with a third since 1992 from 0.33 % to 0.22 %. This facts about the contradictory outcome is hardly known at all. The success of Local Agenda 21 in some countries and of the bio diversity convention cannot disguise the dominant trend of lack of result.

Social and ecological concerns

The strength of the environmental movement has been to integrate both radical and reformist wings into a social movement. During the 1990s this integration has changed into polarisation, fragmentation and professionalisation intergrated into established society instead of into people's movements. More and more separated from each other some have clinged to secret eco-sabotage while others have become experts far away from challenging power structures. To jointly find another strategy away from the market-oriented consensus model promoted by the EU is one way to gain new momentum. But nothing is as important as joining hands in a common struggle. The joint struggle against gene manipulated food integrating environmental, health, consumer, farmers and workers sceptical towards corporate rule is such a key issue. We need a broader vision uniting both social and ecological concerns when confronting transnational corporate rule instead of accepting market-orientated consensus. Tord Bj�rk