Environment, Rights, and Security

Jonathan Lash
President, World Resources Institute

Keynote Address at the 3^rd National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment:
“Education for a Sustainable and Secure Future”

Sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment

It is wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues here this morning, and I am honored to see several of my heroes seated in the front row.

Before going any further, let me correct Karim’s fulsome introduction.  I am a lapsed lawyer, a recovering bureaucrat, and a recidivist in the policy field.  An advocate by instinct and inclination, I have never had as much fun as I do leading WRI…this very credible global environmental think tank that goes beyond research to create practical ways to protect the earth and improve people’s lives.

We work with several hundred partners in over 50 countries, ranging from courageous local groups campaigning against illegal logging in

I want to talk to you today about security, environment, and human rights, and how they are, or can be connected.

Since 9/11 the

Those concerns are real and we are compelled to act to confront them.  But military strength and homeland security are not enough to make the world secure.  I want to make a case for fighting poverty, protecting the environment, and in particular protecting people’s rights as the path to human security, and the foundation, in the long term, for global security.

Neither violence nor hatred is a pathology only of the poor, nor does violence flare only in the presence of poverty, but poverty is volatile when compounded with misery, powerlessness, and injustice.  Although the terrorists we know most about were not recruited from among the poor, they seem bent on provoking a war in which the poor would be soldiers. We cannot create security only by striking at the flint; we must deal with the tinder.

What if we capture the leaders of terrorist groups, seize their resources, disrupt their networks, and deter their state sponsors, but act with narrow focus, treating terror as a crime without a cause that we can address, will our world be secure?  

The squalid slums of the sprawling cities in the poorest parts of the world are growing explosively, expanding by a million people a week… a million people a week.  Why?  

Three-fourths of the world’s agricultural lands are degraded, and the cities are filling with people driven from rural areas by expanding population and failing lands.  

In the

There are about a billion teenagers in the world, most of them poor, jobless and struggling for shreds of hope.  Within a decade or so, if trends continue, there will be 27 cities in the developing world that are bigger than New York.  If they are full of jobless young men with nowhere to turn, they will be tinderboxes of anger and despair.

Close to half of all jobs worldwide depend on fisheries, forests, and agriculture.  In one-fourth of the world’s nations natural resources directly produce more income than industry.  The condition and management of those resources affects people’s lives directly.

Many of the most insecure and poorest regions of the world are also the least democratic.  People are not only poor, they are voiceless.  Dependent directly on natural resources they have no say in how those resources are used, but suffer the consequences when the decisions are corrupt and the use is destructive.

The notion that security, stability, and sustainability are linked is by no means novel.  For millennia refugees have been driven from the land by population growth and the collapse of natural systems.  Nations have fought for access to scarce natural resources.

What is different now is our opportunity to achieve security by improving lives and protecting the future.  The question is whether we will use these capabilities as an alternative weapon in our war on terror.

Imagine if we determined not only to root out terrorism, but also to deprive it of soil in which to grow.  With only modest increases in aid, we could enable vast improvements in education, health, agriculture, and microcredit to launch small businesses.  We could support private sector investments to bring electricity and telecommunications to rural areas.  We could assist in the dispersion of practical technologies to use water many times more efficiently.

We could support programs to educate and empower women, protect their health, and enable them to plan their families.

We could find a way to join the allies whose help we now seek in confronting terrorism, to combat global climate change, using our immense technological capacity to reduce our use of fossil fuels and diminish our dependence on foreign oil.  

We could work to ensure people’s rights to information about natural resources and environmental decisions that affect them.  We could give people the tools to make better decisions.

This last point – the creation of “environmental democracy” and the vindication of human rights – deserves more attention than it ordinarily gets from environmentalists.  It offers a great lever for change – a weapon against corruption and a catalyst to stir action by governments immobilized in the face of the complexity of global problems of sustainability.

Perhaps the place to start in talking about human rights and the environment is the Haida Gwaii – a remarkable archipelago 100 mi off the coast of

The southern third of the archipelago is a park accessible only by water where my wife and I spent 10 days kayaking last summer.  It is the only park in the world administered by descendants of its original aboriginal inhabitants.  Their history is much like that of other North American native people – victims of disease, domination, relocation, whaling, and logging which stripped large parts of the northern islands.

The park was created a decade ago when remnants of the Haida people said “no more!”, and with the backing of environmentalists won creation of the park.

Was this an issue of human rights?  Environment?  Of course it was both, and, but for the peaceful outcome, it was typical.

The story of Haida Gwaii fall in a familiar pattern:

• Chico  Mendes – Brazilian rubber tapper from Xaipuri in the Amazon – murdered by ranchers for protesting their destruction of the forest his community lived in and from.  
• Ken Saro Wiwa – executed – protesting oil pollution and corruption.  
• Edwin Bustillos – beaten and threatened, his colleagues killed mysteriously, protesting illegal logging in Mexico ’s Sierra Madre.  
• Yosepha Aloman – elder of the Amungma people in Irian Yaya, tortured, imprisoned in a cell a foot deep in feces, protesting the destruction caused by the Freeport McMoran mine, and rights that were violently suppressed in creating it.  
• The community of Anniston , Alabama that was victimized by toxic pollution from a Monsanto plant for 30 years after a Monsanto consultant had told them that the plant’s discharge was so toxic it killed fish faster than battery acid.

Natural resource destruction almost always means human misery.  It is almost always accompanied by abuse of the most basic human rights.  The victims are usually poor.  The poor are least able to defend their interests, least likely to have or assert property rights, they have least access to technology to protect themselves.  When sea level rises and storms worsen due to climate change the Dutch build dikes, American vacation home owners demand government subsidized insurance, and Bengalis drown or become refugees.

Chico Mendes, Freeport McMoran, Anniston, Alabama - these are flagrant cases of environmental destruction that injures people’s lives and livelihoods directly, eliminating their source of sustenance and income, wrecking their homes, or threatening their health.  In each case, the victims also suffered from corrupt and illegal decisions, and often violent repression of legitimate protest.  Indeed, environmental protest and movements for political rights often become intertwined.  These are not hard cases.  Of course environmental harm that injures people, degrades their land, destroys their livelihood, and steals their hopes for the future violates the victim’s rights… almost by definition.  What happened in the cases I described was morally wrong, politically antideluvian, and environmentally reprehensible - the trifecta of abuse.

But it is worth turning the analysis around for another look:

If environmental and human rights abuse are often linked, are rights – access to information, opportunity to participate, the right of judicial redress – an effective antidote to environmental destruction?

Well, that’s not so hard either, right?

There is the national environmental policy act (NEPA), a superb bundle of procedural rights that has proven to be a killing ground for really bad ideas.  Perhaps that is why the Bush Administration is assiduously seeking to weaken NEPA - by requiring the assessment, disclosure, and public discussion of the environmental impact of governmental actions it imposes inconvenient restraints on their efforts to hand over public resources for private use regardless of environmental consequences.

One of the pledges governments signed at

The toxic release inventory, and community right to know legislation in the

Some young colleagues of mine have created a space-based “Human Rights Watch” for trees.  It is called Global Forest Watch.  It uses satellite data linked to on-the-ground information from our NGO partners to track what is going on in the remaining great forests from

Even more remarkable as we started doing this work we were approached by major wood using companies who wanted to know how they could use the GFW maps to assure their customers that they don’t get their wood from endangered forests.  We really felt we’d made progress when the Swedish furniture company IKEA announced in their catalogue that they were using the GFW maps to guide their purchases of wood.  

Consumers connected by information to the impacts of their consumption.

As powerful as the globalization of markets has been, the globalization of information may ultimately have the greater impact on our world.  We live and travel constantly connected to a global network of information by CNN, cell phones, the endless global swarm of e-mails that swirl in our wake like a pursuit of moths.  Information, images, information, and ideas flow frictionlessly around the earth in an increasing torrent overwhelming the significance of borders as barriers and diminishing the capacity of governments to control events.

Information is power.  Governments have always sought to control and manage it, applying the harshest penalties for espionage …for those who steal information.  Guttenberg launched revolutionary change, and ultimately the industrial revolution when he invented movable type.

Two of the last three Nobel prizes for economics were given for work that explored the power of information -- Amrtya Sen who demonstrated that there has never been a famine in a democratic society with a free press, and Joe Stiglitz who showed how the efficiency of markets can be distorted without the free flow of information (even in the absence of fraudulent Enronization).

If information is power, control is shifting incredibly rapidly. 500 mm people are connected to the internet which contains perhaps 25 trillion words.  Use is growing fastest in

It took 46 years for one quarter of Americans to get electricity, 35 years for the same proportion to get the telephone, 16 years for the personal computer, and seven for Internet access.

Then there has been the rise of civil society – there are about 190 nations, 20,000 multi-national corporations, but there are several million NGO’s, each needing no more than web access to achieve global reach.

The multilateral agreement on investment, negotiated in secret, was derailed by an ad hoc e-mail firestorm of protest in the course of a few weeks.  The land mine ban was driven by a loose internet coalition that rejected the wisdom of diplomats that change would take decades.

We have seen what happened to highly visible global companies who were perceived to have violated social norms of environmental stewardship, or human rights.

It is a simultaneous expansion of access and usability that provide an enormous new opportunity for voice, and to build ad hoc communities of common purpose to amplify voices.

Access to information is a potentially powerful engine to strengthen the rights of the excluded, and strengthening those rights can be a powerful engine for a more sustainable and secure world.  But there is a problem with the satisfying symmetry of this view that if fewer rights means more destruction, then more rights must mean greater control, and less destruction.  Protection of individual rights doesn’t always mean result in more protection.  The history of environmental regulation is one of applying coercive measures to restrict individual freedom to harm the environment.  Yet not every logger, or miner, or rancher has managed his use of nature’s gifts sustainably.

There are some hard things to think about lurking here.

Consider the differences between the approach of the human rights advocates and that of most environmental groups:

• Human rights advocates address present harm, environmentalists tend to focus on future risk.  
• Human rights advocates are concerned with harm to people, while environmentalists also deal with harm to nature.  
• Human rights advocates defend the individual against the tyranny of the majority, environmentalists fight for the common good against narrow individual interests.  
• Human rights advocates seek to limit the power of the state, while environmentalists often rely on the regulatory power of the state.

Civil libertarians are, of course, familiar with arguments about the common good – that is John Ashcroft’s argument about why security is more important than liberty – and the balancing required.  But 21st century environmental issues present the question of rights and responsibilities in ways that we will have to resolve…soon.

Another characteristic of the global era is the emergence of environmental problems that are big, global and irreversible.  For example the loss of biodiversity – extinctions have reached perhaps 15 percent.  The world’s strategy for the protection of biodiversity during the twentieth century was the creation of parks and protected areas – a notable outcome of the century was the designation – on paper at least of something like 10 percent of the dry surface of the earth for protection.  We know that is not adequate, and in many cases protection is ineffective, but it is also true that in many places the protections they grant are seen as coming at the expense of people who live there, and must be protected by force of arms…

Or consider global warming.

Climate change is real, it is underway, the emissions that cause it are increasing rapidly, and warming is happening more quickly with more significant consequences than previously anticipated.

Climate change is the quintessential global environmental issue: emissions from one area of the globe affect the climate everywhere, although not equally.  All countries contribute to the problem, although again, not equally.  Countries differ in their vulnerability to climate change, and in their capacity to adapt. Low-lying coastal areas, such as those of Bangladesh, and islands, such as those of the Pacific, face the greatest risks from rising sea levels and more severe storms. Industrialized countries are in a better position to protect, or rebuild infrastructure destroyed by storms, to adjust agricultural production to new conditions, or to avoid the spread of epidemics through adequate healthcare provision.

Although every country has emissions of carbon dioxide, most of the emissions come from industrialized countries, and the

This raises some interesting questions about justice and rights.  Whose rights?  Justice for whom?

When an American drives an SUV and causes emissions that will contribute to the sea level rise that will submerge Vanatu is that his right or a human rights abuse?

When our generation makes choices – or more importantly – fails to make choices that create irreversible environmental changes that it is far more difficult for our children to deal with what principle can we articulate for our allocation of rights between current and future generations?

Whose rights should be protected, and how do we persuade our fellow citizens?

I do not believe that sustainability or security can be achieved against people or their interests.  To make progress we must embrace the vindication of rights as a strategy for change.  The mechanisms we create to deal with global problems must be built on the principle of fairness.  We have to create means and incentives to achieve biodiversity conservation by creating sustainable livelihoods.

But in the alliance for human security rights advocates must endorse the notion that rights alone also are not enough because the laws of nature are not negotiable.  The campaign for rights will be immeasurably strengthened by association with the great obligation of stewardship that the number and power of our races imposes.

Thank you.