Last Gasp: by Jonathon Porritt

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When the economy and ecology collide: Clearing up after an oil spill in Milford Haven

Reclaimed by the sea

It might sound paradoxical, but breaking down sea walls might be the best way of holding back the tide.

Jonathon Porritt offers his opinion on the prospects for the environment

But all the principal global institutions are "genetically predisposed" (as it were) to give precedence to the economic over the ecological. The IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, most UN agencies and all regional and international banks take their marching orders from white men in dark suits whose mission (for the most part, it should be said, a wholly honourable if misguided mission) is to expand the global economy on behalf of OECD governments and address poverty elsewhere through more of the same kind of Earth-bashing growth that has got us into such a mess.

Agencies such as the UN Environment Programme are impotent in the face of such hegemonic control; global treaties designed to slow the pace of ecological destruction invariably come off worst in any clash with the titans of international trade and economic liberalisation.

Experience of how such an analysis is sometimes received makes it necessary for me to put in a rider: this is not an anti-growth case, not anti-trade per se, and certainly not anti-development in the interests of the world's poorest people. It's the economic and social costs of that growth that preoccupy us, the one-sidedness of that trade, the inadequacy of that kind of development assistance. And the demeaning subservience to an economic model that may once have served some of us well, but which isn't delivering the goods today.

The irony is that the solutions are already to hand - and entail only a relatively small political risk.

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Content last updated: 18/08/2004