. . . March 1993

No Filthy riches, No Dirt Poverty: That Was the Mandate from Rio

by Paula Drury McIntyre

When more than 100 world leaders converged on Rio de Janeiro last June for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Earth Summit, few expected much more from it than they got: broad but unenforceable statements of intent addressing the oceans and air, the rights of indigenous peoples and women, among others issues. (See accompanying article summarizing the major agreements.)

Most saw the conference as a first step in the right direction: official recognition of the link between economics and environment, and a call for sustainable developments way of life that does not compromise future generations. As a result, sustainable development has become part of the rhetoric-if not yet the practice-of many governments. In the United States, for example, the new administration said that the Department of Energy may have an expanded role in integrating environmental and economic goals, including goals of creating jobs, making industry more efficient and reducing environmental damage.

The University, too, has stepped into a leadership role in seeking solutions, according to Garry D. Brewer, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE), which has established several programs to address environmental issues. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated the SNRE as the National Center for the Environmental Education and Training Program, as well as the National Center for Pollution Prevention. Brewer says the selection reflect SNRE's role as "the major source of innovation in the environmental education field for a decade or more."

The Big Questions

Many U-M scholars are working in areas related to the goals of the Earth Summit. Several of them told Michigan Today how they are tackling the toughest problems highlighted at the Summit: How to protect the environment without loss of jobs, and how to develop national and world economies without destroying our ecosystem.

SNRE's Thomas Princen is a bit fatalistic about the capacity of reforms in international law and politics to offset the rate of environmental decline. "When you consider the rate of biophysical change," he says, "there's little evidence that Rio will have an appreciable effect. For example, if we're losing between 50 and 150 species a day, it simply may not be enough for people to begin to appreciate the need for change."

Nevertheless, Princen points to signs of tangible progress, such as the revival of elephant populations in East Africa as a result of the worldwide ban on trading ivory tusks. And while much broader and deeper changes in economic relations and trading practices than this will be needed to make sustainable development a reality, Princen is not one who would throw out the baby with the bath to make them. "There will always be business," he says, 'and that shouldn't change. Moreover, most business people have the same motivations as the rest of us. I want tenure and they want their jobs long term, too. They're concerned about their families and the future. They know that to survive they have to be competitive. That's reality. The question for the rest of us is how to make competitiveness socially and ecologically responsible.'

One approach, and potentially one of the most important outcomes of the Summit, is the establishment of the Commission on Sustainable Development. "Countries will be required to make progress reports to the commission," Princen says, "yet many won't produce them, or will produce inadequate ones. That's when international law becomes soft and lacks teeth. But if the commission functions as intended, nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) can make a significant contribution and fill in the gaps by providing their own reports.

"To the extent that sustainable economics are based on local ecosystems, the NGO community is better able to achieve that. But they can't do it alone. They need government support to find solutions."

Mark Van Putten, director of the Law School's Environmental Clinic, places little faith in global thinking as a means of spurring cleanup and conservation of Earth's ecosystem.

Van Putten is "skeptical of the ability to define what sustainable development means at that macro level. To me it means that the @d of reconciliation between economic development and environmental protection that must occur, can only happen on a community-by-community basis. The people interested in economic development and those interested in environmental protection share a commitment to a community; it's the only real common to decide on common action. They are the ones who have to reconcile that if a company logs an area, then they won't be able to hike, fish, canoe or hunt there. Only on that kind of concrete basis does sustainable development make sense."

Pulp Mills Disputed

He cites the example of the Great Lakes Natural Resource Center's involvement in a dispute over the siting of new paper pulp mills in Michigan's western Upper Peninsula. The Center, which Van Putten heads, is helping citizens groups come up with an economic development and environmental protection plan for their region. "We have stopped three mills from being put in," Van Putten says, "so they're at a point where there is a parity of power. The industry knows that without at least the acquiescence of the citizens groups, they're not going to build a new mill. And the environmental activists know that they can't just be naysayers. It's not enough to oppose a mill and force people to go to Detroit or the Southwest to find a job. If you're invested in the community, you need to offer options."

The citizens groups have suggested alternatives to using trees for pulp, like using trees to make high-value cross country skis or launching a large telemarketing enterprise. Yet some business people considered these ideas naive. "Environmentalists need to hire marketing experts to help them develop a more sophisticated marketing proposal," Van Putten says. Meanwhile, he's focusing on the "fundamental environmental objective underlying all of this":

The citizens groups consider the environmental values in the area paramount, and want to integrate the economic future with these values. They are not interested only in what gives the highest-paying and the most jobs. The citizens groups, however, do want to keep intensive labor in the area. 'The Lake Superior region is becoming like a Third World economy because production of the final products doesn't occur there," Van Putten notes. "To the maximum extent possible, value-added activities like furniture-making or book-printing should occur in the vicinity of the natural resources on which they are based. That's one way to give the local populace an economic stake. The consequences of action and the benefits of what you do are apparent, and the same people experience them. That's the kind of thing we need to encourage. Then people will make the lifestyle changes. It won't take a command-and-control regulatory system or an EPA enforcer."

Rolf Deininger of the School of Public Health insists that solid facts form the basis for environmental reform. "One of the biggest problems facing the environmental area on a global scale," he says, "is the lack of solid data. A lot of people release data to the mass media, and the mass media pick them up and magnify them and spread them around. Many of those things are done by people who just want to further their own ideas. It takes a long time to get a neutral or opposite view."

To assess properly what is happening on a global basis requires data to document trends, Deininger says. "Small changes happen all the time; data on long-term trends will let us say whether things are improving or getting worse. That is more important than determining only the current status. Agenda 21 recognizes this and calls for the development of databases. But to follow that through is to be another problem."

In Deininger's field, water quality, experts still can't agree on which parameters to measure, but they do agree that more monitoring stations and greater frequency of monitoring are needed. But where should they monitor? "The shoreline of a river tends to be more polluted because that is where the interaction is between man and the water," Deininger says. "Yet the main body of the water may be in good condition. So there are problems with methodology."

Added to that is the problem of realpolitik: "There is some secrecy and jealousy of governments not willing to share data," Deininger reports. "For example, India has refused to have water quality monitoring stations. I think they don't want to reveal bad conditions, so they may have monitoring stations on only the cleanest rivers. Another problem is that poorer countries often don't have the scientists or instrumentation for proper monitoring. So problems on the global level are a mixture of many things."

A Conflict on the Rhine

Agenda 21's call for integrated planning and management of water resources pleases Deininger. Until now, he says, every country has been out for itself too much. "You see prime examples of conflicts on big international rivers. Take one of the stations on the Rhine River, where the river flows from Germany to the Netherlands: The Germans put the monitoring station on the side with the cleanest water, while the Dutch put it on the opposite side with the worst water quality. The Germans want to show that the Rhine is still in good condition when it crosses the border, while the Dutch want to show that the Rhine is in bad condition when it reaches them."

He finds nothing wrong with the Earth Summit's push for integrated management, "except that's not the way people work; I think cooperation will happen only if each country involved sees a benefit. Then it will come by itself, you don't have to preach it. Everybody will agree to it."

Lynda Oswald of the Business School says the Earth Summit had a strong symbolic effect on the business community, if for no other reason than that "businesses are becoming increasingly aware that the American public is well-informed and very concerned about the environment."

Businesses also are much more environmentally aware today than they were 10 years ago, Oswald says. "Of course there's a strong public relations element to this," she adds, "Many companies are using green marketing-pushing their products as environmentally safe or beneficial even if they may not be so."

But PR aside, businesses are starting to realize that environmental concerns matter to them in terms of their own economic efficiency. 'Businesses are finally recognizing that pollution is not just a necessary byproduct of manufacturing," Oswald says. 'Rather, they now view pollution as an inefficiency in the industrial process. They produce pollution, which must be cleaned up, and that's very expensive to do. Pollution is a potential liability out there forever, and that's something a business must factor into its costs."

Now that the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment is the home of the EPA's National Pollution Prevention Center, Oswald sees a big role for SNRE, the College of Engineering and the School of Business Adn-dnistration. "The Center's purpose is to create pollution-prevention teaching modules that can be incorporated into current university classes nationwide," she says. "Instead of worrying about how to clean up pollution, we focus on how to prevent it from occurring in the first place."

Let Polluter Pay?

The question of how pollution cleanup costs will be distributed between producers and consumers intrigues Oswald. "People didn't have to worry about that in the past," she says, "because companies wereiyt required to clean up or prevent pollution. Now cleanup is mandated by federal laws such as the Superfund program, which targets hazardous waste sites. People think businesses should bear these costs, which average around S25 million per site. They say, 'Let the polluter pay. Make the business responsible for that pay."' Although she thinks most people "don't realize the extent to which our consumer-oriented society creates pollution," she emphasizes that "cleanup costs ultimately get passed on to the consumers who pay for the goods or services, or to the taxpayers who end up paying for the cleanup if a business goes insolvent, as many do, in trying to clean up a Superfund site."

So the big social challenge remains: How do we assess the costs and benefits of environmental regulations? Oswald puts the problem in concrete terms: "Removing the first few layers of pollution is reasonably cost beneficial, while removing the last few increments is very expensive. In a perfect world I'd like a pristine environment. But given limited resources, should we focus on getting out that last increment, or should we focus on another problem someplace else? We have to recognize that we are living in a world of finite resourcesfinite financial resources as well as finite natural resources. We need to make our enviroranental choices consciously and with careful deliberation."

Paula Drury McIntyre '86 is an Ann Arbor freelancer who specializes in ecological subjects.