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September 10, 2007 - Our Common Future

2007 marks the 20th Anniversary of the publication of “Our Common Future”, otherwise known as the Brundtland Report, and widely held to be the foundation document for whatever sustainable development means and amounts to today.

Most people have forgotten just how big a deal the Brundtland Report was at that time. By bringing environmental sustainability, economic development and human rights together in the same frame, it upset all sorts of apple carts at the same time. Old-fashioned, elitist conservationists had their noses rubbed in the reality of protecting habitats and species: all your work is doomed to failure if you don’t take up the cause of the poor and disadvantaged people on whom those habitats depend. Lefties in the development movement were told to grow up and stop categorizing environmentalism as a form of middle-class masturbation.

And all that before the great debate about climate change, which has brought all the constituent parts of the sustainable development world together in an unprecedented sense of shared purpose.

The momentum generated by the Brundtland Report led directly to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – seen now, in retrospect, as the high point in political awareness and seriousness of response. Basically, governments the world over have just been messing around since then, with very little of substance achieved over the last fifteen years.

So it was with some distress that I realised the 20th Anniversary might pass us by without so much as a “good-on-you-Gro Brundtland” birthday party. The Sustainable Development Commission itself hoped to do something, but got knocked off track when both Mrs Brundtland (who was incapacitated through knee replacement surgery) and Gordon Brown (who was too busy) turned us down.

So three cheers for the Environment Foundation and the 21st Century Trust who have just announced a 20th Anniversary consultation on Democracy and Sustainability to take place at the Science Museum on October 23rd and 24th.

http://www.environmentfoundation.net/

http://21stcenturytrust.org

Posted on September 10, 2007 3:17 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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