The competition between property rights and environmental protection was discussed in an op-ed I recently signed*. This subject is topical since it will be addressed during the second part of the 15e Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to be held in Montreal in December.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
My letter addressed the issue of time. The time that leads us towards the solution to the climate crisis, or the stalemate, and which raises the question: what is a pollution sustainable ? Strange oxymoron which considers the harmful in time and space. Because if development must be sustainable, so is the pollution that accompanies it. But why, all of a sudden, talk about the environment?
Because as Tennessee Williams said in Suddenly last summer “We all live in a house on fire, and no one to put this one out…”. As proof, this river which caught fire in 1969. I tell you.
Cleveland residents have long viewed the extreme pollution of the Cuyahoga River as a shining example of the success of their heavy industry. This posture is surprising, but remember that at the turn of the 1920s, the Supreme Court of the United States unreservedly declared that rivers constituted a natural dumping ground for liquid toxic waste. The great filter of nature is at the service of man. However, on June 22, 1969, the river caught fire. I exaggerate. It was a very small, very localized fire. Besides, the water only burned for barely 30 minutes. Nothing to get excited about… And it wasn’t the first fire. It was probably the fifth or sixth since the Civil War.
the Time made it his headline. But he was cheating a bit. The news was sensational, but not so much. He used the photos of the much larger fire of 1952 to make an impression.
It was far from the first river that burned, but it was the last. The US Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. From that same year, perhaps a sign of the times, international summits tackled the issue of the environment in greater and greater depth. But this ecological shift was not just the fruit of the unusual nature of a blazing river or a mystical revival. The post-war boom had run out, industry was losing its hegemony, economic problems (unemployment and state debt) were crippling and the population worried. In fact, the pressing environmental problems were legion. Water pollution was dramatic for rural populations, not to mention that it was these regions that fed urban populations.
Fortunately, the environment is a subject that has the advantage of presenting easy solutions for the political class. Context, as always, feeds on opportunity.
We must limit the sacrosanct freedom of industry to pollute, which does not upset anyone.
Initiatives followed one another in the West, but also in the East, notably under Khrushchev. The protection of nature even appears in the 1977 constitution of the Socialist Republics. Canada became, in 1971, the second country in the world to have a Ministry of the Environment. A small revolution has started. In addition to the fact that it has become unavoidable in a rational economic context to deal with the finiteness of resources, it has become just as essential to consider the capacity of the soil to feed its population. Individuals in a country cannot drink the water they pollute forever. The same goes for the inhabitants of neighboring countries whose borders are ineffective in the face of environmental dangers. This is what specialists in international summits call the transcendence of solidarity. In a nutshell, no pun intended, if you get wet, I get wet.
Such an example of this transcendence took shape during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It was, by far, the greatest summit of all summits. It took on the color of a planetary revolution, although since this summit the planet has never been so destroyed… Nevertheless, it is in the wake of this summit that dozens of countries have modified their Constitution over the years 1990 in order to make sustainable development a central orientation. The law has now taken on the color that we intended to give to private capitalism.
Reality, since then, has hardly followed intentions. Without making patience an excuse likely to explain the current fiasco, let us remember that the IPCC is only 40 years old which, compared to the 300 years of the market economy, is a start rather than an impulse. .
We should also remember that at the Earth Summit in Rio, the exact role of human activity in climate change was not proven.
Now that this proof has been made, it is high time that the law (the juice and the the ex, I mean) imposes a new color on private capitalism. If there is a price to pay for rethinking property rights, perhaps it is less expensive than the two-year average reduction in life expectancy caused by air pollution, also demonstrated by the scientists.