newsroom

TODAY Tuesday 28 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Civil Society and Conservation

It is useful to remember that the fires raging out of control on Borneo and Sumatra are illegal. Indonesian national law clearly proscribes unauthorized burns. There exists neither the will nor the means to enforce the law.

The fires continue to burn today for many reasons natural and technical. The infamous El Nino is said to have delayed the onset of the monsoon rain; the resultant drought has made kindling of all vegetation. The fires have now reached peat deposits. They will smolder smokily, not easily extinguished. You have to factor in the remoteness of the burn sites and the inadequacies of the firefighting infrastructure.

But no one can dispute that the fires would not have been lit, and would not have grown so, had Indonesians obeyed or enforced their forest-burning law in the first place. Americans can't get too pious. We have millions of examples of local landowners flouting federal land-use regulations. Even when we follow the rules completely we inflict more than our share of climate change and soil loss. And yet we do have a civil society that allows us to make new rules and to expect that -- more or less -- they will be enforced. In the case of Indonesia, the institutions of civil law and the customs of civil law obedience were unequal to the disinclination of the national elite to enforce laws inconvenient to its members. If, by the way, this business doesn't involve at least a handful of retired and active army generals, I will eat my Balinese wall hanging.

Civil society is a necessary but not sufficient condition of natural conservation in modern economies. You can argue that civil government greases the wheels of economic exploitation of the environment, and that pre-industrial, even pre-agricultural, societies didn't need complicated legal systems to protect natural resources. But you can't make that argument today; the world is too densely populated, too plugged in to itself, for any society to rely on a natural inoculation against the popular fever of development, consumption and trade.

This isn't a question of ideology or class. The laws of civil society can be sapped by the state, by corporations, by the rich, and by the poor. As a matter of fact, all four are probably implicated in the Indonesian fires. In China, the state has succeeded in controlling political speech but failed at controlling emissions. Russia seems more feudal than civil. In both places the protection of the environment -- through a climate treaty, for example -- is going to require the development of civic institutions and a civil society to give them life.

Brazil is another test case. Are the institutions of that country capable of living up to their own rhetoric? "Let's make it clear," says the head of the national environmental agency, "Brazil will preserve more biodiversity than any other country. We have an international obligation to save the Amazon. But we also have an obligation to improve the lives of the 17 million people who live there and to make use of our comparative advantages." He and his colleagues, with help from the World Bank, have carefully and ingeniously drawn a map where expanded economic activities are clustered in "development corridors" that leave vast stretches of rainforest untouched. Can the plan be enforced? Will Brazilians enforce it on themselves? In the end, popular support -- or at least begrudging acceptance -- seems the most essential of all preconditions.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

If you need a refresher course -- or maybe an introductory primer -- on the ample issue of biodiversity, check out the websites recommended by experts Marian Farrior and Anita Daley in the High Fives section of Liberty Tree.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

10/27: Who Owns the National Forests?
10/24: Meanwhile, Back at the Infirmary...
10/23: "Heading Down the Right Path"
10/22: Markets and Medium-Greens
10/21: The Silver Republic and the People's Republic
10/20: Duck!
10/17: The Energy Non-Crisis
10/16: Drillbit Diplomacy
10/15: We Love You, Hiroshi Okuda
10/14: Good Deals at Showroom and Pump

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.