Lanzarote: el papel de la crisis - Fundación César Manrique

A SWING TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY?
WHAT COUNTS IS PARTICIPATION
Enric Tello
At the meeting held in Malmö, Sweden, in June 2000, about a hundred ministers for
environment made a seldom-heard statement to the world: they acknowledged that they
were failing in their efforts to put a brake on the deterioration of the environment. “There
is an alarming gap between commitments and action,” they said. “The main challenges visà-vis
nature, as pinpointed at the Rio de Janeiro Summit Meeting of 1992, have become
globalised and aggravated by the unsustainable consumerist habits of the West.” It was not
the first time that sustainable rhetoric, elevated anywhere and everywhere to the realm of
the politically correct, was held up in public against the absence of real solutions to suit the
purpose. This had already happened at the Club of Rome in 1991, when reference was made
to the culture of sustainability and the new role of non-governmental organisations as
players in the first world revolution. What was new about Malmö was that this should be
openly admitted by the very ministers whose job it is to remedy the degradation of the
natural systems by which we are sustained.
It was a declaration of helplessness. To rub salt into the wound, some people might describe
it as incompetence. The ministers’ honesty, however, is to be appreciated. To my mind, this
is precisely the starting point we need to start shifting sustainable development from the
limbo of well-intended rhetoric to the hard, conflictive, interesting reality of daily life. It is
not within the reach of a ministry, or even of all the governments of the world together, to
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