Killing an idea: While worthies and woollies, cynics and charlatans
prepare for Johannesburg and the World
Summit on Sustainable Development at the end of the month, Jeremy Seabrook,
with all the despair of Cassandra on a bad day, says that we can't have it all,
that growth can't be reconciled with conservation.
The idea of sustainable development has become part of the 'treacherous
lexicon of developmentalism - empowerment, participation, poverty-abatement,
inclusiveness, and so on: ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to
privilege.
'Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear; what originally
meant adjusting the industrial technosphere so that it should not destroy the
planet has now come to indicate the regenerative power of the economy, no matter
how it may degrade the "environment".' [Guardian].
