Anger at the United States only strengthened the other summiteers’ sense of mission. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called on the 178 nations represented to divert defense funds to ecological preservation. “Henceforth nature lies within the hands of man,” he said. The first thing many of those hands did was sign on the dotted line. President Fernando Collor de Mello of Brazil, in his role as host, was the first to sign the climate-change convention that would require countries to control emissions of gases that heat up the planet. Because the pact sets no deadlines, the United States will sign it this week: Washington had insisted on a treaty with only the most nebulous of goals. Boutros-Ghali diplomatically offered the hope that the pact’s “very modesty will motivate governments and observers to maintain constructive pressure” to strengthen it.
He more than got his wish. Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands went to work, crafting a declaration that would have gotten the levels of greenhouse-gas emissions down to their 1990 levels by the year 2000. But with the official climate treaty well on its way toward the 50 signatures required to put it into effect, the Europeans’ move fizzled.
America squeezed by on that one but had even fewer allies on the biodiversity pact, which became the focus of the most heated controversy in Rio last week. Although climate change has gotten more attention and ink, the health of the planet probably depends more on biodiversity, the sum total of all species on the planet. The treaty would force signer nations to protect species within their borders: plants that serve as the planet’s lungs, bugs that eat oil and toxic chemicals and contain substances that treat cancer, microbes that support the soils that feed 5.4 billion people. While few delegates know a fungus from a mold, they do know the most important thing about biodiversity: the rich North needs it, the poor South has it. The North wants the South to develop in a way that protects species vital to life on earth (some 50 to 100 species become extinct every day). The South, however, often needs to chop its forests to fuel immediate development and feed a growing population. The South wants royalties and property rights in return for supplying pharmaceutical companies with the genetic treasures of their forests. So the pact would require a company that developed a drug from, say, snake venom-as Bristol-Myers Squibb did-to share profits with the nation that saved the snake by preserving its habitat. This demand derailed the treaty.
Paying nations to save their forests is one of the few ways to promote sustainable development, in which resources are extracted but not exhausted. It is also a surefire way to make business see red. In an internal memo, the executive director of the Council on Competitiveness, chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle, blasted the biodiversity treaty, partly because it would “facilitate access to genetic material for environmentally sound uses, [and] promote fair and equitable sharing of … benefits arising from the use of genetic materials.” Japan and Britain squirmed over the financing provisions, too, but seemed willing to sign, as did Germany, France, Canada and India. Britain’s environment secretary, David Maclean, told NEWSWEEK that “we’ll sign and leave the U.S. on its own.”
The mystery was why the United States didn’t engage in the time-honored practice of signing a treaty and working out the details later. “The specifics are a lot less important than the will to have an international understanding on the subject,” said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International. But when William Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency and chief of the U.S. delegation to Rio, tried to divorce the problematic financing mechanism from the rest of the pact late last week, the move backfired. Senior White House officials leaked Reilly’s cable to The New York Times, praised him for “trying to present an option” and then landed the knockout punch: “We’ll just have to give him more guidance.”
The White House had its own image-sprucing plan. Two days before the earth-fest began, Bush proposed increasing funds for international forest programs, from $1.35 billion to $2.7 billion, and upping the U.S. commitment from $150 million a year to $270 million. The logic was right: behaving them holds down the carbon dioxide that causes global warming. And if forests are saved, so are the species that inhabit them. Said a high-ranking administration official, “This is a better way to deal with biodiversity.” But no one in the administration could say exactly what the money would go for. Would it address so-called root causes of deforestation, such as the poverty that forces people to chop trees for fuel? Or would it buy more Jeeps for foresters to drive around Malaysian dear-cuts? Previous international forestry plans have left environmentalists skeptical; for example, the World Bank has funded “forestry” projects that contributed to deforestation.
Still, Bush might have won praise for the substance of his forestry plan had his style of presenting it been different. The current plan was slapped together in less than a week, according to members of the U.S. delegation. Bush sent letters about it to leaders of the G-7 the day before his announcement. “We had no indication this was coming,” said Britain’s David Maclean. Although a draft had been presented to European environmental ministers in mid-May, and the idea had been floating around since a G-7 meeting in 1990, the response was cool because of “a fear that the proposal was meant to compensate for very, very weak language in the [climate change] agreement,” said a German diplomat. The week before the summit, high-ranking State Department officials called some of their European counterparts, arguing that support for the forests proposal would help Bush politically. But so far no allies have signed on. Even countries that would get some of the new aid were miffed. “Initiatives done at the eleventh hour are suspect,” said Malaysia’s Ismail.
The last-minute mode was hardly surprising, given that the White House didn’t commit to Rio until last month. Reilly did not know he would head the delegation until a few days before the opening ceremonies. And the 47 members were not notified of their confirmation until last week, forcing some to scramble for the next flight to Rio. “This whole operation has been very clumsy,” admitted one U.S. delegate. Reilly gamely played the hand he was dealt. He shrugged off anti-American press coverage and corridor insults as a “character-building experience.” He played down the importance of the conference, calling it “a mistake to characterize this as a major moment of North-South commitments.” In private, he told colleagues that Germany, France and Britain were secretly happy that the United States had taken a stand against the biodiversity pact-and taken the hit.
It’s ironic that the United States has become the black knight of the green movement. America created an environmental protection agency as early as 1970, passed a tough clean air act 22 years ago and a tougher one in 1990, got lead out of gasoline and spent $800 billion over the last 10 years cleaning up its land, water and air. But Bush is walking a tightrope in Rio. By showing up, he appeases ecologically minded voters. By not signing anything binding, he mollifies big industry and the Republican right, which he desperately needs to hold in November. At a press conference last week, the president angrily vowed that he would “not sign a treaty that in my view throws too many Americans out of work. I refuse to accept that kind of criticism from … the extremes in the environmental movement.”
It is a mark of how far America has drifted from environmental leadership that those “extremes” include Britain and Germany. This week more than 100 heads of state or government will attend the last two days of the extravaganza. The climate-control and biodiversity treaties will get enough signatures to go into effect, and the would-be architect of the new world order will have had little to do with it. Bush had put his own twist on the adage “Think globally, act unilaterally.”
