Earth Charter

The Product of Resistance and Activism

The Earth Charter can be located in a history of more than 3 decades of international environmental politics that began in Stockholm in 1972 with the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. Participants at this and other watershed international meetings struggled with how to respond to a finite world increasingly plagued with pollution and other forms of ecological degradation. The Stockholm conference also marked an incipient emphasis in environmental discourse on the relationship between the natural environment and the socioeconomic issues of poverty and “underdevelopment.” Since the 1970s, the international discourse on the environment has been closely linked to the discourse of global development, with special attention to the relationship between so-called developed and developing countries. In the 1980s, this relationship was emphasized in the phrase “sustainable development,” popularized by the World Commission on [Page 494]Environment and Development's 1987 book, Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report. In the 20th century, the climax of this growing momentum in international environmental politics might be found in the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, otherwise known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

The Rio Earth Summit was the largest gathering of heads of state in history. It was also a hotbed of political activism outside of the state-sanctioned spectacle. Some 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and 8,000 journalists attended the official events, and 17,000 people attended a parallel NGO forum. The theme of much of this political activism, which resulted in 46 separate nongovernmental treaties, was resistance to an intergovernmental process that failed to name some of the deeper causes for social injustice and environmental decay. One of these treaties, The People's Earth Declaration: A Proactive Agenda for the Future, proclaimed that the Earth Summit and the corresponding launch of Agenda 21 (the Agenda for the 21st Century), was a scripted government sham engaged in the fine tuning of an economic system that serves the short-term interests of the few at the expense of the many. The NGO forum repeatedly recognized that leadership for more fundamental change had fallen by default to the organizations and movements of civil society. Resistance to and critique of the shortcomings of intergovernmental conferences such as the Earth Summit, and reports such as Our Common Future, has been a constant theme in the 3-decade history of international environmental politics. This is succinctly evidenced in the title of The Ecologist's 1993 book, Whose Common Future?, which was a response the essentialisms and omissions of both Our Common Future and the Earth Summit. It is within this milieu of resistance, critique, and nongovernmental political activism that the Earth Charter emerged; indeed, an earlier draft was one of the 46 treaties discussed at the NGO forum in Rio in 1992.

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