Rescue Mission Planet Earth

Cultural ecology

Ecological resilience is defined as the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem could withstand without it slipping into a new irreversible state.  As nations strive to improve economic welfare, human consumption patterns are triggering unprecedented disturbances in ecosystem services.  These disturbances are now exceeding Earth’s renewal capacity.  About a quarter of the Earth’s land area is now highly degraded.  Rivers and lakes are drying up, groundwater aquifers are getting depleted, oceans are becoming acidified, and more than a third of global fisheries are overfished . Over a quarter of the world’s reef-building corals have been listed as threatened and biodiversity is declining at rates not seen since the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, which saw the end of the age of dinosaurs.

In fact, the current environmental crisis emerged as an issue of cultural five decades ago when it was highlighted by Barry Commoner in his book ‘The Politics of Energy’, published in 1979.   Commoner called for a national U.S. policy for the transition to a culture based on renewable energy .  He wanted Americans to use solar rather than conventional power, trains rather than automobiles, and methane, rather than gasoline.  These proposals ran up against powerful vested interests and basic American habits and preferences.

The Road to Rio

Nevertheless, Commoner’s views on the relationship between culture and ecology were endorsed by the international community in the 1987 Brundtland Commission’s report entitled ‘Our Common Future’. Five years later the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) brought 179 heads of governments together in Rio de Janeiro. This 1992 world summit created a plan, called Agenda 21,  to implement the agreements of Rio and guide business and government policies into the 21st century. It identifies population, habits of consumption and technology as the primary cultural driving forces of uncontrolled environmental change.  It proposes what needs to be done to reduce wasteful and inefficient patterns of human consumption, while carefully managing ecological resources to ensure their availability for future generations.  This is known as the principle of sustainable development.  The UK was one of the first nations to endorse Agenda 21, publishing the UK Sustainable Development Strategy in January 1994.

Rescue Mission: Planet Earth.

On Earth Day 1996 an international group of young people, funded by the United Nations, published ‘Rescue Mission Planet Earth’ (also Known As ‘The Children’s Agenda 21’, a user friendly version of the UNCED plan, enlivened with personal poems and art.

This WebQuest celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the work of the Rescue Mission team, who were united in the aim of galvanising young people throughout the world to take action and help maintain the resources of our planet for the well-being of future generations.  The educational goal of this WebQuest is for individuals and groups to produce their own updated Rescue Missions, act upon them locally and communicate their ideas and achievements using the Internet.  

Living sustainably

Agenda 21 is an optional strategy for organisations and individuals to take up the challenges of living sustainably. The common objective is to reconcile different and sometimes opposing values and goals toward what ecosystems can provide and what people desire from them; i.e. it says there has to be a new balance between ecosystems and culture.  This requires coordination of mutual action to achieve multiple values, simultaneously and even synergistically. However, as real-world experience since 1992 has shown, achieving agreement on sustainability values, goals, and actions is often difficult and painful work.  

Criticism of the Agenda

Diverse stakeholder values are forced to the surface, compared and contrasted, criticized and debated. Sometimes individual stakeholders find the Rio strategy too difficult or too threatening to their own values and either reject the process entirely to pursue their own narrow goals or critique it ideologically, without engaging in the hard work of negotiation and compromise that is needed to accommodate scientific realities. Most of the attacks on Agenda 21 come from libertarians and other political conservatives who do not like being told how to behave for the good of the planet.   Instead of negotiating over those policies and trying to make them more subject to free-market principles, they have taken the approach of blocking them by trying to undermine the science.  The most extreme version of denialism is to claim that scientists, supported by the United Nations, are engaged in a worldwide hoax to fool the public so that governments can gain greater control over people’s lives.  

Imagine the future

Critique is nonetheless a vital part of the conscious evolution of sustainable development.  Living sustainably is a concept that, in the end, represents diverse local through global efforts to imagine and enact a positive vision of a future in which basic human needs are met without destroying, or irrevocably degrading, the  ecosystem services on which we all depend.

Ancillary WebQuests

Equal Rights

www.zunal.com//webquest.php?w=314824 

Envisage the Future

www.zunal.com//webquest.php?w=314651