Articles by Geoff Dabelko

Two ships in the night

Despite being joined at the hip, the environment and development communities don't talk much. These Siamese twins -- separated at birth -- speak different languages.

While each community respects the other's gig, they don't play well together -- no one wants to be second fiddle. Some even see the environment and development agendas as opposing forces.

Efforts on the ground can bear that out. When conservationists set up protected areas without considering the people living in them, they seem more interested in "lovable huggables" than struggling locals.

On the other side, people-centered development often treats environmental issues as luxuries that only the idle Northern rich can afford. But the "develop now and worry later" approach ignores how much our health, food, economy, and livelihoods are dependent on a healthy environment and well-managed natural resources.

Despite the bad news, some people get it. While a few projects may be partnerships of convenience, others truly integrate environment and development (I won't go so far as to utter the hopeful words "sustainable development").

“The good, the bad, and the rusty”

Ever wonder what happened to the vibrant environmental protest movements that helped bring down the communist governments of Eastern Europe (and did you even know that green NGOs were critical to the fall of the Iron Curtain)?

For the history lesson, read Jane Dawson's book Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine by Duke University Press.  

For tracking today's environmental movements and green journalism in Central and Eastern Europe, check out the Regional Environment Center for Central and Eastern Europe in Szentendre, Hungary, just outside Budapest.  The REC is the real node for green civil society in the region and their websites are terrific entry points for figuring out the what's what and who's who.  Their regional offices in each country mean they have their collective finger on the pulse and their practical training workshops of all types mean they are doers and not armchair types.  

Sign up for their new-look Green Horizon for aesthetically pleasing, bit-size updates and stories like "The Good, the Bad, and the Rusty," which I so gladly borrowed for the title of this posting.

MDGs: You make the call

Now is your chance to have a say at the U.N.

Jeff Sachs' Millennium Project has produced a draft report of its Global Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals and it is open for public comment until Nov. 1.  U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. Development Programme chief Mark Mallach Brown asked Sachs to honcho ten task forces with 250 experts to formulate a game plan for achieving the eight ambitious MDGs by 2015.  The final report is to be delivered to the SG in January.

Although the MDGs have gained little political traction in Washington, many outside the United States are utilizing the education, health, environment, poverty, hunger, and governance targets to set agendas, leverage resources, and in the case of some NGOs, hold national governments accountable for the targets they signed up for at the 2000 Millennium Summit.  Not many are optimistic about meeting goals like halving the proportion of people without access to clean water by 2015.  But we lose nothing by trying, so bring it on.

Geoff Dabelko

It was fitting that recognition of environment's links to conflict and security came out of Norway last week when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai of Kenya for her decades-long work through her Green Belt Movement.  We often count on the Norwegians, and the Nordics in general, to get it right early and for the rest of us to catch up.

In fact it was nearly twenty years ago when Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Prime Minister of Norway, chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development, a group of international bigwigs that authored the influential volume Our Common Future.  We remember that 1987 book that set the agenda for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio for its widely accepted definition of sustainable development (meeting the needs of current generations without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own). But often forgotten is the chapter where the Brundtland Commission explicitly traced the destructive links between environment, conflict, and security.

So it was doubly disappointing to read in The New York Times the disparaging quotes from officials of both right and left-leaning parties in Norway in the wake of the announcement.