Abstract

Booby Traps at Rio + 10

The article presents the author's opinion on the failure of the 2002 world summit on sustainable development held in Johannesburg, South Africa. Aside from putting the blame on U.S. President George W. Bush, who abandoned the environmental regulations that came out of the Rio conference in 1992, the summit is failing because the entire process was booby-trapped from the start. When Canadian diplomat Maurice Strong was chair to the Rio summit in 1992, his vision allowed for more participation from civil society, and it raised unprecedented amounts of corporate funds for the summit. However, corporations would only accept ecologically sustainable practices voluntarily. The author said that the summit is not going to save the world, but merely offers an exaggerated mirror of it.