In the early 2000’s I was taken up with an investigation into the relationship between a person’s worldview and that person’s proclivity to support resource development. It started with an interest in the nature of the mot de jour, “sustainability”. What does sustainability mean? Why did the word suddenly show up in the public square? Who coined the term and then tied it to environmentalism? I was surprised to find an unusual connection between peer reviewed sustainability papers and a declaration that we live in a post-Westphalian world. Papers describing sustainability in a mining project would suddenly assert that “… because we live in a post Westphalian world”. From the context of the assertion, it was clear that the authors knew next to nothing about the Peace of Westphalia and the Thirty Years War which precipitated the relevant treaties. Such non sequiturs and silly irrelevancies in the published literature are hardly a surprise but modern mining is long way from the events in a small town in 17th century Germany.
“Hmmm,” I thought, “that’s weird.”
A few years later, I was invited to present a paper on sustainability at a relevant conference and, because it ticked a box for my PhD efforts, I agreed. By this time, I had read enough of the published literature to have decided that the concept of “sustainability” was mostly a greenwash fraud and I was close enough to retirement that I was willing to throw some fire into the literature.
The conference was coincident with widely reported events in a remote First Nations reserve in Canada. The band was desperately short of housing because much of the current housing stock had been allowed to deteriorate. I made the point that First Nations correctly celebrate their many thousands of years of successful existence prior to contact with Europeans and during that time they lived in tents or lodges made of natural materials. Surely this was the very definition of “sustainable”. If the housing of the band for thousands of years was sustainable and if the current housing was unsustainable then why not go back to the tents and lodges? Why pressure the government for housing which everyone said was unsustainable? My argument generated a few laughs and more importantly did not generate the angry rejoinders that I feared. The point is that the sharpened weapon known as sustainability in general and the UN sustainability goals in particular is malicious nonsense.
But how did it happen? Here is my take on things.
In the 1970’s the modern environmental movement was building in strength and support. In the 1980’s it became clear that the movement was open to infiltration by disappointed Marxists and could become a significant cash generator for unethical capitalists. The movement caught the attention of the United Nations and in 1982, then Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar appointed former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland to head the World Commission on Environment and Development, known more colloquially as the Brundtland Commission. From 1983 until it issued its report in 1987, the commission travelled the world to define sustainability from various perspectives and to identify a path forward to make the world more “sustainable”. She identified up to three “sustainability pillars” and others have since concluded that there are at least nine. But her report, Our Common Future, never answered a basic question,
“If mankind has been around for tens of thousands of years and has successfully managed the world’s resources isn’t sustainable development an oxymoron?”
Apparently disaster was right around the corner unless loud squawking was done. Ms. Brundtland’s commission filled that gap and defined sustainability as,
“… development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Without impugning her good intentions, this sounds simple and obvious enough to be unassailable by anyone but the most churlish. But whatever the intentions, the definition and the report wrapped around it led to several (perhaps) unintended consequences.
In the first place, the report allowed businesses to jump on board, declare themselves to be all in for sustainability (whatever that is) and paint themselves in varying shades of green. Perhaps the most outrageous example of this was when British Petroleum (BP) rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum”. And then almost immediately spilled prodigious amounts of oil into the Caribbean Sea from the blowout of the Maconda well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig. It cost the lives of eleven workers, billions of dollars in reparations and fines, a very red corporate face, and a wasted investment in inopportune public relations. It also enriched the Louisiana shrimp industry because the shrimp loved to eat the decomposing oil.
Clearly the oil spill was unsustainable. But was it? Natural oil seeps into the Caribbean are many times larger than the oil leaking from the Maconda well. And they continue to leak today. I am not arguing for more oil spills. Such events cost human lives and waste financial resources. But it can hardly be argued that they are unsustainable. And that is my point. Sustainability is a canard.
Worse than its happy, clappy definition of sustainability, Our Common Future defined and advocated for the creation of a much-expanded civil society. And that has caused and continues to cause unending mischief to this day.
I addressed the definition of “civil society” at the aforementioned conference by asking,
“If you folks are civil society and I am from the development industry, what does that make me? Uncivil society?”
Again, it drew a laugh, but the implication is not funny. The use of this term has defined the battleground on which the modern environmental globalists are fighting. Strategic positioning is given up at great risk.
So why is an expansion in civil society such a problem? Simply because the rapid expansion of the not-for-profit sector has created a black hole for all kinds of dark money investment that is driven by goals that are opaque at best and obscured at worst.
When I was residing at my friend’s hotel in Peru, I watched employees of OXFAM indoctrinate and train Peruvians to block resource developments. Along with accomplices, for example, their success in shutting down the Tambogrande project was remarkable. Less remarkable was the fact that they did not hang around to deal with the explosion of social problems that resulted from the predictable arrival of criminal groups who mined illegally and terrorized the local population.
Try to find this type of activity listed on the OXFAM International website. Did all of those who donated to the organization realize that some of their donation was going towards aggressive, anti-development activities which cost, in the case of Tambogrande, at least one human life? It seems unlikely. From the perspective of today’s citizens of Tambogrande, does sustainability mean “efforts to ruin my chance at an improved life so that criminals can invade my community and rape my daughters”? It sounds harsh but we must learn to see what we see.
Are all civil society not-for-profits guilty of such devastation? No, and I don’t argue that OXFAM is a uniformly terrible organization. It undoubtedly does a lot of good in the world, but I reiterate, the outcomes of Ms. Brundtland’s report are not controlled and untinctured blessings. Big money perverts the best of intentions.
Today, civil society organizations increasingly take on the nature of government proxies to do what governments would otherwise not be allowed to do. The most egregious example of this is the flood of money from the US government to not-for-profits which organize and manage the home country solicitation of illegal immigrants into the United States. They manage and operate the many “way stations” enroute to the US and then are responsible for the distribution and housing of the illegal immigrants throughout the United States.
Religious organizations as well as secular not-for-profits are making billions of dollars each year to do what the government cannot do. More shocking is the role of these organizations in the “care and comfort” of the unaccompanied minors who arrive in the United States. An estimated 85,000 minors are unaccounted for but there is reliable reporting that many of these underaged minors are housed in brothels and sweat shops throughout the US. If you doubt me then type “role of ngos in immigrant invasion of US” into your search engine.
Is this what Ms. Brundtland had in mind? That civil society organizations should take dark money from governments and others to work alongside criminal cartels to ruin young lives? I very much doubt it, but this is what her report has spawned. How sustainable is that?
Let me finish by going back to the Peace of Westphalia. Following thirty years of fruitless death and destruction that took an estimated 8 million lives across northern Europe, the deep thinkers of the countries involved thought it might be a good idea to establish some ground rules for reasonable behaviour between nation states.
“This is the border of my country and if you cross it with an army then you have declared war and war we shall have.”
Stuff like that.
If our world is now post-Westphalian, then, by definition, borders no longer exist. Remember when Justin Trudeau described Canada as the first post-nationalist country? This explains why Mr. Trudeau is so sanguine about Russia crossing into Ukraine with an army. There are no borders, remember? Oh right… Mr. Trudeau, like so many others, is a hypocrite.
But what is the relationship between borders (or their lack) and resource developments in the developing world? Why are researchers in the mining industry including statements about the Westphalian state of the world in their published work? Could dark money and quid pro quos be involved? Do such statements improve the probability of getting their work published? I can only speculate about motives but this I know; it started over 30 years ago with Ms. Brundtland and “her little report” to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.
But is it sustainable?
What isn’t sustainable is this substack if you don’t get a free subscription and pass it along to your friends! Just kidding. I am supposed to be promoting my work…
Good work Murray - Right On Brother! Nice talking with you yesterday. How did you like the "Uranium Fever" folk song? Things have sure changed a lot since the 1950's and 60"s - No?
Perhaps you should write a blog note about that. Nuclear power is becoming popular again - some enviros realize (the thinking ones at least) - that if we are going to quit using fossil fuels - then if we want electricity on the scale we have now - nuclear power plants are the only answer.
They are proposing modular nuclear plants. The size of the ones we have on submarines. Have you heard about the project that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are trying to bring on line in SW Wyoming?
They want to put in multiple small modular plants at the site of the old Jim Bridger coal fired plant. They will just hook up the modular plants to the existing power line infrastructure. Then just turn it on!
Pretty wild - No? Well - that is enough for this afternoon. Hear from you soon - Randy