Fast Forward to 2013: High Time

Eight years ago Jonathon Porritt passed through a wormhole in time and fetched up in a parallel universe. There he saw the world’s political leaders look global calamity in the face - and wake up to sustainable development in the nick of time.

Obituaries do sometimes put things in perspective. Take Gro Harlem Brundtland, who died last month aged 74. Her name might not have meant much to many people nowadays, so the notices duly recalled her political legacy as Norway’s first woman prime minister - but it’s as chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, and author of the eponymous Brundtland report, that non-Norwegians have most call to remember her.

It was this report (actually published under the title Our Common Future) that gave the concept of sustainable development its first major outing. That was in 1987 - more than 25 years ago. I just hope she was regularly raising a glass in the last few years to the way the concept suddenly moved out of the margins of political irrelevance, to the very heartland of contemporary global capitalism.

But why does it always have to be traumatic events that move us on, rather than the sheer genius of the human spirit, with all its theoretical capacity for foresight, empathy and courage? It’s nearly six years now since the UK and the US were devastated by unparalleled natural disasters. Ours was at least ‘manageable’; the overwhelming of the Thames Barrier on three separate occasions in November 2007, coupled with the worst flooding down the whole of the east coast since 1953, resulted in little loss of life, notwithstanding the catastrophic economic damage.

But the hurricane death toll of over 30,000 in Florida just a few weeks later (10 times more people than died in the horror of the Twin Towers terrorist attack in September 2001) made it the worst ‘natural’ disaster in US history. ‘Natural’ disaster; those ironic speech marks say it all, of course. Although there was much more to John McCain’s triumphant presidential campaign in 2008 (he was, after all, the first candidate ever to have changed parties to secure the presidential nomination), his slogan of ‘Security through Sustainability’ shattered the appalling ignorance, arrogance and isolationism that had characterised so much of American politics in the preceding decade.

It was hard not to feel a serious thrill watching President McCain signing Kyoto II (with its array of seriously impressive Protocols to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% before 2050) last year. How appropriate, too, that McCain should have signed Kyoto II alongside Premier Wan Lizhong - since it was actually the collapse of the Chinese economy in 2009 that had the biggest impact of all. After 20 years of breakneck growth, not even the combined power of the Chinese Communist Party and the most successful capitalist economy in the world could rescue China from its natural limits - on water, land, energy, clean air, forests, fisheries and so on. It was only then that the pernicious influence of 50 years of growth-bound economic orthodoxy could be set forever aside.

And only then that the ideological power of sustainable development started to come properly into its own - with its unapologetic emphasis on ecological limits, on global interdependence, on the politics of enough, on justice between generations as well as within generations. Could we have reached that point earlier? Without a doubt.

But a whole generation of politicians betrayed their own insights and instincts about the need for radical change. Chairing the Sustainable Development Commission in those days, I felt surrounded on all sides, by Labour politicians playing fast and loose with sustainable development - or Tories ignoring it altogether - because they were so hopelessly in thrall to the God of Unsustainable Growth. Some still are, of course. But we took some comfort in the gradual mainstreaming of sustainable development that got seriously under way a decade or so ago - and kept banging on about it being the only ‘big idea’ that any of them needed to bother with.

And many do now rue the fact that they didn’t really take in the Treasury’s earliest recognition (back in 1998, if you can believe that!) that “sustainable economic growth means growth that is both stable and environmentally sustainable”. How much less painful it could all have been - as Gro Harlem Brundtland first pointed out back in 1987.

Jonathon Porritt is programme director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.

26 January 2005

Jonathon Porritt