Abstract
The year 1994 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods Conference. The ideals of Bretton Woods were, above all, worldwide freedom and peace. The World Bank was founded as a means to these ends. But for nearly half a century it has often been a prime accomplice in a quiet war against the diversity of human cultures and our planet’s biological inheritance, the social and biological underpinnings of humankind’s future. It was not a conscious war, at least for the first decades, and it is important to emphasize the word “accomplice”—since the Bank was often only a helpmate for the modernizing, initially well-intentioned megalomania of a thousand government bureaucracies around the world. But it became, more and more, an agent itself, establishing new bureaucracies and setting the agenda for many more.
We know now that social situations, social behavior, social problems are much too complex to admit a simple “right answer.” If they can be solved at all, they have several solutions—and none is quite right. … We thus find ourselves at the end of two centuries of Western history.1
—Peter Drucker
Virtually everywhere in the world, pockets of resistance against modernity’s misdeeds are growing.2
—Jean Chesneaux
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Notes
- 1.
The women literally encircled trees with their bodies, embracing them in an ultimate gesture of protection and care—thus “Chipko,” which comes form the Hindi verb meaning “to hug.” The Chipko protests spread through the Himalayas and to forested hill regions in the South of India such as the Western Ghats. As a result, in 1981 India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a fifteen-year ban on tree felling in the Garwahl Himalayas, the region where the Chipko protests originated. But the movement continued to spread; Ghandian activist Sunderlal Bahuguna led a 5,000-kilometer foot-march from Kashmir to Bhutan to spread the Chipko message between 1981 and 1983. In Bahuguna’s words, “Ecology is permanent economy” (Bahuguna, cited in Paul Ekins, A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 143). (See Guha, The Unquiet Woods [see. endnote 11], especially pp. 152–84.)
- 2.
They were fighting the renewal of a forestry concession to a large paper and logging enterprise, Fabricas de Papel Tuxtepec (fapatux). They launched their own newspaper and declared in its first edition, “We will no longer permit our natural resources to be wasted, since they are the patrimony of our children. The forest resources should be in the hands of our communities” (David Barton Bray, “The Struggle for the Forest: Conservation and Development in the Sierra Juarez,” Grassroots Development, vol. 15, no. 3 [1991], 15).
- 3.
A critical need for the long term success of common property systems is the legal securing of land tenure or usufruct rights for local communities. See Stanley, “Demystifying the Tragedy of the Commons” (see endnote 13), 35.
- 4.
It is equally important to bear in mind the numerous examples of environmentally and economically maladaptive human societies, a good many of them “traditional” or “primitive.” (See Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony [New York: Free Press, 1992].) The point is not that a technologically advanced society is necessarily maladaptive, and a rural or traditional community necessarily in balance with its environment (both can be either adaptive or maladaptive), but that the consequences of maladaption in a single, global culture may entail disaster on a scale unprecedented in human history.
- 5.
In the words of Indian activist Vandana Shiva, “The global must bend to the local, since the local exists within nature, while the ‘global’ exists only in offices of the World Bank and imf and the headquarters of multinational corporations. The local is everywhere. The ecological space of global ecology is the integration of all locals” (Vandana Shiva, “The Greening of Global Reach,” The Ecologist, vol. 22, no. 6 (November/December 1992],258-59).
- 6.
The term in this context is Peter Drucker’s, from the book with the same title.
- 7.
The following lament of the former head of the New York public school system reads as an elaborate metaphor for the World Bank. Replace chancellor with president, schools and classrooms with programs and projects, district superintendents with country directors and task managers.
The chancellor is chief executive of a byzantine central bureaucracy. … Questions of quality and individuality are lost in the quagmire. The central bureaucracy cannot think creatively. It adapts very slowly and tries to control and manage rather than lead and support. At the same time the chancellor has no direct authority over elementary and junior high schools. District superintendents do not report to the chancellor and the chancellor has few tools available to change what happens in individual schools and classrooms. … Minor changes like increasing the size of the central board … or creating more local districts will not accomplish real reform. We need to learn from corporate restructuring efforts that less is more and that monolithic entities are not responsive to customers or successful in the marketplace. … We need to decentralize. (Anthony J. Alvarado, “No One Person Can Save New York City’s Schools,” New York Times, 20 February 1993, 19.)
- 8.
Thomas Hines has coined the phrase “subtle progress” to characterize this approach. “Subtlety would depend on immense technological sophistication, but that would probably be the easy part. The tough, but crucial task would be to take the vast machinery of modern society off automatic pilot” (Hines, Facing Tomorrow [see endnote 34], 240; see also pp. 207–41).
- 9.
In Indonesia, a national ipm program supported by bilateral aid agencies and fao has reduced pesticide use 50 percent between 1986 and 1992, while raising rice production 14 percent. The Ministry of Agriculture’s $130-million annual insecticide subsidy was eliminated (Peter Kenmore, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Manila, personal communication, 23 February 1993). Only in 1993 did the Bank begin to support the program.
- 10.
Even in the case of the Indonesian ipm program described in the previous footnote the Bank has been reluctant to abandon support for its traditional clientele in the Indonesian agriculture ministry, who have been incapable of delivering ipm training and consultation with the farmers they are supposed to serve.
- 11.
Although she condemned the Bank’s mismanagement of the project, she endorsed continued funding, arguing that the recently elected Indian government should be given one more chance. The fate of the nearly one-quarter of a million people the dam and canal system would displace did not seem to weigh very heavily in her calculations.
- 12.
The phrase was first used in this context by Lori Udall of the Environmental Defense Fund.
- 13.
The Bank argues that it needs a substantial bond portfolio “to ensure flexibility in its [the ibrd’s 1 borrowing decisions should borrowing be adversely affected by temporary conditions in the capital markets” (World Bank, Annual Report 1993 [see endnote 69], 67). But half or a third Of $18.5 billion for these purposes would be more than sufficient.
- 14.
The Bank issued a new energy efficiency policy paper in early 1993, in which it claimed that it would “be more selective in lending to energy-supply enterprises” and that “approaches for addressing demand-side management (dsm) and end-use energy intermediation issues will be identified, supported, and given high-level in-country visibility” (World Bank, Energy Efficiency and Conservation in the Developing World [Washington, D. C.: World Bank, January 1993], 12). But the policy paper lacks specific commitments for actually increasing lending for end-use efficiency-which, according to the Bank’s 1991 energy sector review will account for only 1 percent of Bank energy lending for the period 1992 to 1995. In mid-1993, the Bank approved a $400-million loan to begin a 3,750-megawatt expansion of coal-fired power production in the Singrauli region of India (see discussion in Chapter 2)—with. no consideration of end-use efficiency and “demand-side management” alternatives. Germany, the United States, and Belgium refused to vote in favor of the loan on environmental grounds.
- 15.
In May 1993, representatives from more than sixty participating countries met in Beijing and discussed contributing over $2 billion to replenish the gef. The Chinese had originally proposed the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square as the date for the meeting, but this was too much to stomach for some Western donors and the date was changed. U.S. proposals for greater public participation and access to information were poorly received by other countries, including several European nations and Japan. It appears that the gef will continue its links to the World Bank, though probably as a marc autonomous body.
- 16.
We might recall Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson’s observation that “human beings … have become a hundred times more numerous than any other land animal of comparable size in the history of life. By every conceivable measure, humanity is ecologically abnormal. Our species appropriates between 20 and 40 percent of the solar energy captured in organic materials by land plants. There is no way that we can draw upon the resources of the planet to such a degree without drastically reducing the state of most other species” (Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992], 272).
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© 2013 Bruce Rich
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Rich, B. (2013). What on Earth Is to Be Done?. In: Mortgaging the Earth. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-515-1_10
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