Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 254

The 'Environmental Crisis'
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) - the so-called 'Earth Summit' - held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 1
drew the world's attention to the vexed question of sustainable development.
A myriad of proposals, collectively presented within the wide ranging Agenda
21, were tabled to reconcile the often conflicting interests of governments,
industries and conservationists whilst, more specifically, the intellectual dis-
course on sustainable development - initiated some two decades earlier -
received a much needed shot in the arm. However, the tangible sense of
optimism amongst the leaders of world's wealthiest nations at the end of the
conference drew media attention away from the vocal environmentalist lobby.
Had its voice been heard, the world would have learned that, during the
12-day summit, between 600 and 900 species of plants and animals had
become extinct, some 487,200 acres of arable land had turned to desert and
well over one million acres of tropical rainforest had been destroyed. Moreover,
during the same period, the world's population grew by 3.3 million. Thus,
from the environmentalist perspective, there was little ground for optimism.
The message that humanity was facing imminent social and environ-
mental disaster and human tragedy was, by 1992, well rehearsed. Indeed,
a similar sense of pessimism was evident at the earlier United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), held in Stockholm in
1972, and was articulated in the ensuing publication Only One Earth (Ward
& Dubos, 1972). By the early 1970s, increasing rates of deforestation,
declining fish stocks, rapidly diminishing supplies of agricultural land and
the general reduction of common property resources had all contributed to
the environmentalists' concern for the earth's capacity to support prevail-
ing rates of 'development'.
Attracting particular concern was the susceptibility of the earth to
increasing levels of pollution. During the 1970s, radioactive fallout from
nuclear tests was seen to be just one of many pollutants which 'ignored'
national boundaries, whilst the acidification of Scandinavian lakes and
forests and the presence of DDT in Antarctic and Arctic fish brought home
the need for development to embrace an understanding of global ecological
'limits'. In short, it became recognised that the 'effluence of affluence' did
not respect national borders, that one country's activities could have global
consequences. Reid (1995: 3), following Boulding's (1992) description of
'spaceship earth', makes the point that, at that time, the first satellite imag-
ery was reinforcing a perception of the world as a 'precarious and rather
vulnerable entity'. Furthermore, by the end of the 1970s, James Lovelock's
Gaia hypothesis, which saw the planet as a single homoeostatic organic
entity, added to concerns over the potential for human activity to upset the
earth's delicate ecological equilibrium (see Lovelock, 1979).