Soapbox:

Environmental judgement day

By El-Sayed Eleiwa

---

The alarms are sounding furiously and people are rushing to feverish meetings and conventions in order to come up with ways to drive the nations and governments of this world to take action against what has come to present the foremost threat to life on this planet: environmental deterioration.

The most zealous campaigners for confronting this peril are ordinary people who have leagued together in various NGOs and other civil society organisations in order to spur governments and international agencies on in the fight against all forms of environmental pollution. If only governments and their officials felt even a fraction of the people's ardour and sense of urgency!

International conferences have failed to produce the binding resolutions needed to compel industrial nations and the US, above all, to take the necessary measures to reduce emissions and halt global warming. As a result, the conferences from Kyoto to Bali in December 2007 were engulfed in an air of frustration and gloom; in part, too, because participants refused to address civil wars, ethnic strife and regional conflicts that are also a direct cause of environmental impoverishment, not to mention suffering and wretched living standards for millions of people.

In order to forestall what some experts have termed environmental judgement day, action must be taken on two fronts. In the short run, all the major causes of environmental disequilibrium must be brought to a halt. In the long run, efforts must be poured into an internationally funded drive for the search for clean sources of energy and a comprehensive strategy for energy production and consumption. Towards the latter end, members of various academic disciplines and lay persons should put their heads together to consider alternative modes of life to rampant capitalism. Surely there must be ways to realise human happiness through lower levels of consumption and a more intimate friendship with our planet.

This week's soapbox speaker is a professor of political science at Helwan University.