This trend has shaped the history of international environmental law. It is no coincidence that sustainable development and neoliberalism emerged around the same time and became increasingly intertwined after the World Conference on Environment and Development in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED); a publication described at the time as a veiled attempt to “appease the [growth-friendly] economic establishment” (Nebbia 2012, p. 101). Consensus was reached at the WCED because the report`s focus on development appeased developing countries, while the focus on economic growth eased Western concerns (Borowy 2013). Without this compromise, the concept would not have emerged in the Brundtland formulation. The report formed the basis of an international consensus precisely because it removed the contradiction between the ideal of endless extractive growth, on the one hand, and the real and sobering limits of the Earth system, on the other; and it offered the illusion that key development models could easily be optimized to achieve social justice for all, everywhere (Lafferty 1996). The Brundtland Report made clear that “a new era of economic growth is now needed – powerful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable growth” (WCED 1987, p. xii). In retrospect, the Brundtland Commission`s mandate was to create a neoliberal blueprint for green capitalism (Higgs 2014). This has inevitably perpetuated the inescapable logic that “capitalist societies, according to their own intrinsic laws, can only survive through continued growth in the production and consumption of goods, which occurs at the cost of increasing extraction and contamination of the planet`s natural resources” (Nebbia 2012, p.
101). UNDP. N/A Human Development Index (HDI). hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi. Retrieved 15 October 2021. One of the main concerns is that calls for “better reconstruction”Footnote 6, when the pandemic is under control, will be drowned out by the desire to return to “normal”, as if what was considered “normal” before the pandemic was not deeply abnormal. If the return to normalcy means business as usual, the pandemic will be a missed opportunity rather than a generational turning point. To the extent that the pandemic shows one of the consequences of socio-ecological destruction and human intervention in the biological worlds of life, it signals the urgent need for a different path for the pursuit of the well-being of the entire living order. While environmental law must play an important role in pursuing such a radically different path, the history of sustainable development within and outside environmental law suggests that this principle cannot be part of such a radically different path. Development, the linchpin around which the concept of sustainable development is articulated, emerged after the Second World to integrate the former Third World into the world economy under unequal conditions (Escobar 2011). As Hettne writes, development is “one of the oldest and most powerful Western ideas” (1995, p.
29). Since humans are part of ecosystems, their actions have a direct and indirect impact on the environment, and changes in ecosystems consequently alter the conditions of human well-being.13xMillennium Ecosystem Assessment, “Ecosystems and Human Well-Being” (2005), available at: www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.aspx.pdf (last visited 26 August 2013), at v-vi. The right to a clean environment is inherently a collective interest, as environmental health affects people outside the individual sphere and other borders.
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