Global Roundup

Environmental Talk, Talk, Talk

United Nations' Under-Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development, Nitin Desai, told the assembly, "To a certain extent, after Rio, other issues took over. When we focus only on environmental problems, we won't get very far unless we move backward and focus on agricultural policy, energy policy, transport policy-all the economic policies that affect the environment."

John Gummer, Britain's Secretary of the Environment, at a press conference, echoing this heretic, holistic view, maintained that "we are accepting as a world community that there are to be world rules. Until this conference, the oceans were untouched by the Rio process."

"World rules"? But who decides, enacts, enforces and polices such "rules" except a world government representative of the world's people who either enjoy or are distressed by the world's environment? No delegate took the cue.

The conference was not without its success stories, principally from hundreds of municipalities that have discovered that environmental problems are local as well as global and grassroots and urban neighborhoods can help cope with industrial waste through recycling and utilizing mass transport systems. The explosion of car ownership in some parts of the world with its increase of carbon monoxide was cited by several speakers as a major factor in global warming. No mention during the conference was made of environmental pollution by the armies of the world, a glaring blind spot.

The U.K. Indicted

The European Court of Human Rights has found Britain guilty of human rights violations 41 times, the results of 80 cases heard against Britain in the court's 36-year history, more than against any other country except for Italy.

While Great Britain signed the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, embracing speech, privacy, the press, religion, sexuality, corporal punishment and the rights of suspects, immigrants, prisoners and the mentally ill, the human rights court is regularly ridiculed by Conservative politicians and newspapers as an "unrepresentative and unaccountable body" whose rulings "veer crankily from the tragic to the farcical, giving comfort to terrorists, drug barons, gypsy squatters and transsexuals" (Daily Mail).

Contrarily, the Economist wrote in October that "A British bill of rights would make redress easier and cheaper and thus restore at least some popular respect for Britain's own sense of justice."

Human rights lawyers, members of the judiciary and even members of the Labor Party propose the radical idea that the European human rights convention be incorporated into British law-as every other member of the Council of Europe, except Ireland, has already done.

When are nation-states going to recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the forerunner of world law?

The Mikado on a Slippery Slope

"I have never seen the authority or prestige of bureaucrats so heavily damaged by a series of accidents or troubles," said Takeshi Asaki, a professor of political science at Tokyo University.

"They are in a different world from us ordinary people," said Nobuko Serizawa, a graduate student in economics. "The system is so murky, and they should be criticized for their inability to respond to the people."

Bureaucrats-of-the-world, please take note!

Profits with Principles

In her best-selling book, Body and Soul, she writes, "People talk of the Body Shop as a multinational company because we trade in thirty-eight countries. I prefer to describe us as global. The magic of that word is that it is responsible, it is multicultural, it has an anthropological and spiritual tone. Global companies have values; multinationals just trade, make money and gobble up other companies."

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International,Save The Whales, The Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments, Cultural Survival, Survival International and dozens of human rights issues have been sponsored and aided financially by Roddick's chiefly cosmetic business. Two major international campaigns are launched every year, one on a human rights issue, one on the environment.

Roddick started the business with a borrowed $7,000. "When I opened the first Body Shop in 1976," she writes, "I knew nothing about business; my sole object was simply to survive, to earn enough to feed my kids." The magic formula was hard work, a passion to offer an honest product for an honest price and overall, the desire to do good for the world in general.

"I believe that young people of my daughters' age," Roddick writes, "the children of the hippies, are going to come forward with a moral code, with a passion, a zest for the moment, and prove to be the true planetary citizens, the ones who will keep this planet alive. My generation has certainly not done much to keep it going."