Conference told changes necessary to preserve life sustaining planet

THE global industrial and economic system "has already overshot some of the Earth's vital ecological limits and could collapse by the middle of the next century", a conference in Dublin was told yesterday.

Mr Jack O'Sullivan, environmental consultant and prominent member of An Taisce, warned that the only way to avert this disaster was to "commit ourselves to sweeping systematic changes in the 1990s . .. so that succeeding generations can inherit a life sustaining planet".

Addressing an Earthwatch conference on sustainable development, he said: "This goal is not a luxury; it is an immediate necessity and an enormous challenge, brought about by increasing problems of environmental degradation and resource depletion worldwide."

Yet governments continued to discuss what to do about it "while the earth's life support systems unravel", Mr O'Sullivan complained. Few countries, apart from Denmark and the Netherlands, appeared to appreciate the pressing need to make the radical changes now required.

One of the most urgent tasks was a revision of the Maastricht Treaty to embody the principle of sustainable development, commonly defined as "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

He said Ireland should take the lead in "greening the Maastricht Treaty" to ensure that the creation of a sustainable society was one of the principal objectives of the treaty and should be integrated into all policy areas.

Through such measures as "eco taxes", the goal should be to develop a market economy which would "make acts of environmental destruction or degradation sufficiently expensive that they will be eliminated over time" and which would also reward environmentally sound practices.

In Ireland, a steep rise in the number of vehicles, an increase in energy consumption, changes in agricultural practices and continuing industrialisation had caused a 50 per cent increase in nitrogen oxide emissions since 1980.

Examples of unsustainable land use included afforestation on poor soils, mechanical harvesting of turf from peatlands, over reliance on tillage and over grazing by sheep on mountain soils, leading to widespread acidification, removal of vegetation and soil erosion.

Quoting a recent Environmental Protection Agency report on the state of the environment, he noted that some 38 per cent of Ireland's lakes, measured in terms of surface water, were affected by eutrophication (artificial enrichment), mainly as a result of over using fertilisers.

Mr O'Sullivan pointed out that agriculture produced some 30 million tonnes of waste annually - vastly more than the quantity of municipal waste.

Ms Sue Scott, an economist, with the ESRI, told the conference that there was a growing interest in using "eco taxes as an instrument of environmental policy. "It is by not using eco taxes that we have landed ourselves, with many of the environmental problems we have today.

Ms Scott cited one example of how taxation had been used to achieve environmental objectives - the eco tax on leaded petrol. "People have to pay an extra tax of 2.56 pence per litre, or 4.5 per cent. Since it was introduced, leaded petrol sales have sunk to 40 per cent of total sales."

Mr Richard Douthwaite, a noted critic of the current economic order, said a sustainable world would be one of "small communities which run their own affairs and which, rather than, trading across the globe, meet or make most of their requirements from their local resources".