By Oakland Ross
A Swedish diplomat by the name of Bernt Carlsson was musing about the parlous state of this fragile blue orb.
At the time, Carlsson was the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, and he happened to find himself one morning in a rather gloomy lounge at the international airport in the Angolan capital of Luanda, a largely gutted city, where he was chatting with a couple of foreign journalists.
The Cold War was just then ending, the Berlin Wall was being torn down, and Carlsson opined that the driving force behind those seismic geopolitical changes was a new awareness that the old world order had to change, if only because our frail and disputatious species faced an even more implacable enemy on an even deadlier battleground.
The foe, of course, was humankind itself. And the battleground was the natural environment, which was - and is - being despoiled at an enormous rate.
World leaders, said Carlsson, were finally recognizing that it was time to put ideological differences aside in order to salvage the planet and preserve our place upon it.
Maybe the urbane, soft-spoken Swede was right or maybe he was wrong. In either case, it's a parlous world, and a fragile existence.
Not long after that brief conversation in an African airport, Carlsson was among the passengers aboard Pan American Airlines Flight 103 when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988 - the target of Libyan terrorists, with the loss of all on board.
Now, 17 years later, Scotland, Africa and the imperilled state of the global environment are again in the news, as the leaders of the world's eight most powerful industrial nations prepare to gather for their annual summit.
This year, Britain will host the gathering, which will take place July 6-8 in the Scottish resort town of Gleneagles, outside Edinburgh.
These meetings are visited upon the planet every year, and they often have a largely ritualistic air - eight men and their aides dining extravagantly behind closed doors, to no great purpose, while a grab bag of protest groups play cat and mouse with heavily armed riot police somewhere outside, as tear gas fumes swirl all around.
But this year's G-8 summit - bringing together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States - promises to be different.
Maybe only a little bit different or maybe a lot.
"Maybe 'watershed' is not the right word," says Roy Culpeper, president of the North-South Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank on relations between the world's rich and its poor. "But a lot of positive things could happen."
Thank British Prime Minister Tony Blair for that. He has strived mightily during long months to make this year's edition of the annual get-together something more than a chance for a few middle-aged white men to sit down, sip single-malt whiskey, smooch cigars, and discuss exchange rates.
At the top of the agenda next month are two themes that ought to resonate deeply with everyone on this planet, whether rich, poor or in-between.
When they gather in Scotland next month, the leaders of the G-8 will be talking about global climate change and they will be talking about Africa.
And they will not be alone. Also invited this time around are the leaders of Brazil, China, India and South Africa.
Meanwhile, among those unlikely to be invited to the summit, expectations of the event are predictably mixed.
"We know it's a talk shop," says John Stremlau, head of the department of international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. "Let's not get our hopes too high."
That said, lofty hopes are probably inevitable, especially given the fanfare, hoopla and spectacle that already have attached themselves to this year's gathering, to a degree that easily outstrips any that has gone before.
A panoply of international pop stars - many of them male, white and middle-aged - have organized a constellation of rock concerts in various parts of the world to accompany, or compete with, the deliberations at Gleneagles. The concerts will highlight the urgency of the issues at stake, particularly the plight of sub-Saharan Africa, a region beset by poverty, hunger and the grim spectre of AIDS.
"I think something will come out of Gleneagles," says Culpeper. "God knows, Tony Blair has been breaking both legs trying to get something out of the Americans."
Possibly the most urgent item on the agenda has to do with AIDS and its predations in much of Africa, where the disease remains a wholesale killer.
"There is absolutely no precedent for what is happening there," says Stephen Lewis, the Canadian who serves as U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa, "and we are nowhere near containing it."
In North America, thanks to the development of anti-retroviral medication, AIDS has been reduced from a death sentence to a chronic but manageable condition.
In Africa, however, where the incurable malady has already claimed a toll of victims equivalent to more than half the population of Canada, AIDS is still on the rampage and continues to devour individual lives, destroy families, and cripple whole communities with an ease and persistence that seem little short of diabolical.
In time, in its African incarnation, AIDS may cause entire countries to collapse.
"It's a dire situation," says Culpeper. "When you have the core of the labour force wiped out, then who's producing the goods?"
The question is rhetorical, because the answer - if there is one - is already buried under the good red African earth, and still the funerals continue at an alarming rate.
Even without AIDS, this continent would have its misfortunes and its woes, and yet Africa has made many impressive strides in its three or four decades of political independence, mainly in the area of education - training men and women to master the myriad technical and managerial skills required to run modern states.
Now many of these very people are among the dying or the dead, with no one to replace them. Two generations of post-colonial accomplishment must now be written off, along with the names of the deceased.
Meanwhile, the virus continues to infect, spread and kill.
True, tens of thousands of Africans are at last receiving anti-retroviral treatment, thanks to combined local and international efforts and to dramatic reductions in the drugs' once unaffordable price tags, but many millions of desperate men, women, children remain caught between the tropical heat and the pharmaceutical cold, where death is just one opportunistic infection away.
Large-scale ARV treatment programs in Africa began very late, and they have been slow to expand.
"Clearly, we have not been 'in time,'" says Mark Dybul, deputy global AIDS co-ordinator at the U.S. State Department. "It has been a somewhat slow ramp-up."
Others use stronger language.
"It is a doomsday scenario," says Lewis. "It's desolation. It's out of control. If we haven't made a breakthrough (on AIDS treatment) by the end of 2006, if we can't see it by that time, some countries will be struggling for survival."
Millions of Africans already are.
It is not AIDS alone that is devastating many parts of this region, but a lethal brew of AIDS, other diseases, hunger, and an inability of overburdened and cash-strapped governments to respond to the crisis.
"The combination of food shortages and AIDS is what's killing everyone," says Lewis.
Two weeks ago, while meeting in London, the G-8 foreign ministers hammered together a precedent-setting agreement to forgive approximately $40 billion (U.S.) in debt owed to multilateral lending institutions by 15 highly indebted developing countries, most of them in Africa.
Not everyone praises the agreement. For example, Nicky Oppenheimer, a South African and chairman of De Beers, speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, quickly branded the deal "a handout," when what Africa needs is "a hand up," especially through improved terms of trade with the industrialized world.
Improved terms of trade would certainly be welcome, and they will be discussed at Gleneagles, along with dramatic increases in foreign-aid spending by donor nations, but most observers are lauding the debt-relief arrangement as a good start along the way to easing Africa's overwhelming financial troubles.
But it is only a start.
"It's time for the donors to put the money where the mouths are, " says Stremlau. "We are not talking about handouts."
We are talking about people dying, not only tomorrow or next month but today.
In fact, a scant 24 hours before the G-8 ministers were putting their gold-nibbed pens to the new pact on debt relief in London, a senior official of the World Food Program was in his office in Johannesburg, typing out a desperate appeal for international help, as the ranks of the hungry in six southern Africa countries continue to escalate dramatically.
Blame AIDS. Blame another poor harvest. Both play a role, and the result is stark: there is not nearly enough food available to keep millions of people alive, much less healthy.
"Without new commitments of either cash or in-kind food resources, WFP will be unable to meet the food needs of several million highly vulnerable southern Africans," wrote Mike Sackett, the WFP's Johannesburg regional director, in a letter dated June 10. "Lives are unquestionably at stake."
This is by no means his first such plea.
"The WFP makes these appeals," says Lewis, "and they always fall short."
And so people go hungry, and they die, for it is indeed a parlous world.
In part, you could blame the weather.
This year in southern Africa, the rains were spotty, the cornfields baked in the scorching sun and the cobs died on wilting stalks in what was the fifth consecutive year of low rainfall in the region. Granted, five years are not a long time in the grand scheme, but some here are beginning to wonder whether the term "drought" properly describes what is happening in the southern reaches of Africa and perhaps elsewhere on the continent.
"This year's rains were close to last year's, but well below 30 years ago," says Abdoulaye Balde, the World Food Program country representative in Swaziland on South Africa's eastern border. "Maybe we have a different cycle of rain than 30 years ago. We keep saying 'drought,' but is it? Or are these the new norms?"
Balde does not actually use the term "climate change," but it's what he means.
For his part, Stuart Piketh, of the Climatology Action Group in Johannesburg, is reluctant to make too much of this five-year succession of parched weather.
"Drought is not uncommon to the southern African region," he says. "I'd be skeptical of saying the drought we are seeing is a climate-change signal."
This is not to say, when he gazes out at the southern African high veld and beyond, that Piketh does not observe any climate-change signals at all. In fact, he sees plenty, and they mostly take the form of "extreme weather events" - events that are becoming increasingly common, increasingly destructive and increasingly worrisome.
After all, it is nowhere written that humankind must endure forever. More than 70,000 years ago, the species was very nearly wiped out in the volcanic winter that followed a fiery eruption in Sumatra. DNA evidence suggests that we are all descended from the few thousand human survivors of that catastrophe.
Endure forever? How? In two billion years or so, the sun will explode and burn the planet Earth to a memory that no one will survive to recall.
Two years ago, writing in the February 2003 issue of Harper's magazine, American essayist Tom Bissell observed that global warming or climate change "is well under way." He labelled those who believe otherwise as "the meteorological equivalent of creationists."
In some parts of the world, of course, creationists continue to abound. Washington, D.C., is such a place, and the United States is one of two industrialized powers that have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases. Australia is the other.
The failure of the George W. Bush administration in Washington even to treat the matter seriously is a source of profound frustration to scientists, environmentalists and no doubt many political leaders in other countries, possibly including the prime minister of a certain scepter'd isle off the west coast of Europe.
This past February, Moscow finally joined the Kyoto accord, but the whole world knows that the initiative has no hope of achieving its goals without U.S. participation.
“The U.S.A. is the biggest emitter by far," says Neil Bird, a Canadian climate-change expert currently working in Austria.
Even countries that do subscribe to Kyoto are in many cases failing to meet their obligations under the accord. According to Bird, such countries include Canada, as well as Austria, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Germany is slightly over target as well.
Meanwhile, the world's two most populous countries, China and India, are both industrializing at a frantic pace, which is good news for anti-poverty advocates. It means the planet will almost certainly reach the U.N.'s goal of cutting the ranks of the world's poor in half by 2015.
On the other hand, the rapid economic ascents being engineered by Beijing and Delhi also spell grim tidings for the global campaign to limit greenhouse emissions.
Piketh, for one, is not optimistic that much will be accomplished at Gleneagles on climate change, not as long as Washington refuses even to recognize that a genuine problem exists.
"I just don't think the issue driving the agenda at the G-8 is science," he says. "A lot of these protocols are based on political will, not scientific knowledge. I don't think at this point that America is making its decisions on scientific facts."
As with AIDS and so many other scourges, it is the poor countries of this planet that will suffer most keenly if the world's leaders fail to make genuine progress on greenhouse gases - and quickly.
As an example of an extreme weather event, Piketh singles out the unprecedented rainfall and floods that inundated the southern African republic of Mozambique five years ago, causing widespread death and suffering. The country is still struggling to recover from the effects of that meteorological spasm.
"The developing world is not geared to deal with that," he says. "They don't have the reserve resources to fix things when they go wrong."
Nor do they have the political clout to make things go right.
The G-8 leaders who will gather at Gleneagles early next month may indeed possess that sort of clout.
The question is, will they use it?
