[fse-esf] Environment in the draft Charter of Principles

[isf at centrum.cz]

Dear friends,

at the EPA in Frankfurt, I have promised to redraft the chapter "Environment" which was tabled there in English (while the rest of the draft Charter of  Principles for another Europe was e-mailed in French). In fact, environment is not enough, it should be about the principles of sustainable production and onsumption - as we are social-environmental movements.
I apologize myself for it took so long a time but now. here it is ready for your comments as a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/etd. present. I tried to keep in its wording the interests of East and West, North and South.

I wish you all not only Merry X-mas (and whatsoever feasts) and Happy New Year but also another Europe as we all fight for it.

Greetings from Prague,

Mirek Prokes, Friends of Nature International
                          phone +420.603.438822

Environment, Sustainable Production and Consumption

•	The destruction of an important public formative space and centrality’s loss of formative and cultural institutions are determining a tendency towards extreme individualism.
•	The important role of mass media and consumers in the creation of cultural models reduces school and university’s role.
•	Today’s technologies would be able to cover the basic needs of the whole humankind. Instead, financial capital groups create artificial needs (by subliminal ads) in countries with buying powers, thus exploiting human and natural resources everywhere. The Third world is the most vulnerable, more than 15.000 children die daily of hunger and curable diseases.
•	The irreversible anthropogenic climate change is the most acute danger for the Earth, as well as is a global social catastrophe. 

These dangers must be avoided by all means: be it by policies, legislation or economy. 


Vision of a new lifestyle

There is an absolute necessity for Europe to change towards a new lifestyle of sustainable production and consumption. Saving materials and energy, radical change from using fossil fuels to renewable ones, decoupling the economic growth from the growth of transport, keeping chemical and biological safety and halting the loss of biodiversity is no choice but a must. 
The vital interests of people and their health must be put above the interests of corporations and financial groups arguing again and again with the “loss of competitiveness” – which in fact only means a further expanding of their enormous profits. European nations should not compete by social, economical and environmental dumping but work together for the change towards sustainability. The main goals of the European governments must be the quality of life and environment: we have to pass the next generation nature and society not in a worse state in which we inherited it from our ancestors.
The first steps towards this end are: internalization of “external costs”, the environmental tax reform, including the Tobin tax, and introducing sets of indicators to measure sustainability instead of today’s single indicator, gross national product (GDP) which says nothing about the quality of life. 
The new sets have to be composed of economic, environmental and social indicators (the latter with double weight).
The commons, including water resources, must not be subjected to patents, to exploitation or privatization nor must they become object to commercial treaties. The public service management of the commons should be directed by public policies subject to direct participation in order to guarantee the right to access for everyone. This goes also for earth: agricultural activities have to be preserved as they have direct impact on the planet. Especially with biological and local production, we can avoid the food dependency on transnational corporations. Healthy food in a sufficient quantity is a human right. Fair trade systems should contribute towards this. 
Also new forms of mobility should save energy by supporting public transport over individual one, preferring railroads and waterways over road and air transport as well as avoiding unnecessary transport of goods, eg. by introducing tolls. Cities should be brought back to the human scale to facilitate alternative transport as a combination of walking and cycling with the public transit.

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