By Christy Rodgers for Climate Connections
18 June 2012 – Rio de Janeiro. The Peoples’ Summit opened this weekend with what is likely to be the highest level UN visit all week: by Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program (UNEP). Steiner is perhaps the single person most responsible for the “green economy” model being touted as the best path to global sustainability. He was invited to speak – or rather listen – to the concerns of a broad array of social movement organizations that have been highly critical of this market-dependent strategy and what it means for the world’s people and ecosystems.
The mainstream US press, when it pays any attention at all to the official UN “Earth Summit,” seems to fret mostly about bureaucracy and obstructionism by poor countries. The concerns of hundreds, if not thousands of organizations and networks of peasant farmers, trade union workers, corporate watchdogs, indigenous peoples, and many other groups worldwide are quite different. They see the main problem is that the UN, like many member states, appears to have been functionally captured by the private sector. In the lead-up to the summit, major corporations positioning themselves to benefit from the market mechanisms being promoted have launched a greenwashing onslaught beyond anything the movement groups have seen before—which is considerable.
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