Ecological Sustainability Is Now As Good As Dead. Europeans Are The Reason Why.

Unless somebody pulls the "do not resuscitate" sign from above its death bed and there is some miraculous last-minute intervention, the United Nations' historic 1987 Brundtland Commission on the Environment and Development is dead. It could take at least a year to complete the final autopsy report, but we already know that there were lethal and crippling toxins coursing through Brundtland's system for some time, and yesterday's European ban on Canadian seal products contained a fatal concentration of these same toxins.

Africa will notice how the vote went in the European Parliament. China will notice. The Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species will be the next victim. You just watch.

If "animal rights" eccentricites and other cultural peculiarities are allowed to trump universal principles that are supposed to govern sustainable wildlife management, then there is no reason to expect African countries to save all the lovely elephants that Europeans find so precious. If Brundtland means nothing, there's no reason not to liquidate the bothersome, crop-stomping elephant herds. The profits from all those spectacularly valuable tusks could be reinvested in things that earn higher rates of return than the annual tourist income derived from German hobbyist photographers.

And on and on it will go like this, and you won't have Brundtland or any other UN covenants to stop it from happening.

The Brundtland Commission was a historic victory in the global campaign to establish the universal, enforceable principle that harvests of renewable-resource surpluses should be sustainable. It rested on the necessary basis of a simple and straightforward idea, which is that humanity's interest in the integrity and health of natural resources should be held above and beyond narrow national economic, national or cultural concerns.

But ever since 1987, the international environmental movement has been looking the other way while Canada’s humane and eminently sustainable harp seal hunt has been villified and lied about by animal-rights activists, slowly but surely undermining everything that Brundtland stood for. And now it's come to this.

Gro Harlem Brundtland herself saw it coming years ago.

In 1993, the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission was overrruled by a decision forced on the IWC by its European member states. The IWC listed the North Atlantic's huge, healthy and growing minke whale populations as endangered, which was a lie. The IWC was already a circus, but what little credibility it had was in the work of its scientists. By 1993, its credibility was gone for good. But the damage didn't end there.

The toxin spread to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species when CITES scientists were then instructed to place unambiguously non-endangered cetacean species on CITES' red-alert Appendix I. Like the IWC, CITES was by then already enfeebled by weird European ideas about the ways "aboriginal" people are supposed to behave, and those same weird ideas now show up in full bloom in the European "exemption" on Inuit seal products. The Inuit quite understandably find the exemption insulting, and don't even want it, and these same toxins now threaten even the international General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade.

In 1997, Brundtland wrote: "We have to base resource management on science and knowledge, not on myths that some specifically designated animals are different and should not be hunted, regardless of the ecological justification for doing so. There is no alternative to the principle of sustainable development. This is necessary and logical. People haven't understood how important this is."

At the moment, it certainly looks like Prime Minister Stephen Harper hasn't understood how important this is, either. He is proceeding with free trade talks with the Europeans, despite the harm their idiocies have done not only to Brundtland's international sustainability principles, but also the harm they've done to our swilers. International Trade Minister Stockwell Day says he won't raise the seal ban in the trade talks, and that if push comes to shove, the toxins can always be stopped by some sort of appeal to the World Trade Organization.

This is dreaming. This is not good enough. Not by half.

Stand With The Swilers.