Environment summit honors several cities
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Environment Writer
The Mayor's Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit last night was slated to honor several mayors of cities in Asia and the Pacific who made commitments at the first summit in 1999 — and kept them. One was Mayor Kim Tae-hwan of South Korea's Cheju City.
Kim established a 150-member Green Vision Council, a citizens panel that met more than 100 times to plan for improved environmental conditions in Cheju. Among the resulting projects is a restoration of the banks for the channelized river that flows through the city.
Conference participant Charles Wiggins, a mediator and law professor from Portland and San Diego, noted that, increasingly, Asian nations are involving their citizens in environmental planning and decision-making. From what he heard at the conference, it's working.
Wiggins said he was encouraged by the increasing respect being given to the opinions of traditionally powerless and poor people.
All the successful examples of environmental problem-solving at the summit involved citizen participation, Wiggins said. "Environmental and poverty issues are just not things that Third World countries have had the luxury of thinking about. Now it's not only happening; it's vital."
Broad-ranging cooperation between citizens and governments, and flexible, adaptive use of technology were recurring themes in international meetings throughout the environmental summit, which wraps up today at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
As villages, cities and nations around the world deal with stinking rivers, full landfills, crowding, slums and poverty, they are overhauling systems of decision-making to make them more effective.
Speakers addressed links between the poor and the powerful, between nations, between regions.
"It's all about understanding all the connections," said Morgan Williams, a New Zealander who described himself as an independent environmental watchdog.
Physicist Amory Lovins, keynote speaker and director for research of the Rocky Mountain Institute, said groundbreaking solutions can be found around the world. Examples: a super-efficient bus system in Curtiba, Brazil; Asia's use of fast-growing bamboo for low-cost and environmentally benign construction.
Businesses around the world are concluding that waste — which causes pollution — is also bad business. A factory that eliminates all products except those that produce revenue is better for everyone, Lovins said.
He calls it biomimicry, a system like nature, in which there's closed loops, no waste and no toxicity.
"You design out products that don't generate a profit. We eliminate waste by design, and conventional environmental regulation becomes an anachronism," he said.
Williams said he came to the conference "looking for what's going on around the Pacific on the really tough sustainable development issues.
"Governments and city administrations can't solve all the problems. A lot of ideas come from the community, and you find that the community expectations are often quite different from the empowered officials," he said.
Maurice Strong, a veteran United Nations official who advises Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said decisions on difficult measures have to be supported by the people as well as the leaders.
