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BRITAIN and the US were attacked this week over the seriousness of their
commitment to solving the world’s environmental problems after the withdrawal
of top officials from an international environment conference.

Thirty-two environmental and Third World groups have supported a letter
to the British environment secretary, Chris Patten, sent by the Council
for the Protection of Rural England. The letter objects to his decision
not to take part in a conference on sustainable development which opened
on Tuesday in Bergen, Norway.

Meanwhile in the US, William Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection
Agency, pulled out of the conference. Instead, the US sent John Knauss,
a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kristin
HilleValla, the Norwegian environment minister, said she ‘regretted’ the
Americans’ decision.

The conference is bringing together countries from both Western and
Eastern Europe, as well as Canada and the US, to discuss how they should
mount a joint response to the 1987 report by the UN World Commission on
Environment and Development, chaired by Norway’s then prime minister, Gro
Harlem Brundtland.

Patten was to have been one of the main speakers. He was reported on
Tuesday as saying that his decision to send his deputy, David Trippier,
in his place, was due to pressure of work in his department, which is currently
thought to be drawing up revisions to the controversial poll tax.

However, Fiona Reynolds of the CPRE, a nongovernmental delegate to the
Bergen meeting, said in the letter to Patten that his decision meant Britain
‘was not prepared to give the issue (of sustainable development) top priority,
and that once again environmental considerations are being subjugated to
other considerations’. It was, she said, ‘a clear signal that Britain’s
new green image was a false dawn’.

The meeting is expected to produce a joint statement on the current
state of the global environment, and future actions that are required to
protect it. A draft of the final declaration, put forward by the Norwegian
government, says that measures taken by governments must ‘anticipate, prevent
and attack the causes of environmental degradation even if final scientific
proof is lacking’. The draft adds that ‘doubt should not be used as a reason
for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation’.