If policy truly reflected what we now know about the state of the planet (in terms of climate change, water resources, disappearing habitats, deforestation, overfishing, growing numbers of environmental refugees, and so on), the political declarations such as those coming out of the World Summit would be very different from the anaemic and duplicitous efforts to date. What we have is ideology-based policy, with science deployed in a partisan and self-interested way to justify political expedience.

When George Bush was thrashing around to justify ideological abhorrence for the Kyoto protocol, he not only impugned the integrity of world-class scientists involved in the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but he totally ignored the judgement of the US Academy of Sciences (to whom he had turned in the hope of getting something more to his liking), which emphatically endorsed the findings of the panel.

Closer to home, despite overwhelming evidence that mass-burn incinerators are hugely problematic for all sorts of environmental reasons, government ministers have steadfastly argued that they represent the "least worst solution" to the fact that we're rapidly running out of dumping grounds for our waste. It really cannot be claimed that the available scientific evidence has played much part in this crucial debate.

Such examples are legion, globally and nationally. The underlying problem is not the science itself, but the fact that the science is telling politicians something they are desperate not to hear: that it's all up with our current model of gung-ho globalisation. The price we're all having to pay for today's economic progress (which, incidentally, advances the interests of a small minority of humankind) is the systematic liquidation of the natural capital on which we all depend.

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