Lions and Tigers and BRICS

While Britain discusses the benefits of taking its poorest and angriest people and throwing them - and their families - out on the streets, international news suggests that our housing problems are going to be upstaged by the end of the century, by which time we will need 'at least another two planets' to 'sustain consumption patterns.'

Two items in the news that have caught my attention this week have been:

1. Reports of the growth of illegal trading in ivory and rhino horns, fuelled by China's economic boom.
2. The Environment Investigation Agency's press release on the 11th of August, accusing China of opening a loophole in its ban on trading tiger pelts.

In case anyone's wondering, this isn't my annual bash-China weekend (I align mine with Morrissey's): these stories relate to the failure of laws protecting endangered animals, and in both cases the market is straining against regulations. As a booming country, it would not be surprising if China had bowed to pressure from commercial tiger-breeders to relax the trading ban, although it has not admitted to doing so. This lack of transparency and discomfort with the world's reception of its environmental and wildlife-related policies is, again, unsurprising.

Both stories fit in nicely with my general sense of helplessness about the future. Summits trying to safeguard the world from the environmental consequences of the development of a new economic A-team (the big players of which will be Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa: BRICS) have shown a tendency to flop. The worst example is the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, a watered-down, ineffectual agreement drafted by the US, China, India, Brazil and SA that is not legally binding but merely to be 'taken note of'. The next big thing on the agenda is the Rio Earth Summit, 2012, but it's hard to be optimistic about its success in forcing developed and developing countries to behave themselves in a big way. The Earth Summit website says 'The current paradigm cannot continue,' but nobody's found a good way to put the brakes on: if a country wants to shirk on or break its promises, we just cannot stop them. I'm blaming capitalism for all this. You can blame something else if you want to.

Today's cheerful message (by the way, it's my birthday) seems to be that tigers are going extinct, and so are rhinos, and so is the earth. C'est la vie. At least we have two new planets to think about. How about keeping things peaceful by giving one to the rich and one to the poor, so that the second ends up like a big teeming council house but the first one is comfortable? And another planet, perhaps, for people who refuse to believe that any of this is happening at all.