TWS decided to stay outside the process, and Greenpeace withdrew in protest at the government’s position on resource security in the foresty industry. ACF and WWF agreed to participate in all but the forestry working groups, and received substantial federal funding to facilitate this.

"We went into it with our eyes open, knowing it would involve compromises to get a result, but it gave us the money to do a lot of policy research we needed to do anyway," recalls Karen Alexander, who managed the joint environment groups' ESD Liaison Unit at the time. "I don’t know if I’m exaggerating, but people were excited about it. We had a real sense that something could be achieved."

According to Alexander and many other participants in the federal ESD process, some of the outcomes from the working groups were "quite ground-breaking". "But then it all got bureaucratised and we withdrew," she recalls. "And Keating dumped ESD. I’ve never heard him so bored as when he talked about the environment. I felt such sadness when I looked at the policy statements in the Compendium of ESD Recommendations that accompanied the 1992 National Strategy for ESD and the National Greenhouse Response Strategy, and compared the words with reality."

Disappointment at the gap between rhetoric and reality, between policy and practice, is felt almost universally amongst environmentalists. "Basically we’ve thrown away the last ten years, and if anything we’ve gone backwards," says energy consultant Alan Pears, who represented the environment groups in the Energy Use Working Group. "For example, we’ve now acknowledged that introduction of electricity markets has increased Greenhouse gas emissions by 6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year above the predictions, yet the restructuring of the electricity industry was the centrepiece of the 1992 National Greenhouse Response Strategy! At that time supporters of electricity reform claimed it was the most powerful Greenhouse strategy we could apply!"

Michael Buxton, now head of RMIT University’s Environment and Planning Program, was on the Steering Committee for the 1992 Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment (IGAE), which committed the State governments

to the Commonwealth’s ESD Strategy. He also looks back at the last decade with sadness, regret, even anger at the lost opportunities. "Very little is being done to tackle the fundamental causes of environmental degradation, such as water allocation and use, land cultivation and grazing methods, coastal and urban development, and land clearance," he insists. "Institutional responses have been a monumental failure!" He cites the Murray Darling Commission as "the perfect demonstration" of this. "It’s a farce," he says. "All the wrong decisions have been made and now we have to claw back water use in a reducing supply." Indeed some commentators now believe the Murray Darling system is so seriously degraded that little can be done to save it.

Michael Krockenberger, ACF’s Strategies Director, agrees that institutional responses to environmental degradation have so far failed to change society's handling of the environment in any meaningful way. "There are, however, some positive signs," he concedes. "One of the major differences now is that an increasing number of businesses are becoming enlightened, especially with Greenhouse and salinity issues, because they see they are potential beneficiaries from environmental action. We’re getting beyond the "greenwash" phase in corporate culture. We’re somewhere between PR and a recognition that real action is required!"

But the absence of leadership from government remains deeply disappointing. "While there are some individuals who know what’s going on, no single government has a real sense of the economic and structural changes that are required," Krockenberger says.

As a signatory to both Agenda 21 (the very gentle blueprint for sustainable development that emerged from the Earth Summit) and the accompanying biodiversity and climate change conventions, the Australian Government has binding obligations to the international community. As a signatory, it must report annually to the UN Commission for Sustainable Development on its progress towards ecological sustainability.

So far, the reports have been little more than a greenwash, but how long can we get away with this? Will the international community accept Australia’s recalcitrance at the next Earth Summit in 2002, or at the next Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in November this year? And how will Professor Bruce Thom, Chair of the Australian State of the Environment Report Committee, and his team assess our progress towards ecological sustainability when they report to the nation next year? What will their much-hyped "sustainability indicators" tell us?

Felicity Wishart, who worked with the ESD Liaison Unit all those years back and is now the coordinator of the Queensland Conservation Council, accepts that the future is not looking good. "There will probably be major biodiversity losses, runaway Greenhouse, and other irreversible pollution problems with nuclear waste and chlorine-based toxins that are here to stay, and all the stuff we don’t yet know about", she says. "But we humans have the foresight, intelligence, and knowledge to come up with ways of living that can protect the environment and give us all fulfilling lives, and if we don’t keep striving for that then we do ourselves incredible disservice. For me, that’s the most deciding challenge in life, to be able to find the solutions to these incredibly complex problems."

And the challenge is profound.

Merrill Findlay 
is a Melbourne-based writer, 
and author of the literary fiction "Republic of Women" (UQP, 1999). 
She is currently working in the Environment and Planning Program at RMIT University. 
Visit her website at www.merrillfindlay.com/