Every one of the 13,000 participants, it seems, has a new idea for cleaning up the planet. At one booth, bespectacled professor Ruben Metcalf boils an egg in his cardboard-and aluminum “solar-box cooker”-ideal for developing nations where families spend so much time scavenging for firewood. A few booths down, Victor Sygen explains how his patented waste-water filter system uses the duckweed plant to gobble up sewage. At one end of the park, not far from where Garry Davis, a ponytailed 70-year-old, is selling “World Passports” for his ideal, nationless planet, nine people seem to be caught in a trance. Orlando Peixoto rushes up to a perplexed visitor to explain that they are practicing the ancient Japanese art of Mahikari. “We transmit the purest light in the universe with our hands, focusing on one part of your head,” he says. What’s the ecological angle? “We grow plants this way, too,” he says. “No fertilizer needed.”
The fertilizer of conventions–cash-is already in short supply. Last week countersummit organizers called a press conference to announce they were out of money and unable to pay the 86 contractors who provided sound, lights, food, security and trash collection. The forum owes more than $2 million, they said-then they passed a hat for contributions. It wasn’t the first time the forum had faced extinction: two weeks ago the Brazilian government bailed it out with a $1 million gift.
Bad financial karma back home haunts venerable environmental groups whose work over the last 20 years paved the way for the Earth Summit. The Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace all cut staff and programs in the last year, victims of global recession and “green fatigue.” The shortage of capital has forced some groups to rely increasingly on the largesse of the erstwhile enemy-government and industry. “They hand down stone tablets about what they will do to limit their damage to the environment,” laments Clifton Curtis, a legal adviser for Greenpeace. “But there’s no real participation or accountability.”
He should try the crowd across the bay. In the chandeliered salon in the Copacabana Palace, folks in dresses and suits listen to former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairwoman Dixy Lee Ray argue that global warming and the greenhouse effect are nonsense. The same point is explained in a pamphlet comparing the ruthless ambitions of environmentalists to those of Genghis Khan and Hitler. “The Earth Summit,” says a blurb from Citizen Outlook, “is their boldest attempt yet to create a global Green Empire.” Come on, guys, lighten up. Sounds like you could use some Mahikari in the park.
