The event was packed. Tara had the inspiration of including a blank check in the package of material left on every seat, thereby removing the excuse “I didn't bring a check with me.” The girls had all prepared talks to go along with a slide show about the environment. They said they wanted to go to Rio to be a conscience to adults, and they asked the audience to help them. It was a powerful presentation because the girls spoke from their hearts, and their very innocence and naïveté touched a chord. During the break, an older man leaped onto the stage, held up five checks for $200 each, and announced he was so inspired that he would donate them if others would match them. People began to fill in the blank checks. Dad anted up $200.
The girls ended up with over $4,700 from that one event, which they had hoped might raise $1,000. Raffi Cavoukian, the well-known children's troubadour, had moved to Vancouver; he had become very interested in environmental issues and wrote a check for another $4,000. Somehow a Toronto philanthropist who supports women's issues heard about the girls and sent another check for $4,000.
In all, the girls had raised more than $13,000, which Tara and I had to match — enough money to send five ECO members (including, of course, Severn and Sarika) and three parents (Tara, me, and Patricia Hernandez, the Spanish-speaking mother of one of the other girls) to Rio.
Although I was now planning to go to the summit, I remained skeptical about what the meeting itself would achieve. In December 1991, I interviewed conference coordinator Maurice Strong for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki and expressed my skepticism. He was irrepressibly optimistic, saying the conference couldn't fail because the future of the planet was at stake. When I pressed him, he responded, “If it does fail, it must not be allowed to be a quiet failure and recede unnoticed from memory.”
The Earth Summit was heralded by Carlo Ripa di Meana, environment commissioner of the European Union, as a chance “to make decisions, obtain precise and concrete commitments to counteract tendencies that are endangering life on the planet.” But in order to ensure U.S. president George Bush's participation, the proposed Treaty on Climate was watered down from a target of a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to merely “stabilizing 1990 levels of emissions by 2000.” This caused Ripa di Meana to boycott the meeting because, he said, “by opting for hypocrisy, we will not just fail to save the Earth, but we will fail you.” So things were not looking good.
Once it was known that Tara and I were going to Rio, we were asked to become involved in some of the deliberations leading up to the event. For years, hundreds of groups and thousands of people had been attending Prepcom (Preparatory Committee) meetings in different countries to draft documents to be presented to and signed by leaders at Rio. The signings would be merely formalities and photo ops, because all the wording would have been worked out beforehand.
To persuade all countries to sign on, the wording in the documents had to be fine-tuned to avoid offending signatories — oops, can't talk about overpopulation to the developing countries, don't mention family planning lest it scare off the Catholic countries, mustn't raise the issue of hyperconsumption in the industrialized countries. Documents on forests, water, air, and so on were drafted, passed through many hands, edited and reedited, rewritten many times.
By the time I was called in to one of the meetings in Vancouver to look at a forestry document, people were spending a great deal of time arguing over whether there should be a hyphen here or a comma there or whether it should be “the” or “a.” Maybe I'm being unfair, because I went to only one meeting and abandoned further attendance as a waste of my time. I know lots of people who invested huge amounts of energy in the process, and thank goodness there were people willing to do it.
For me, the important thing was not in all of the picky details but in an overarching vision that would establish the real bottom line: that we are biological beings, completely dependent for our good health and very survival on the health of the biosphere. At the David Suzuki Foundation, we felt one contribution we could make at Rio would be such a statement or vision, so I began to draft a declaration that would express an understanding of our place in the natural world. As I began to work on it with Tara, she suggested it should be like the American Declaration of Independence, a powerful document that would touch people's hearts. “How about calling it the Declaration of Interdependence?” she suggested, and it was instantly obvious that was what we were drafting.
Tara and I went back and forth with our efforts and then recruited Raffi, our Haida friend Guujaaw, and the Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, to contribute. At one point I kept writing the cumbersome sentence, “We are made up of the air we breathe, we are inflated by water and created by earth through the food we consume.” That was what I wanted to express, but I wanted to do it in a way that was simple and inspiring. As I struggled with the lines, I suddenly cut through it all and wrote, “We are the earth.”
That was the first time I really understood the depth of what I had learned from Guujaaw and other aboriginal people. I knew we incorporate air, water, and earth into our bodies, but simply declaring that's what we are cut through all the boundaries. Now I understood that there is no line or border that separates us from the rest of the world.
There is no boundary — we are the earth and are created by the four sacred elements — earth, air, fire, and water. It follows that whatever we do to the planet Earth, we do directly to ourselves. I had been framing the “environmental” problem improperly — I thought we had to modify our interaction with our surroundings, regulating how much and what we remove from the environment and how much and what waste and toxic material we put back into it. Now I knew that wasn't the right perspective, because if we viewed ourselves as separate from our surroundings, we could always find ways to rationalize our activity (“too expensive to change,” “it's only a minuscule amount,” “that's the way we've always done it,” “it interferes with our competitiveness,” et cetera). But if we are the air, the water, the soil, the sunlight, then how can we rationalize using ourselves as toxic dumps?
This is what our final document was:
Declaration Of Interdependence
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.