What is the impact of globalisation – increased international trade across the planet – on our environment? While there is widespread disagreement as to whether cutting barriers to trade increases poverty, environment seems to have dropped off the global agenda. In Bangkok last Friday Gerd Leopold, executive director of Greenpeace International, attempted to rectify this at a press conference where poor attendance was itself a sign of diminished interest in the issue.

In a presentation that was short on specifics but clear on generalities, Leopold conceded that globalisation has brought some benefits to the environment, particularly in increased awareness and legislation. People across the world are aware of the need to protect the environment and to reverse degradation where it has occurred. Environmental studies appear in school curricula and businesses increasingly include protection of the environment in their core concerns. This is more than good public relations: a good environment may benefit commerce while a poor environment harms it, as China learnt when it realised that it could only compete in the electronics market when manufacturers were guaranteed a steady supply of clean water.

Awareness has stimulated the passing of environmental legislation in many countries. However, that legislation is only as good as the ability of the state to enforce it, and laws are frequently ignored. The Democratic Republic of the Congo – that disabled giant of a nation once known as Zaire – has some of the best anti-logging legislation in the world, but it is a state in little more than name. Its sprawling forests, as yet mostly untouched, are under growing threat and are protected only by the country’s size, collapsed infrastructure and the embers of its civil war.

But awareness and legislation are only the silver lining of an increasingly dark cloud. Leopold focused on three areas of the environment that are under immediate threat: forests, fisheries and climate. The first two are limited resources that are being exploited at a faster rate than they can be replaced; climate, while not itself subject to exploitation, is also under severe pressure.

Across the world, once extensive forests are now depleted (China is now a net importer of timber, placing increasing strain on the global market) and existing forests are under threat. Consumption of fish is at almost three times 1960 levels, and 70% of global stock is overexploited, depleted or “recovering”. One little known fact: the current fashion for sushi and sashimi, barely known outside Japan 20 years ago, brings pleasure and variety to those who can afford it, but it also places considerable increased strain on already overfished stocks.

Meanwhile, we all know about climate change; the burning of fossil fuels of coal, oil and gas pumps huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to global warming, increasingly erratic weather and melting of the polar ice caps. Several Pacific island nations are expected to disappear under the waves within the next one hundred years and large tracts of Bangladesh, already one of the world’s most crowded countries, will be under water.

This, by the way, is the moment to point the finger, partly at the wealthier nations, but specifically at the United States, which comprises under 5% of the world’s population but is responsible for 25% of its fossil fuel use. And even more specifically at George W Bush, who refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, an agreement intended to produce only modest reductions in carbon monoxide emissions, on the grounds that the “American way of life is not up for discussion”. As Leopold pointed out, this is taking advantage of the environment, not responsibility. And as Leopold did not point out, this is also squandering the family inheritance, permitting today’s generation of USAmericans to enjoy lifestyles that their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren (not to mention the rest of us) will have to pay for.

So what do we do about it? Leopold argues that the remedial argument – get rich now and solve environmental problems later – may have provided a fix for relatively small industrial societies in the nineteenth century, but it is strategy that will no longer work. National legislation is helpful but, as indicated in places like the Congo, is meaningless if the state is inefficient.

Leopold's solution includes increasing awareness of the links between globalisation and the environment, raising pressure from consumers on manufacturers to be environmentally aware, implementing voluntary business standards (why voluntary? I should have asked during the question and answer session, but didn’t…) and adopting on a international scale measures such as taxation on activities which lead to environmental degradation. Unfortunately, on the last point, “nobody knows how to get there. We’re not closer to a world government than we were twenty-five or thirty years ago.”

Whether or not Leopold intended to say that a beefed-up United Nations was our only hope for preserving the environment, it’s a solution that is far from realisation. The emergence of a tax-generating and environmentally conscious world government is dependent on 200 nations agreeing to pool their sovereignty, in the way that it has taken 25 European nations 50 years to achieve - and Europe still has a long way to go. International co-operation is highly unlikely in the time-frame needed to stop further damage to the planet’s forests and oceans.

If degradation of the environment is to come to an end, it will not be as the result of world government, but of individuals around the world radically altering their perception of what they need to make them happy. Currently, too many of us equate contentment with the ability to continually purchase new products, whether the latest Dido CD, 4-wheel drive “sports utility” vehicle, new clothes or an upgraded computer. The rich among us spend money because we can, and the poor see us and aspire to the same lifestyle.

With a few exceptions, 600 million North Americans and Europeans are currently addicted to spending more and more money to buy more and more goods each year. The planet could not sustain a similar assault if 2,000 million Indians and Chinese, not to mention the remaining 3,000 million of the world’s population, had similar purchasing power. Do I think that Asians should be deprived of pleasures that I now enjoy? No. Do I think that I and my fellow westerners should significantly reduce our consumption of the world’s resources? Yes. Do I think it will happen? Yes, about the same time as pigs are scheduled to land and take off at Heathrow.

And there’s the rub. There is little indication that we can stem this tide. We human beings crave the comforts that wealth brings. We are too selfish to restrain our consumption for the benefits of others, whether those others live on the other side of the planet or are our children or grandchildren. So we salve our consciences by pointing to a few minor successes, such as persuading Coca-Cola to stop using polluting HFC agents, while ignoring our many failures (given the considerable cultural, pscychological and environmental harm caused by Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other multinationals, real success would have been persuading the company to close down or radically restructure in a way that would render it unrecognisable). By the time enough people understand and act on the awareness that protecting the environment requires not a modification of our habits but a total revolution, it may be too late…