On the 22nd February, 2004, an article in The Observer (Now the Pentagon tells Bush Climate Change will destroy us), revealed the contents of a "leaked" secret report, forecasting how nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world within the next 20 years.

The document entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario, was commissioned by the Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall and prepared by the Global Business Network. It predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.' These events, they reasoned, present ‘a greater threat to global stability than that of terrorism’.

It was not known whether this document was another "wake up call" to the Bush administration or deliberately leaked as a strategy in order to justify ever more repressive legislative measures, military expenditure and invasive surveillance to protect the "American way of life". The only response from the US government was as one commentator put it, "to continue to declare war on the weather" and keep it "business as usual" … at all costs.

This disturbing forecast could be seen as an updated version of the 1972 Club of Rome report entitled The Limits to Growth, when a group of international researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to examine the eventual effects of exponential* worldwide economic growth. Though it made no link to climate related disasters, the authors concluded that if growth trends in industrialisation, birth rate, food production and the depletion of resources continued, the earth would reach its capacity to support this growth in the next 100 years (2070). The result would be a global catastrophe resulting in ecological collapse and the end of industrial society.

The Limits to Growth was clear in stating that because there are limits to the world’s resources, there will also in turn be limits to economic growth. Although the report drew intense and widespread criticism from the proponents of "the new gospel of consumption" and economic orthodoxy at the time it was published, its main contentions helped to form the theoretical underpinnings for the contemporary Sustainable Development movement.

Since then three major world conferences, the 1987 Bruntland Report in Stockholm, the Rio Summit of 1992 (billed as "the last chance to save the Earth") and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, have convened to try and get the concept of sustainable development moving from theory to policy and into action. All three were meant to be part of an evolving framework towards setting the world on course for ecological and economic sustainability, thus ensuring the next generation would inherit a viable and life supporting planet.

To many however the worthy goals of sustainable development with all its wonderful aspirations was high on rhetoric, low on practice and beset with unresolved contradictions. They began to see the concept of sustainable development as a contradiction in terms, in that it accepts that developed nations may continue to grow their economies without any major upheaval, while developing countries can meet their aspirations in the same way, and that human population numbers can continue to increase at the current unsustainable rate. In other words they ask the simple question. If our current economic system is so harmful and unsustainable, why is that same system still being perpetuated?

At best this "mist shrouded" concept was just redefining the problems with nicely embroidered "teddy bear" descriptions, or as Dr Sharon Beder states in her book Global Spin, The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, … they were just ‘greenwashed subscriptions sold to suburban householders to be taken in regular doses as a palliative for environmental anxiety, while they continue their lifestyles as polluting producers and consumers’.

Peter Russell writing in the journal of the World Business Academy asks. If this planet is already finding it difficult to sustain one billion, acquisitive, money-loving, status-seeking, power-hungry human beings, how can we expect it to sustain five billion people relentlessly seeking fulfillment through what they have or do? The real truth is, as Worldwatch researcher Michael Renner put it, ‘we’re eating more meat, drinking more coffee, popping more pills, driving further and getting fatter.

Professor Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, questions the very use of the phrase, sustainable development, pointing out that the word sustainable has been used in too many situations today. The result of the overuse of the word, sustainable, in Temple's view, is that it has come to mean too much and nothing at the same time. Therefore sustainable development as a concept is too largely drawn to have any particular usefulness.

Professor John Whitelegg of Sustrans, Transport Research, describes sustainable development as an "irresponsible distraction from the key issues". While other commentators have labelled it a "convenient myth". American environmental activist Howie Wolke called the unwitting popular acceptance of sustainable development as a "vast sea of raging moderation, irresponsible compromise…and unknowing (sometimes knowing) duplicity in the systematic destruction of the Earth

PowerLess New Zealand, a growing group of scientists, energy analysts and concerned citizens, describe sustainable development based on current models of growth as an ‘impossible theorem …the imagined perpetual motion of conventional economics in a world of finite resources. We cannot grow ourselves out of resource depletion or environmental degradation, nor can we endlessly substitute or replace the inevitable resource shortfall’ they say.

Here in Ireland we continue to invest billions in a car culture infrastructure that has no future. Thousands of hectares of land is being taken out of food production and covered with tarmac and concrete to accommodate a transport system that is running on "dead credit". Most of our consumer driven economy is dependent on dead credit fossil fuels and we continue to believe there will be cheap and abundant supplies to maintain it.

Jed Greer and Kenny Bruno in the report, From Rio to Johannesburg - the Road to Globalisation, state that since the Earth Summit documents declared that free and open markets are necessary prerequisites for achieving sustainable development- then sustainable development was essentially equated with wealth creation. With this philosophy at the forefront, saving the environment and ending poverty were made compatible-on paper-with corporate globalization. In reality they say globalization has only exacerbated the world's ecological travails*.

Biologist Peter Rosset of Institute for Food and Development Policy maintains that sustainable development has been going in the wrong direction since the Rio Summit and compares the subsequent market led events as a "global auction of the environment". This is illustrated he says by the approach to global warming which has been essentially to "privatize the atmosphere". There's something called carbon credits where polluting corporations in the North pay poor people in the South not to develop so that these corporations in the North can continue to "overpollute". We believe that the only way to address global warming is to reduce emissions in the North.

Sandy Irvine of the Real World Resource Guide reviewing the book Questioning Technology (1988) states, ‘there are two particularly bad ideas about technology. One is the almost religious faith that technology is the answer, believers thinking that social and environmental problems can be made to disappear simply by waving the magic wand of applied science. The second is the belief that technology is simply a neutral tool, its impacts dependent upon the identity and purposes of its controllers.

That other great technological pie-in-the-sky, the so-called ‘green car’ is a further bluff that society has yet to realise, as well as the other false dawns of biotechnology and communications technology.

The United Nations Environment Programme (U.N.EP) confirms that the "state of the planet is getting worse." The agency also pins at least some of the responsibility on business, saying "there is a growing gap between the efforts of business and industry to reduce their impact on the environment and the worsening state of the planet.

We are now witnessing the final limits of reductionist and mechanistic thinking of industrialised society. The individualistic and materialistic values that underpin mainstream economic thinking and economic growth policies are profoundly unsustainable and are directly responsible for spawning the global predicament faced by mankind.

Sustainable development cannot be seen as a solution to these global predicaments simply because of the irreconcilable and contradictory dynamics of its designation. It has done nothing to halt what Jared Diamond in his latest book Collapse (2004) ‘the thousands of small tragedies that Western society deems acceptable for the convenience, efficiency, freedom and glamour associated with consumerism, above all, the motor vehicle’.

In the meantime the degradation of the planet continues and our legacy to future generations is becoming more like the "Armageddon" scenario presented to the boys in the Pentagon. Generations to come will hardly appreciate their ghastly inheritance of endless conflicts, droughts and famine, all because we were unwitting dupes in a concept that negated itself by its very definition and could never be anything else but a dangerous deception.

*Exponential: More rapid.

*Travails: Torture - laborious effort.