(12) Environmentalism

Agenda 21 The Depopulation Agenda For a New World Order

Adbusters

Adbusters Media Foundation is a nonprofit activist network cofounded in Vancouver, Canada, in 1989 by Kalle Lasn (a documentary filmmaker) and Bill Schmalz (a wilderness filmmaker and photographer). Adbusters sees itself as an anticorporate social movement; using a method of social change it calls “culture jamming” defined by bestselling Canadian author Naomi Klein as “the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages.”

The network’s primary means of communication is its Adbusters magazine, which, after starting in 1989 with 5,000 copies, has grown into a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 120,000. The magazine has subscribers from around 60 countries, although two thirds live in the United States. The foundation also operates a website (www.adbusters.org) and runs its own advocacy advertising agency, PowerShift, which offers creative services to environmental campaigns and produces “uncommercials” and “subvertisements.” In recent years, Adbusters has pulled off some high-profile campaigns, including buying space on CNN to advertise TV Turnoff Week and Buy Nothing Day and purchasing a full-page advertisement in the New York Times for its Unbranded America campaign.

AGENDA 21

Agenda 21, a document arising from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, is a nonbinding plan to achieve sustainable development for the 21st century. The result of years of preparatory meetings, it reflected the emerging consensus among state negotiators that global environmental sustainability would require cooperation and partnerships across developed and developing countries. The specifics of how to share the financing of sustainable development-by far the most contentious topic at the 1992 conference-were never resolved, although Agenda 21 does call for more Official Development Assistance (ODA).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.

Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992.

The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED, to monitor and report on implementation of the agreements at the local, national, regional, and international levels. It was agreed that a five year review of Earth Summit progress would be made in 1997 by the United Nations General Assembly meeting in special session.

The full implementation of Agenda 21, the Programme for Further Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Commitments to the Rio principles, were strongly reaffirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002.

Environment and Development Agenda