Three is Company

For this final blog I wanted to investigate further an aspect of environmental legislation I discussed in an earlier blog-- the Basel Convention. I mentioned it while discussing conflicts to the free market in regards to waste as a commodity, but now that MacBride has brought it up, I feel even more compelled to explore the topic.

The Basel Convention is an international treaty in the same family as the Kyoto Protocol which seeks to reduce the movement of hazardous waste between nations, particularly from developed to less developed countries, though it does not contain provisions for radioactive waste. The Basel Convention also seeks to diminish the toxicity and amount of waste generated, to guarantee that it is disposed of and contained in environmentally sound ways, and that the waste is contained and managed appropriately near its origin. It was available for signatures on March 22, 1989, and entered into force on May 5, 1992. 182 states and the EU are a part of the convention as of January 2015, with Afghanistan, Haiti, and the US still left to ratify it after signing the convention.

That’s right, the United States of America in the same boat as Haiti and Afghanistan. Hell, Haiti doesn’t even have plumbing in its capital city! It is astounding that the US can be this out of touch with Mother Earth and the rest of the human race. To be fair, I went digging to try and find a reasonable explanation and stumbled upon a frequently asked question page of the EPA’s website which stated that:

“The US signed the Basel Convention in 1990 and the Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification in 1992, but before the President can ratify the treaty, implementing legislation is required. The US supports ratification of the Convention, but to date no implementing legislation has been enacted.”

So here we are, with a treaty that is more than perfectly reasonable, it is, in all actuality, a damn near necessity, but the US is too tied up in conflicting interests and bureaucratic nonsense to get legislation critical to its ratification passed, legislation that it has had over two decades to write up and approve. This is a prime example of the sort of political activism for which these authors we’ve been studying wholeheartedly advocate, to push for the environmental cause within these large political arenas to enact some real legislative, wide scale change, because, as we can plainly see by the example of the US’s failure to ratify the Basel Convention, nothing is going to change unless the people demand it.