Eco Soundings, John Vidal, The Guardian -
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1844951,00.html
Wednesday August 16, 2006
Clare Short, the former international development secretary who
resigned in 2003, has just returned from a fact-find trip to the Philippines with some environment and development groups, and seen first-hand the devastation caused by global mining companies. She is angry. “I have never seen anything so systematically destructive as the mining programme in the Philippines,” she says. “The environmental effects are catastrophic, as are the effects on people’s livelihoods.”
Welcome back to the real world, Ms Short. Eco Soundings cannot but remember how, when in office, you used to defend the globalization of poor countries by rich companies, saying they would make the poor richer, and how you used to heap venom on environment groups (”they always end up being anti-development”). Will you now retract your famous quote about how “there is too much talk about the environment”?
