“Ecology as a social principle . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect and advocates men’s return to `nature,’ to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.” -Ayn Rand

The much-touted U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development is coming to a close this week, amid a cacophony of street protests by indigents, anti-globalization commandos, environmentalists, neo-Marxists and every other far-left group under the sun, decrying everything from the global wealth divide to genetically modified organisms.

Says Claude Martin, Director-General of World Wildlife Fund International, “The economic interests of the rich are being put before poor people and the environment.”

Naturally, to individuals such as Martin, it is impossible that the economic interests of poor nations (such as having access to First World markets as well as agricultural technologies such as insect-resistant crops that reduce the need for harmful pesticides) could ever coincide with those of the First World. Rather, contrary to the conventional wisdom that trade and economic growth bring prosperity and a way out of crushing poverty, it almost seems as if the definition of “sustainable growth” to individuals like Martin would be that of “no growth” or, better yet, negative growth.

This very idea was poignantly captured by another member of the WWF, Daniel Bitler. During a press conference at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature he said, “Sustainable development is setting the necessary social and ecological limits to economic growth.”

Yet what the protesters on the street along with protesters in suits and ties fail to realize is that prosperity is not simply won by fiat – rather, it is won by the economic growth that open markets and trade beget. Consider the United States, which despite being hailed as the greatest threat to earth’s environment by groups like Greenpeace, enjoys one of the highest standards of living, not to mention that even those living in the most isolated rural areas enjoy access to electricity and clean water.

Yet the ability to provide these amenities to all Americans wasn’t won simply by street protests and posturing at summits – it was won through the same means that made America the economic powerhouse that it is today – economic freedom, the very same freedom that well-wishing protesters would deny to the world’s poor.

Perhaps then it is somewhat ironic that many of these street protests were met with their own form of counterprotests: Individuals demanding the right to grow whatever crops they choose (be they GMO or not) and demanding neither subsidies nor handouts but simply access to open markets, something that “champions” of free markets like our own president have been eager to praise but equally quick to renege on.

In President Bush’s case, consider the tariff he slapped on steel earlier this year, the bloated multi-billion dollar agriculture subsidy bill (which Mr. Bush signed and later lavishly praised) that made even our most socialist EU allies blush, not to mention his squeamishness on lifting tariffs on textile imports for fear of alienating workers in states key to his re-election.

Despite their avowed loyalty to both the principles of open and free markets and their commitment to the world’s poor, individuals like Bush have done little other than to pay lip service to these very principles – ironic indeed, for if they would but show even a passing amount of conviction towards their proclaimed ideals of economic freedom, they would do far more for the world’s poor than any ostensibly named summit on “sustainable” development could ever hope to achieve.

Examples of this principle in action would be nations such as South Korea and Taiwan, where open markets have brought peoples who once lived in poverty into the fold of First World living standards. Indeed, even in communist China, market reforms and trade are bringing the rise of a new middle class, something unfathomable merely twenty years ago when China was uniformly mired in poverty and overpopulation.

Even the United Nations’ own statistics demonstrate this principle in action. According to a fact sheet distributed at the summit, “During the 1990s the economies of developing countries that were integrated into the world economy grew more than twice as fast as the rich countries. The `non-globalizers’ grew only half as fast and continue to lag further behind.”

The fallacy of detractors of free markets and trade is in assuming that economic growth is coupled with environmental destruction and exploitation, yet these same individuals seem to forget that the high environmental standards we have come to enjoy in the United States were not a product of a U.N. summit but rather economic and technological growth, things which only exist in a climate of economic freedom. To deny this to the world’s most destitute constitutes nothing less than a travesty.

Steve Skutnik is a graduate student in nuclear physics from Ames.