WSSD: 'at least it wasn't as bad as it could have been'

Thirty years after the Stockholm meeting on the environment launched the era of massive environmental conferences, the World Summit on Sustainable Development ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. The 10-day conference pulled together 9,000 delegates, 8,000 NGOs, and 4,000 media representatives (well below the 65,000 originally projected) in what is widely viewed as an unworthy descendant of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The most gracious comment one leading environmentalist could come up with was "at least it wasn't as bad as it could have been."