John Wilkins was browsing through the Convention on Biological Diversity's website, and decided to compile a listing of the countries that are not parties to the treaty. I replicated his experiment and came up with something similar. It's not a very long list:
- Andorra (Wilkins missed that one)
- Brunei
- Iraq
- Somalia
- The Holy See
- The United States of America
Most of those countries can be excused for not being parties to the Convention. Iraq and Somalia both have more pressing concerns (although it's worth noting that Afghanistan became a party to the Convention in 2002). Andorra has a long history of being a bit slow when it comes to international affairs - they were in a technical state of war with Germany from their entrance into World War I until 1957. The biodiversity of the Holy See consists almost entirely of priests and pigeons, so I can understand their lack of concern. That just leaves Brunei, with its 386,000 people and 5,800 square kilometers, and the US without excuses.
What makes this even more embarrassing is that unlike the other five countries on the list, we've signed the Convention. We did that back in 1993. We're not a party to the Convention because the Senate never ratified it. The other five parties were at least honest enough to not bother pretending that they gave a damn. We - as we often do - said all the right things, then did nothing.
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