On World Environment Day it’s time again to go beyond the usual talk of the economic crisis, climate change and environmental catastrophe that appalls us all. It’s time to understand the full system crisis, which is based on our lost human face, and time “to empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development … and to advocate partnership which will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future,” as it says in the UN’s World Environment Day statement.
The controversies surrounding the economic and ecological crises show the limits of our resources and stand in contrast to the myth of infinite growth. So let’s reconsider our own wasteful lifestyle — sleeping in the car on roadsides with the engine running and the air conditioning on, “no problem … if we get cold we can open the window.” Watch the fleets of buses parked in clouds of stinking diesel exhaust or the thousand smokestacks, catapulting tonnes of life threatening toxins into the air. Consider the unconscious way we use electricity, plastics and paper. See the respect we’ve lost for even our daily food.
We don’t need to wait for The Economist magazine to remind us that our world of neo-liberalization with deregulated markets and privatized common property has suddenly become a joke. Didn’t the world accept all kinds of “innovative” constructs, such as absurd speculation on the prices of raw materials and food for ever higher profits, only to end up creating more poverty and joblessness?
We now have to face the fact that our insatiably growing demands are compromised by limited resources. By last year, we had already consumed fossil energy that took 1 million years to form. Nuclear waste has already left a radioactive heritage that will last 1 million years. Daily capital transfers around the globe reached US$2 trillion in 2000. Has our economy really flourished? We ended up with worldwide losses of the same amount. Now people in Africa and Asia seek to consume as those in the West do. James Leap of the World Wildlife Fund has warned that if humanity continues to misuse its natural resources, “by 2030 we will need two planets to maintain our lifestyle.”
The economic crunch should have been short, but it doesn’t look like it will be. Eighty years ago the world slumped into a similar crisis ending the “Golden 1920s” and paving the way for World War II. Now the US and Europe face competitors. Third World countries have transformed to Second World countries, leaving behind a Fourth World. The 42 least developed countries (LDC) most clearly reflect the gap between wealth and poverty and in the resources available to “developed” and “developing” countries and communities.
Last year’s World Resources Report showed that almost half of the world’s population, or about 2.6 billion people still live on US$2 per day or less, whereas the top three billionaires possess more wealth than all 42 of the LCD countries and their total population of 600 million combined.
There has been increased food production on the one side, but on the other side up to 25,000 people die every single day from hunger and malnutrition. Do you have any feeling about that? Just watch the 2006 award-winning movie Chicken a la Carte by Ferdinand Dimadura. It offers a glimpse into a world of contrasting internal social structures, economic and political systems. A world that has also led more than 50 million people to flee economic despair, natural disasters, political persecution and wars that have grown from local conflicts to international wars.
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