[A-List] How the Rich are Destroying the Planet

["Jim Yarker" <sjy_estrien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807G.shtml

   The Rich Stand Accused
   By Louis-Gilles Francoeur
   Le Devoir

   Saturday 06 January and Sunday 07 January 2007

Capitalism is the source of social and environmental crises.
   What do global warming, pollution of the atmosphere, streams, rivers and 
oceans, the exhaustion of natural resources, the accelerated extinctions of 
species, deforestation, the liberation of GMO into the environment, and - 
coming soon - the infinitely small and practically undetectable pollution of 
nano-materials have in common? Capitalism and the oligarchy that profits 
from it, as first cause, answers Hervé Kempf in a bombshell book published 
in Paris by éditions du Seuil.

   A journalist who specializes in the environment for Le Monde, Hervé 
Kempf has taken his work to the four corners of the planet and frequented - 
as is the privilege of an environmental chronicler - the cream of the 
scientific community, "people who tend to be rather calm and steady." Yet, 
from these contacts and the issues patiently compiled for the newspaper 
where he works, he retains two observations, he writes at the outset of 
Comment les riches détruisent la planète [How the Rich Destroy the Planet], 
which will be available in Québec February 6th.

   First, he explained in a telephone interview yesterday, the planet's 
ecological situation is worsening at a rate that neutralizes all the efforts 
of millions of citizens and ecological militants, to the point that the 
planet is in danger of crossing a threshold of irreversibility "within the 
next 10 years," he believes, on the basis of the speed at which negative 
outcomes are piling up.

   The second observation of this attempt to provide a veritably 
comprehensive explanation of the environmental crisis is that "the social 
system that presently governs human society - capitalism - blindly, doggedly 
rejects the changes necessary if we want to preserve the dignity and promise 
of human existence."

   In the same way that the different aspects of the global environmental 
crisis react with more and more synergy - warming accelerates the rate of 
species extinction, as use of fossil fuel gives rise to pollution, and 
consumption to the exhaustion of resources - the planetary ecological and 
social crises are two mutually bound-up facets of the same problem.

   "We cannot understand the simultaneity of the ecological and social 
crises if we do not analyze them as two facets of the same disaster. This 
disaster derives from a system piloted by a dominant social stratum that 
today has no drive but greed, no ideal but conservatism, no dream but 
technology. This predatory oligarchy is the principal agent of the global 
crisis," writes Kempf. "The present form of capitalism," he adds in an 
interview, "has lost its former historic ends, that is to say the creation 
of wealth and innovation, because it has become a financial capitalism, 
disparaged even by capitalist economists. This capitalism, which destroys 
jobs by rationalizations, new technologies and globalizations, overall and 
everywhere increases the disparities between rich and poor within each 
country and between different countries," the journalist observes.

   This oligarchy he targets is not satisfied with blindly consuming and 
wasting the planet's material resources with its big cars, its airplane 
trips, its unbridled consumption of living products, its uselessly vast 
houses, its unrestrained energy wastage. It has also, adds Hervé Kempf, 
spawned a model of hyper-consumption that the lower and especially the 
middle classes now attempt to imitate, just as developing countries try to 
imitate Western countries - even though, whether instinctively or 
rationally, everyone clearly knows that "this ideology of waste" and its 
drain on planetary resources will inevitably come to an abrupt end.

   This course places before the human species the unprecedented fact that 
it has reached or soon will reach the planet's limits, which could, through 
feedback effects, threaten the species' own existence. But this course is 
all the more difficult to arrest, Hervé Kempf deems, because it depends on a 
semi-authoritarian regime ever more institutionalized at the planetary 
level. It even depends, he says, on crises like that of September 11 in 
order to appreciably reduce those human rights that had been acquired 
through elevated struggle and to neutralize, even cause to disappear, those 
democratic mechanisms that allow free public debate on the choice of plans, 
the social choices that the workings of the economy repeatedly raise.

   Hervé Kempf rejects all accusations of attempting to take the planetary 
ecological debate from green to red.

   "I am no Marxist," he says, "and have never been, because that ideology 
does not respect human rights. But the Marxists do not have a monopoly over 
the social debate and we cannot, all the same, close our eyes to the 
documented, measured phenomena right in front of us. I note the existence of 
two crises, one ecological, the other social. And I observe that they act in 
synergy. I observe that a minority of people benefit from them. And I draw 
conclusions from these observations."

   But he also observes that a large part of the European Left has not seen 
the depth of the links between the two problems, just as many ecologists - 
who restrict themselves to an environmental approach - miss half the 
problem, if not its first cause.

   "If you want to be an ecologist," he writes, condemningly, "you have to 
stop being half-witted," for "the social given remains ecology's blind spot" 
as long as no one dares analyze it from the angle of power, domination and 
wealth relationships.

   "We must," he writes, "get past this hiatus. Understand that the 
ecological crisis and social crisis are two facets of the same disaster. And 
that this disaster is set in motion by a system of power that has no other 
end than the maintenance of the ruling classes' privileges."

   Although he does not address the impact of unchecked demography on the 
decline of the planet's "biological services" in his essay, Hervé Kempf 
immediately acknowledges that this factor certainly has an impact that is 
greater overall than any hyper-consumption by this oligarchy, composed of 
several hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires who control the bulk 
of income and of financial capital. However, he explains, it's this 
oligarchy that creates an unsustainable model for the planet, the indirect 
impact of which on other social groups exceeds its direct consumption. 
"And," he says dryly, "not all humans have the same impact on the planet at 
birth: a Westerner carries more weight in the planet's fate than a baby from 
Niger or from India."

   It's to put an end to this ostentatious consumption that he advocates 
radical control of wealth through "a ceiling on maximum salaries and on the 
accumulation of wealth," a sort of matching piece for the minimum wage, but 
on the upper side.

   "Everyone," Kempf comments, "knows that China will never be able to 
reach a level of consumption per inhabitant comparable to that of the 
Americans, with two cars per family, three televisions, four computers and 
cell phones, a house three times too big for its inhabitants, which 
generates energy consumption that would be sufficient to the needs of ten, 
even twenty people on other continents." The environmental chronicler 
proposes that a reduction of its consumption be imposed on this oligarchy 
that has globalized poverty, so that it no longer feeds this unsustainable 
dream, which numbs the critical faculties of the entire planet to the point 
that it closes its eyes to the wall into which it is careening full speed 
ahead.

   And the reporter, known for his rigor and level-headedness, nevertheless 
concludes: "It is still necessary for ecological concerns to be based on a 
radical political analysis of present relationships of domination. We will 
not be able to reduce global material consumption if the powerful are not 
brought down and if inequality is not combated. To the ecological principle 
so useful at the dawning of awareness - "Think globally, act locally" - we 
must add the principle that the present situation imposes: "Consume less, 
share better."

   Ecologists, he adds, have not often conducted an inquiry into the 
"ecological misery" that parks the poor next to industrial neighborhoods, 
polluted and at risk, next to highways or noisy activities, in the most 
insalubrious houses and in sectors generally the least well-served by public 
services, including public transportation. It is wrong, he says, to act as 
though the economic system must grow more to bring these people out of 
poverty or to allow more poor people to attain greater wealth. The economic 
system works in the other direction, by monopolizing wealth and power at the 
expense of those who have the least, and of the middle classes that dream - 
ever more vainly - of hoisting themselves into the cocoon of the present 
financial oligarchy, Kempf maintains.

   That's why, he says, we must "bring down the rich" rather than pull up 
the poor, in order to begin to respect the thresholds of irreversible 
deterioration of the planet's resources.

   He takes aim, moreover, at the concept of sustainable development and 
the alibi it now constitutes for governments and companies that use it to 
justify other drains on resources in the name of this new rationale that is 
supposedly harmless for the planet. Sustainable development, he writes, has 
become "a semantic weapon to remove the dirty word, 'ecology.' Moreover, is 
there any need to still develop France, Germany, or the United States? The 
concept has meaning, he concluded in an interview yesterday, but only in 
developing countries, because it can help them to avoid a development as 
brutal and lawless as the one we have effected in the West. But in the West, 
he says, the first of our environmental responsibilities "consists of 
reducing our consumption of material goods" to attain a level of well-being 
based rather on values, knowledge, in sum on immaterial, but nonetheless 
very real, riches.

   --------

   More information about H. Kempf's work is available at 
www.reporterre.net.




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   Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie 
Thatcher.

-----


How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet: A Review
   By Leslie Thatcher
   t r u t h o u t | Review

   Thursday 15 March 2007

"Ingenuous comrades, there are bad men on the Earth. If you want to be an 
ecologist, you have to stop being a dummy." From Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich 
Are Destroying the Planet."
   In 2006, Le Monde environmental editor Hervé Kempf's article, "New 
Suspicions about GMO" (translated and republished at Truthout) was nominated 
for a Project Censored award for covering an important topic neglected by 
the mainstream press. Earlier this year, Truthout reported the publication 
of Kempf's new book, "How the Rich are Destroying the Planet." I was 
intrigued, all the more so as a few readers asked when the book would be 
available in English, and asked Mr. Kempf to send me a copy of his book as 
well as for permission to translate the Preface (see below). My own 
appreciation of this completely original and fundamentally necessary little 
book - a scant 125 pages of text - follows. That review precedes a short 
online discussion with Hervé Kempf, while a translation of the Preface to 
"How the Rich are Destroying the Planet" appears at the end of this feature, 
along with a number of links to related subjects.

   Although familiar with much of the information Kempf marshals in "How 
the Rich Are Destroying the Planet," I was nonetheless amazed by the long 
and elegant arc of his argument, his ability to discern and convey a 
crystalline pattern in phenomena as diverse as elevated PCB levels in the 
sediment of "pristine" Alaskan lakes and the increase in length of 
billionaires' yachts. The book's central thesis - that the "oligarchy," a 
global stateless class composed of the hyper-rich and the "new 
Nomenklatura," is responsible for our species' headlong rush to 
environmental destruction, both indirectly, through the rest of society's 
attempts to imitate and emulate their wasteful habits of conspicuous 
consumption, and directly, through their control of the levers of power, all 
presently fixed at the "Catastrophe" setting - is buttressed by twenty pages 
of footnotes and direct citations from sources as varied as Adam Smith and 
James Lovelock; the scientific monograph, "Effects on the Marine Environment 
of Ocean Acidification Resulting from Elevated Levels of CO2 in the 
Atmosphere" and Alexis de Tocqueville.

   The first stage in Kempf's argument is to adduce the irrefutable 
evidence of an accelerating ecological catastrophe as humanity's use of the 
planet's resources overshoots the Earth's carrying capacity: While, 
according to one researcher Kempf cites, humanity's resource use was at 50 
percent of the Earth's biocapacity in 1950, by 2003, it had reached 120 
percent - consuming resources faster than the Earth can reproduce them. 
Foretastes of the ultimate catastrophe are suggested by avian flu worries, 
the destruction of New Orleans by the combined impact of Hurricane Katrina 
and infrastructure failures before and after the storm, and by increased 
mortality associated with the 2003 heat wave in Europe. Each environmental 
"problem" is linked to all the others; their synergy and imbrication propel 
us "in the direction of unstoppable destruction" and preclude any idea of 
separate crises, "solvable independently of one another." Why, Kempf asks, 
when the situation is so clear and alarming, does it remain so stubbornly 
intractable to change? He concludes that "if nothing happens even though 
we're entering an ecological crisis of historic gravity, it's because those 
who have power in the world want it to be this way."

   Kempf goes on to document the return of widespread poverty and economic 
precariousness to the rich world and the globalization of poverty in spite 
of economic growth and some reduction of poverty in China and India. 
However, economic growth and greater agricultural productivity are achieved 
at the expense of environmental degradation and, finally, there is a vicious 
"synergy between the global ecological and social crises: they respond to 
one another, influence one another and worsen correlatively." And the poor 
are the first victims of environmental degradation everywhere.

   In spite of a distinct coolness of tone and a controlled reliance on 
statistics and citation, Kempf's depiction of "The Powerful of This World" 
echoes Old Testament prophetic outrage. He quotes Peter Drucker on the 
destructiveness of unbridled executive compensation, St. Augustine on 
government ("If there is no justice, what are kingdoms, but vast systems of 
robbery?"), "Forbes, "The Economist,' and the "Financial Times" to create a 
portrait of a predatory, self-perpetuating elite that has become wealthy 
"not through success in production, but through constant redistribution of 
collective wealth" (think Halliburton or Blackwater senior executives and 
shareholders) and that lives "... separated from the plebians. They are not 
aware of how the poor and wage-earners live; they don't know and don't want 
to know." No sense of the public good or civic virtue moves "this predatory 
and greedy controlling class, wasting its rents, misusing its power, (it) 
congeals as an obstacle on the way. It bears no proposal, is animated by no 
ideal, delivers no promise ... is blind to the explosive power of obvious 
injustice. And blind to the poisoning of the biosphere that growth in 
material wealth provokes, a poisoning that means a degradation of the 
conditions for human life...."

   None of this would matter so much, Kempf suggests, were it not for 
insatiable human rivalry in ostentation. Globally, wealth is an indicator of 
status and the social stimulus of emulation and imitation creates limitless 
"needs." Drawing on Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Classes," Kempf suggests 
that production is adequate, but consumption is excessive as oligarchs vie 
with one another in sumptuary competition and every social stratum beneath 
does the same. The "alibi" that the oligarchy uses to maintain its grip is 
economic growth and the myth that a rising economic tide lifts all boats - a 
market theory that has been broken ever since the disconnect in the direct 
correlation between growth and employment: "Because the pursuit of material 
growth is the only way the oligarchy can make societies accept extreme 
inequalities without bringing those inequalities into question. In fact, 
growth creates a surplus of apparent wealth that allows the system to be 
lubricated without changing its structure." Immaterial growth would not 
degrade the environment the way material growth does: growth-engendered 
environmental degradation outstrips the creation and implementation of 
technological fixes that reduce environmental degradation. And, since 
justice demands that the consumption of the poorest be increased, "the rich 
have to consume less." That last requirement would appear to apply to me and 
to almost anyone reading these words online.

   Although the oligarchy may be blind to the public weal, it is vividly 
aware of what is necessary to maintain and perpetuate its own privileges. We 
may have great difficulty believing it, but "the global oligarchy wants to 
get rid of democracy and the public freedoms that constitute its substance." 
Kempf cites a chilling passage from a nineteenth century social observer to 
suggest how social control techniques, rather than the crude methods of a 
Hitler or a Stalin, could be quite effective in muting democratic freedoms:

   "The kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples does not in 
any way resemble what preceded it (...) I want to imagine what aspect 
despotism could take on in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, 
similar to one another and equal, who gyrate unceasingly to obtain small and 
vulgar pleasures for themselves with which they fill their souls. Each one 
of them, isolated at some remove from the others, is like a stranger to the 
destiny of all the others: his children and his personal friends constitute 
the entire human species for him: as for the remainder of his fellow 
citizens, he is right next to them, but he doesn't see them; he touches them 
and doesn't feel them; he exists only within and for himself and, although 
he still has a family, one may at the least say he no longer has a country. 
Above all these men rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes care of 
assuring their enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, 
elaborate, regular, calculating, and mild. It would be like paternal power, 
if - like it - its goal was to prepare men for virile maturity; but, on the 
contra'y, it seeks only to limit them irrevocably to childhood; it likes its 
citizens to be happy, as long as they dream of nothing other than being 
happy." (Alexis de Tocqueville)

   Since the collapse of the former USSR, it appears that capitalism no 
longer needs democracy - so antithetical to the oligarchy's objectives. 
Terrorism is the latest alibi to tighten security, criminalize dissent, 
expand surveillance and imprison the poor. "The hyper-rich will attempt to 
maintain their excessive advantages by force as they did after Hurricane 
Katrina, when armed forces were sent - not to help the drowning poor - but 
to hunt down looters.

   "An ironic twist of history could even be an authoritarian government's 
use of ecological necessity as a pretext to persuade the people to accept a 
restriction of freedoms - without, however, touching [socioeconomic] 
inequality."

   However difficult the political decision to "accept humanity's 
self-moderation" may appear to be, Kempf maintains his optimism in that 
possibility. He urges us to get rid of several received ideas:

belief in growth as the solution to social problems


belief in technology as the solution to ecological problems


the inevitability of unemployment ("a construct whereby capitalism keeps 
workers docile and salaries down")


the necessary alliance of Europe, which embodies a universal ideal and the 
demonstrated ability to unite diverse states, and North America, "the obese 
power"
   He encourages us to build on existing strengths:

the public freedoms and concern for the public good that still characterize 
the system itself


a mass media which may have "treacherously" supported the oligarchy in the 
recent past up until now, but which is capable of being once again a vehicle 
of real information and empowerment


the "Left" - which could be reborn by joining the causes of inequality and 
ecology


nascent global solidarity movements
   Kempf is neither a cranky conspiracy theorist nor a bitter ascetic, but 
a wide-awake dreamer with a Gallic joie de vivre and faith in liberté, 
égalité, fraternité. His latest book is an important work of 
social-scientific syncretism that merits wider distribution.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031507E.shtml
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   A Conversation With Hervé Kempf
   "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet"
   By Leslie Thatcher
   t r u t h o u t | Interview

   Thursday 15 March 2007

   Leslie Thatcher, for Truthout: I read "Comment les riches detruisent la 
planète" this afternoon. I'm not sure "like" is the operative term for my 
response. I devoured it in one go, which means I will need to go back and 
reread many passages - my copy is now as prickly as a porcupine with all the 
little bits of wastepaper I stuck in to mark the passages I'd want to 
review.

   The book seems to me an incredible tour de force. I could not imagine it 
possible to lay out systematically, with sentences of classical limpidity 
and concision, such a complete, as well as completely persuasive argument 
for what ails the world and what needs to be addressed. The dense 
connections between all the disturbing phenomena of recent years - 
ecological degradation to the point of habitat destruction for our own 
species, increasing social inequality and unemployment, the new 
totalitarianism (government snooping, torture, the percentage increase in 
prison populations), and the disappearance of a seriously contentious press 
are simply and powerfully delineated.

   One thing I missed was hearing directly from the oligarchs - not just 
the presumably enlightened ones like George Soros, Warren Buffet, Al Gore 
and Howard Dean, but from the Cheneys, Bushes and other Carlyle Group 
shareholders. I want to know what their vision of the future is, what planet 
they think they can live on after they've wasted the only one we've got - or 
whether they think a "Soylent Green" future is perfectly acceptable.

   It was particularly poignant to read your book after reading this week 
in The Independent that everyone in Davos - winter camp for the Oligarchy - 
is happy and upbeat about economic growth, record profits, etc. - a 
disconnect from our terrestrial reality no less dangerous than the Ancien 
Régime's. And I confess that even though I work in the alternative press and 
used to work in the oligarchy, I cannot believe that class's 
irresponsibility can actually be conscious. In spite of myself, I remain 
incredulous at the idea of such comprehensive wickedness.

   Hervé Kempf: I'm very happy and honored "Comment les riches détruisent 
la planète" pleased you so much. I believe it has touched a sensitive chord 
with many people in many places. Many readers have responded with great 
interest: it was useful to clearly connect the environmental crisis and the 
social question.

   I think [the oligarchy] is not monolithic and that one part of it can 
break away and take another direction (that's a theme that I sketch at the 
end of the book and a point that seems critical for the future).

   Truthout: May I ask about the work of "Reporterre" and what, if 
anything, I can do to support it?

   Kempf: The objective of Reporterre is to prolong the discussion 
initiated by the book by making the site a meeting place for concerns over 
ecological, social and public freedom issues. As you know, we post news 
produced by French associations and short interviews with militants and 
personalities involved in those issues that are relatively well-known in 
France. I would like to develop the site, but lack the time - and, of 
course, the financing - to do it. Nonetheless, at the moment we keep the 
site going and I hope some friends will join us little by little to enrich 
it further. As for support, please let its existence be known! 
(www.reporterre.net Even non-French speakers can enjoy Hervé Kempf's 
incisive interview with Al Gore, who seems a bit surprised by his 
questioner's perspicacity and absence of triviality. ljt) And if there's a 
foundation or some other organization somewhere that would be interested in 
helping it along, send me their contact information!

   Truthout: I read that you bicycle to work: how else do you personally 
reduce your own consumption, share with those who have less, and create a 
new ethos?

   Kempf: Reducing my personal consumption? First of all, it's possible to 
live in Paris without a car, given that public transportation is efficient. 
In daily life, the family (I have five children) goes without television, a 
microwave, a dishwasher and all those electronic gadgets that are expensive, 
use a great deal of energy, and take too much time. We pay attention to 
turning lights off in rooms where no one is present. My wife is a good cook 
and we eat healthily and pleasantly without meat every day. One important 
point is that I live without credit - indebtedness is one of the most 
pernicious instruments pushing us towards excess consumption. Obviously, all 
this makes life quite happy, since we have the time to read and we spend a 
lot of time with our friends. The children adapt well to such a thrifty 
life, even if their friends often have more gadgets than they do. As to 
sharing with those who have less, one never does enough - of course. But I 
regularly send money to charitable and development organizations.

   Truthout: If Veblen is right about the basic human drive to compete 
insatiably for social status, it seems to me we need to replace the 
competition of conspicuous consumption with virtuous competition: to make 
recycling and reusing - as well as real leadership - "chic."

   Kempf: Veblen and new values: yes, absolutely! To change the world we 
must create new norms of "savoir-vivre" [manners] (I re-echo Veblen's 
formula) so that what's "chic" is not having a big SUV and taking the plane, 
but bicycling, having a convivial social life, and consuming less stuff. And 
in this regard, the oligarchy has a heavy responsibility also.

   Truthout: Readers have asked when "How the Rich Are destroying the 
Planet" will be available in English: do you have any plans for an English 
publication?

   Kempf: This depends on generating the interest of an English-language 
publisher.

   Truthout: What are your immediate plans?

   Kempf: If all goes well, I'll spend three weeks at the end of March at 
Duke University in North Carolina at their invitation. I will give a 
symposium on "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet;" I am curious to know 
how it will be received by Duke's rich students. Then, the beginning of 
April, I go to Québec to give several lectures: the book has aroused a great 
interest there, to my surprise. All the media talked about it after the 
"Devoir" article appeared, and lecture offers poured in.

   Truthout: Thank you so much, Hervé Kempf, for taking the time to talk.

   Kempf: Thank you for your work and for making these ideas known in the 
United States.



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   Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie 
Thatcher.



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   Preface: "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet"
   By Hervé Kempf
   t r u t h o u t | Translation

   Thursday 15 March 2007

   The bus took me to Heathrow airport after I had finished coverage on a 
story about the "soldier of the future." The radio was broadcasting the 
news. The reporter explained that, according to Swedish experts, a high 
level of radioactivity that could have arisen from a nuclear power station 
accident had been detected in that Scandinavian country.

   It was April 28, 1986, the day after the Chernobyl accident. For me, 
that news suddenly reawakened a feeling of forgotten urgency. Ten or fifteen 
years before, I had read Illich, La Guele ouverte [the first environmental 
magazine, founded in 1972]; Le Sauvage [another ecology magazine, associated 
with the Nouvel Observateur, that came out first in 1973], and I was 
enthralled by ecology, which seemed to be the only real alternative at a 
time when Marxism triumphed.

   Then life pushed me in other directions. As a journalist, I was then 
immersed in the microcomputing revolution: at a time when TIME crowned the 
computer "Man of the Year," I, along with my colleagues from Science et Vie 
Micro, was discovering the arcana of the first Macintosh, Minitel's 
"messageries roses" [an online service of France Telecom] that prefigured 
Internet forums and chat rooms, and the adventures of a young guy named Bill 
Gates who had just concluded a smoking deal with IBM.

   Suddenly, Chernobyl. An overwhelmingly obvious need: ecology. An 
exigency: to tell about it. I began to do that. Since then, I have always 
been guided by two rules: to be independent and to produce good information 
that is precise, pertinent, and original. Also, I held back from 
Doomsdayism. While I was among the first to write about climate issues, the 
GMO adventure and the biodiversity crisis, I have never exaggerated. It 
seems to me that the facts, borne by tenacious attention to such obviously 
priority subjects, are sufficient to speak to our intellect. And I believed 
that intelligence would be sufficient to transform the world.

   However, after having believed that things would change, that society 
would evolve and that the system could move, today I make two observations:

The planet's ecological situation is worsening at a speed that the efforts 
of millions - but too few - of the world's citizens who are aware of the 
drama do not succeed in slowing down;


The social system that presently governs human society - capitalism - 
blindly sticks to its guns against the changes that are indispensable to 
effect if we want to preserve the dignity and promise of human existence.
   These two findings lead me to throw my weight - however minimal it may 
be - onto the scales by writing this book: short and as clear as it is 
possible to be without oversimplifying. You will read an alarm here, but 
above all, a double appeal on the success of which everything depends: to 
ecologists, to think about social arrangements and power relationships; to 
those who think about social arrangements, to take the true measure of the 
ecological crisis that conditions justice today.

   The comfort in which Western societies are immersed must not conceal 
from us the gravity of the moment. We are entering a time of durable crisis 
and possible catastrophe. Signs of the ecological crisis are clearly visible 
and the hypothesis of a catastrophe is becoming realistic.

   Yet, in reality, people pay little attention to these signs. They 
influence neither politics nor the economy. The system does not know how to 
change trajectory. Why?

   Because we don't succeed in relating ecology and society.

   However, we cannot understand the concomitance of the ecological and 
social crises if we don't analyze them as the two sides of the same 
disaster. And that disaster derives from a system piloted by a dominant 
social stratum that today has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than 
conservatism, no dream other than technology.

   This predatory oligarchy is the main agent of the global crisis - 
directly, by the decisions it makes. Those decisions aim to maintain the 
order that has been established to its advantage and favor the objective of 
material growth: the only method, according to the oligarchy, of making the 
subordinate classes accept the injustice of the social situation. But 
material growth intensifies environmental degradation.

   The oligarchy also exercises a powerful indirect influence as a result 
of the cultural attraction its consumption habits exercise on society as a 
whole, and especially on the middle classes. In the best-provided-for 
countries, as in developing countries, a large share of consumption answers 
a desire for ostentation and distinction. People aspire to lift themselves 
up the social ladder, which happens through imitation of the superior 
class's consumption habits. Thus, the oligarchy diffuses its ideology of 
waste throughout the whole society.

   It's not the oligarchy's behavior alone that leads to deepening of the 
crises. Faced with opposition to its privileges, with environmental anxiety, 
with criticism of economic neoliberalism, it weakens public freedoms and the 
spirit of democracy.

   A drift towards semi-authoritarian regimes may be observed almost 
everywhere in the world. The oligarchy that reigns in the United States is 
its engine, as it uses the terror that the September 11th, 2001, attacks 
elicited in American society.

   In this situation, which could lead to either social chaos or 
dictatorship, it is important to know what it is right to maintain for 
ourselves and for future generations: not "the Earth," but "the 
possibilities of human life on the planet," as philosopher Hans Jonas calls 
them; that is, humanism, the values of mutual respect and tolerance, a 
restrained and rich relationship with nature, and cooperation among human 
beings.

   To achieve those goals, it is not enough for society to become aware of 
the urgency of the ecological crisis - and of the difficult choices its 
prevention imposes, notably in terms of material consumption. It will 
further be necessary that ecological concerns articulate themselves as a 
radical political analysis of current relationships of domination. We will 
not be able to decrease global material consumption if the powerful are not 
brought down and if inequality is not combated. To the ecological principle 
that was so useful at the time we first became aware - "Think globally; act 
locally," - we must add the principle that the present situation imposes: 
"Consume less; share better."



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   Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie 
Thatcher.