Ecological Debt

Andrew Simms

Description

Millions of people in the West are running up huge ecological debts: from the amount of oil and coal that we burn to heat our houses and run our cars, to what we consume and the waste that we create, the impact of our lifestyles is felt worldwide.



Whilst these debts go unpaid, millions more living in poverty in the majority world suffer the burden of paying dubious foreign financial debts. Ecological Debt explores this great paradox of our age. Highlighting how and why this has happened, it also shows what can be done differently in the future.



Now updated throughout, this is a passionate account of the steps we can take to stop pushing the planet to the point of environmental bankruptcy.
Acknowledgements

Preface

1. A Short Walk to Venus

2. The Chemist's Warning: a Short History of Global Warming

3. The Heaven Bursters: Tuvalu and the Fate of Nations

4. The Great Reversal of Human Progress

5. Ecological Debt

6. The Carbon Debt

7. Rationalising Self-destruction (Or Why People Are More Stupid Than Frogs)

8. The Car Park at the End of the World

9. Pay Back Time: the Law, Climate Change and Ecological Debt

10. Data for the Doubtful: the Lessons of War Economies

11. The New Adjustment

12. Minerva's Owl

13. In the Footsteps of Stanley

14. Tick Tock Climate Clock

15. The Duck's Choice

16. How to Live on an Island

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Sociology
• General officer
• Ecology
• General
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783710591
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ecological Debt
PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION
For conventional economists the environment is often an afterthought. They even describe the uncounted cost of pollution as an abstract externality . Ecological Debt diagnoses this potentially suicidal oversight, and comes up with a creative and compelling plan of action.
Larry Elliott , Economics Editor, Guardian
Never has the idea of living beyond your means seemed so terrifying and potentially disastrous. As a business woman I know the importance of reading balance sheets. This book shows that we re in-the-red like we never knew. Forget your bank balance, now we re all going to be talking about our ecological debt . A new phrase has entered the language.
Dame Anita Roddick , founder of The Body Shop
This book describes the world as it really is. Not as the advertisers or growth-obsessed politicians and economists would have us believe. A world where the most massive debts of all are owed by the rich to the poor, a world in which luxurious western lifestyles directly undermine the prospects for a fairer global society. Simms sets out a compelling argument as to why the stakes are now so high, and why the question of ecological debt must move to centre stage in global politics. Read it, find out who really owes what to whom.
Tony Juniper , Executive Director, Friends of the Earth
This book should be essential reading, particularly for those in positions of responsibility. It brings out in very simple but powerful words the reason why ecological debt is far more important than national debt for a country. The book highlights the paradox of the world having reached unprecedented prosperity in monetary terms but an alarming rate of impoverishment in ecological terms. This trend needs major global efforts to address this malaise.
R. K. Pachauri , PhD, Director-General, TERI, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

First published 2005.
This edition published 2009 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright Andrew Simms 2005, 2009
The right of Andrew Simms to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 2728 0 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2727 3 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1059 1 ePub
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70 per cent post-consumer waste.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition
1  A Short Walk to Venus
2  The Chemist s Warning: a Short History of Global Warming
3  The Heaven Bursters: Tuvalu and the Fate of Nations
4  The Great Reversal of Human Progress
5  Ecological Debt
6  The Carbon Debt
7  Rationalising Self-destruction (Or Why People Are More Stupid Than Frogs)
8  The Car Park at the End of the World
9  Pay Back Time: the Law, Climate Change and Ecological Debt
10  Data for the Doubtful: the Lessons of War Economies
11  The New Adjustment
12  Minerva s Owl
13  In the Footsteps of Stanley
14  Tick Tock Climate Clock
15  The Ducks Choice
16  How to Live on an Island
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
To all the people, in no particular order, who were interested, helpful or encouraging, even if they were unaware of being so at the time - including but not limited to: June Simms, David Simms, David Boyle, Rachel Maybank, Simon Retallack, Andy Strauss, Nick Robins, Jenny Scholfield, Caroline Lucas, Jonathan Walter, Molly Conisbee, Ann Pettifor, Romilly Greenhill, Marion Genevray, Etienne Pataut, Peroline Bousquet, Renwick Rose, Ruth Potts, Hetan Shah, Pat Bailey, Matt Rendell, Angela Burton, John Harriss, Alex Macgillivray, Petra Kjell, Jessica Bridges Palmer, Julian Oram, Alex Evans, Aubrey Meyer, Angela Wood, James Marriott, Wolf Hassdorf, Andrew Dobson, John Broad, Ralph Russell, John Magrath, Ed Mayo, Saleemul Huq, Hannah Reid, Judith Dean, David Woodward, Jane Shepherd, Victoria Johnson, Corrina Cordon, Peter Myers, Benedict Southworth, Stewart Wallis, Kevin Anderson, Joe Smith, Pat Conarty, Sarah Butler Sloss, Liz Cox, Fred Pearce, Sue Mayer, Ros Coward, Martyn Day, Charlie Kronick, Rob Hopkins, Satish Kumar, John Sauven, David Castle, Caroline Stewart, Colin Hines, Robin Maynard, Tim Lang, Bevis Gillett, David Adshead, Andy Fryers, Rosie Boycott, Felicity Lawrence and Ethan and Joe Stein. Some specific thank yous are also in the endnotes.
All photographs have been supplied by the author, unless credited otherwise.
To Scarlett Iona Snow, on behalf of my generation I apologise, we didn t do enough. And to Rachel Maybank, thank you for Scarlett.
Preface to the Second Edition
I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.
Alan Greenspan, former chairman, US Federal Reserve, October 2008
Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger … The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.
Winston Churchill, 12 November 1936 1
Oil is the trouble, of course. Detestable stuff!
Gertrude Bell, Baghdad, 1921
RETURNING …
The elephant is still standing. And still dead. Around its feet glisten hundreds of coins thrown by visitors. They might be wishes asked of the soul of the departed animal. Or, small gestures of recompense in lieu of its fate and the fate of the land that was once its home. Three years since I last visited the Museum of Central Africa in the Belgian city of Brussels, little else has changed. Room after room is full of animals stuffed and perched rigidly against crudely realised backdrops of African forest and grassland.
Had they been painted by your three-year-old daughter, you would brim with pride. As the work of a major museum, they look comic and sad. The joke, too, is a bad one. Passing through to another long room that surveys Africa s global economic contribution, maps on the wall dissect and label each country, tagging them like the worn, stuffed big cats and apes, and fish pickled in jars.
This is Africa as the memory and promise of wild, exhilarating and dangerous nature. Life waiting to be hunted, captured, tamed or killed. Two crocodiles in a glass case encircle each other in freeze-frame, flexing long tails and grins that seem to keep widening. This is Africa seen as a cornucopia of natural wealth to be mined, harvested, picked, squeezed and taken. The wall maps speckled with graphs reduce the continent in general, and the Congo in particular, to a series of carefully plotted locations for the extraction of oil, cotton, coffee, sugar, rice, maize, jute, palm oil, diamonds, cobalt, tin, copper and gold. One term for it is the resource curse .
A partial defence by the museum could be that this is real history - it represents precisely how Europe has viewed and treated Africa for more than a century. But the defence fails because there is too little to rescue it from the charge that seen like this, it merely lays the psychological foundations for the future to repeat the mistakes of the past. Somehow, the reality of civilisations wrecked and of peoples brutalised and killed to support Europe s rising economies becomes dissipated.
When a continent is reduced to economic botany, agronomy and geology, it comes to be seen through a lens of cold accounting, by eyes disinterested in rich history and cultural diversity. But, more recently, a new interest in the murderous story of King Leopold II s activities in Central Africa (told briefly in Chapter 5) forced the museum, and the nation more widely, to reassess its colonial past. Two rooms introducing the history have been carved out from among the cases full of still air, masks, spears and bewildered-looking big cats.
Yet in the museum, when it does address the troubled human past, the tone is often reluctant, equivocal and begrudging. With glorious understatement it tells the visitor that this history was experienced differently by Belgians and Congolese. There is a quiet but repeated emphasis on the involvement of the Congolese in their own exploitation, as if to create a moral equivalence between the corruptor and the corrupted. We are warned that passions and emotions concerning the past continue to the present. The display is less forthcoming about another unbroken link with the past, about how there is a continuing pattern of destructive appropriation of Africa s natural resources, one that involves a similar, if slightly longer, list of more powerful nations.
But even with this nod to excavating the buried history of colonialism, an almost morbid fascination drags you around the museum s unchanging stone corridors. A fabulous crassness clings to the walls. Here is a flagship national museum in a capital city that is home to the political machinery and administration of the modern European Union. Yet sitting proudly still in its central courtyard, with an imperially upturned chin, is a statue of the man who embodies international relations bu