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.
Large parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa are at war. Africa has been hit worst. Sudan (Darfur) is just one tragic example where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, tortured and driven away by a mercenary vanguard hired by foreign forces for the purpose of getting oil and other resources.
The so-called “Democratic Republic” of Congo is another example where people engage in murderous fighting to gain access to and control of trade in diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold and coltan. The 21st century society of consumption and fun say the rare columbite-tantalite mineral is a vital component in cell phones. It is found in the lawless eastern part of the Congo, then smuggled to Belgium via Switzerland, to be stored in the industrial triangle of Zhuzhou in Hunan Province, China. All of this regardless of the human costs and nature destroyed by land clearing, not to mention the killings of the last African mountain gorillas.
Other wars are presently fought in the Niger delta of Nigeria and the eastern part of the Amazon rainforest for oil supplies to Europe and the US — more wars being fought for the world’s growing hunger for resources. China alone in 2004 had one-fifth of the world population consuming one-fourth of the worldwide production of industrial metals (tin, copper, nickel, zinc not to mention crude oil). Since this voracious giant has become an El Dorado for investments, its economy consumes almost half of the world’s cement, 31 percent of its coal, 30 percent of its iron ores, 27 percent of its steel, 18 percent of its caoutchouk or rubber, 17 percent of its aluminum and 7 percent of its crude oil. All this for a growing economy with countless manic projects and sunset industries.
Is the price for this over-heated and uncoordinated economy not high enough yet? How much must we pay for rising air pollution from industries and traffic? How much must agriculture suffer from water shortfalls, poisoned soil and water? China, once an exporter, since 1996 has become one of the world’s largest oil importers, expected to consume 138 million tonnes of oil next year for road traffic alone, just 43 percent of its total oil consumption. Since 2005 even coal must be imported, along with iron, which mostly comes from Australia and Brazil, where Chinese investments are expected to reach US$2.4 billion merely for infrastructural projects, in return for the promise of secured supplies (iron, bauxite, ethanol, pulp, fertilizers, soy beans, beef and cotton).
Humanity has transformed the world into a place that may soon be unable to ensure a healthy environment essential to our well-being and the enjoyment of human rights as required by the 1972 Stockholm declaration. Our demand for growth has brought us face to face with the limits to growth as the Club of Rome warned in 1968.
Can we live with the imbalance between technical and economic progress on one side and the dearth of ethics, morals and ideals on the other side as evidenced by rampant affluence coupled with poverty and starvation? Can we continue to use and destroy our Earth and ignore the updated version of the Club of Rome warning that our growth-oriented society will break down by the end of this century? Shall we not turn to our humanistic ideals and replace our obsession with “growth” with “sustainable development,” thus pushing for resource and energy efficiency in production as well as consumption?
Taiwan, the ever marginalized Treasure Island, is asked to reconsider its way of life and think about tomorrow and future generations. Formosa may join the “Global Green New Deal” as drafted last month in Berlin for a prospective European-American Green Industrial Revolution that probably provides the most radical and feasible change in the use of the Earth’s limited resources and protection of our living space.
The pioneers of world exploiters may give a helpful hand as colorfully demonstrated in the French movie Home, available worldwide in a variety of languages beginning today by free Internet download.
Engelbert Altenburger is an assistant professor of international business at I-Shou University.
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