Towards a sustainable future: the organizing role of ecologism in the north-south relationship

Today, the rapid growth of world populations endangers the earth. There are now five billion people on the planet and it is impossible to feed, house, educate and give jobs to most of those people according to the minimal requirements (World Commission, 1987). The root of the problem is not only a matter of a population boom but it is also a boom of consumption: a billion people (one-fifth of the world population) can afford to have an ‘excellent’ lifestyle, which imposes a tremendous and unnecessary burden on the planet’s ecosystem. Another billion people enjoy moderate levels of consumption, with enough to satisfy their basic material needs without superfluous consumption (although a great number of these people expect to reach the same level of conspicuous consumption as the privileged one-fifth). Finally, there are three billion people (three-fifths of the earth’s total) who cannot afford to satisfy even their most basic material needs and live in abject poverty. Worst of all, because of the spread of global media, a large part of this impoverished population aspires to adopt the same predatory types of consumptive behaviour as the privileged minority. Considering the present state of the disorder of the biosphere, we easily realize that it is most unfeasible for the world population as a whole to achieve the high levels of ‘affluent squalour’ (Sprout and Sprout, 1971) of the privileged one-fifth.