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2 Sailing into the Anthropocene
Chapter 2
Sailing into the Anthropocene
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century geologists have been debat-
ing whether the Holocene Epoch, which began as the last major Ice Age
came to a close some 12,000 years ago, might be over. Like many others, I
think we are indeed in a new geologic epoch: the “Anthropocene,” defined
by the global unsustainability of Homo sapiens. Epochs are marked by geo-
logic shifting events—an asteroid striking the earth; sustained volcanic
eruptions; continents colliding; drastic climate change—and remain vis-
ible in rocks and ocean sediment for millions of years. Some scholars mark
the Anthropocene Epoch as starting in the late 1700s when the Industrial
Revolution took off. Others see the beginnings in the mid-1900s with the
launching and testing of atomic and nuclear weapons. Strong cases can be
made for both of these time periods, and, as I’ll return to in later chapters,
the ecological consequences of human activity did accelerate after each of
them, with the last 50 years a period many scholars are now calling the
“Great Acceleration.”
It’s reasonable as well, however, to date the beginning of the Anthropo-
cene around 1600, as by then European imperialism was well on its way to
ripping apart the world’s social fabric and global ecology, with the popula-
tion of the Americas, for example, crashing by some 50 million from 1492
to 1650. For centuries after 1600, European armies and commercial allies
would continue to subjugate and appropriate lands across the Asia-Pacific,
Africa, and the Americas. Explorers and colonists would also continue to
transport European diseases, plants, and animals, a process of “ecological
imperialism” further devastating societies and landscapes over the next
three centuries and continuing to this day to roll over postcolonial societ-
ies as the “slow violence” of unsustainability.1
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20 Chapter 2
Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean
in 1605–1606 provides a glimpse into the mundane terrors of these early
years of imperialism. Few of you will have ever heard of this voyage, as
most of the historical record is limited to the diaries of the men on board
the ships. Entering the history of imperialism through such a seemingly
inconsequential moment in time may seem like an odd choice. I do so as
a reminder of how far small acts of ignorance can build and extend into
the future, and how easy (and tempting) it is to forget that the legacy of
European imperialism and colonialism is at the root of what we now call
globalization—a fact that environmentalism of the rich tends to push aside.
The Story of Captain Queirós
Captain Queirós set sail from Peru on December 21, 1605, in command of
two ships and a launch. In the service of the King of Spain and for the glory
of Catholicism, for the next four months he would navigate the stormy
Pacific Ocean in search of the legendary southern land of “Terra Australis
Incognita,” along the way plundering islands. On May 1, 1606, the fleet
sailed into a deep bay off the coast of what Captain Queirós mistook for a
vast continent, naming it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. The land of black
sand and coconut palms struck him as a divine spot for a colony. Two days
later the Capitana, the 150-ton flagship captained by Queirós, and the Almi-
ranta, a 120-ton ship captained by his second-in-command Luís Vaez de
Torres, dropped anchor in a fine harbor not far from a sparkling freshwater
river. Forays over the next week would convince Captain Queirós that his
discovery was indeed historic. On the night of May 13 a celebration was
held with such a dazzling display of artillery and fireworks that the revelers
could hear “great shouts” of alarm from the surrounding hills and valleys.
The next morning, with the Royal Standard of Spain flying, Captain
Queirós formally took possession of Espiritu Santo for God and the King of
Spain. Following Mass under an awning of branches, he proclaimed the city
of “New Jerusalem,” appointing his crew to high office as “royal officers”
and “magistrates,” and vowing that the city would one day rival the capi-
tals of Europe, with gates and sidewalks and houses of white marble, and a
marble church as grand as St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City.
Captain Queirós was courageous. Yet he was also, in the eyes of many of
his men, dithering and pompous. Retaining the respect and loyalty of his
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Sailing into the Anthropocene 21
officers was never easy for him. Chronically sick, when he did emerge from
his cabin he was prone to giving long and sanguine speeches of the splen-
dors ahead, of “hatfuls” of pearls and islands of gold and silver: what one
adventurer on board, the Spanish nobleman (and, later in life, a monk of
the Order of Saint Basil) Don Diego de Prado y Tovar, would describe in his
journal as nothing but “wind.” It didn’t help that Captain Queirós was Por-
tuguese in charge of a Spanish fleet. The Spanish officers and unpaid adven-
turers under his command were especially quick to question his orders and
navigational judgment, and treachery and mutiny were already in the air a
month after leaving Peru. Those loyal to Captain Queirós called for harsh
measures to restore discipline. Toss the mutinous lot overboard. Set them
adrift. Maroon them on a coral atoll. But Queirós liked to rule with words,
not his sword; he chose to transfer disgruntled crew from the Capitana to
the Almiranta, locking up only one of the conspirators, Chief Pilot Juan
Ochoa de Bilbao.
Matters grew worse for Captain Queirós after landing on Espiritu Santo.
His crew became restless as relations with locals took a turn for the worse
after a foraging party under the command of Captain Torres shot and killed
a villager, severing the man’s head and then, as a warning, hanging the
corpse by one foot from a tree branch. Horrified, villagers began to throw
stones and shoot arrows and darts. The foraging party countered with a bar-
rage from their arquebuses and muskets, killing at least ten people, includ-
ing a chief. Captain Queirós was irate. A disciple of the Franciscan Order,
he saw himself as bringing peace and religious order, not bloodshed and
fear. The tendency of his men to kill without cause infuriated him, as he
believed this set back his mission to spread the teachings of Christ.
For many of the crew the response of Captain Queirós to the killings was
further proof of his flaccid leadership. The adventurer Prado, a ringleader
of discontent throughout the voyage, and whose journal exposes his own
vanity and arrogance, was contemptuous of Queirós’s “peevish” reaction
to the killings: “with such savages it is impossible to use politeness,” he
scrawled, “in order that another time they should not be so rude to Span-
iards.” For Prado the reason that Queirós was so soft was obvious: He “could
not swallow it, being a Portuguese.”
By late May the crew was itching to sail onward. Captain Queirós had
forbidden them from bringing kidnapped women onto the ships, and raids
were becoming perilous as villagers were now counterattacking. To pass the
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22 Chapter 2
time the crew decided to ransom three kidnapped boys for all the pigs “in
the land.” The boys, seeing their fathers on the shore, wept and begged to
go home—the eldest, who the crew renamed “Pablo,” was around seven
years old. Distraught, their fathers quickly handed over fruit and birds and
pigs. But the crew never was going to return the boys; they knew Cap-
tain Queirós would never permit that. Earlier that week, after a sailor had
joked that “thirty pigs would be better eating than three boys,” Queirós
was indignant, scolding the sailor and praising God for saving “these three
souls.” I “would rather have one of those children,” he said with emotion,
“than the whole world besides.”
To reassure their fathers on the shore Captain Queirós dressed the boys
in silk and paraded them around the ship deck. But his concern for propri-
ety and souls did not translate into compassion for the boys. Reacting to
Pablo’s weeping pleas to be allowed to go to his father who was calling from
the beach, he barked: “Silence, child! You know not what you ask. Greater
good awaits you than the sight and the communion with heathen parents
and friends.” Taking the boys with him, Captain Queirós finally set sail in
the Capitana five weeks after anchoring off Espiritu Santo, as Captain Tor-
res would log, “without any notice given to us, and without making any
signal.” Assuming the Capitana had either gone its own way or was lost at
sea, two weeks later Captain Torres set sail for the Philippines.
Under the command of Captain Torres the Almiranta would trade and
loot its way through the islands of Melanesia, charting a passage between
New Guinea and Australia (known today as the Torres Strait). Along the
way Torres would raze villages, in the words of Prado abducting the “young-
est women” for “the service” of his crew, and seizing children as trophies
and slaves for the Spanish empire, even kidnapping a pregnant woman
who, to the crew’s wonder, came up on deck during labor, bracing against
a cannon as another captive poured buckets of seawater over her (the baby
would later die in Manila).
During this time Captain Queirós was sailing to Acapulco, where he
would arrive five months later. Bad winds, he would tell anyone who
would listen, prevented him from returning to Espiritu Santo to reunite
with Captain Torres; heading for Mexico was the best option. Some of the
Capitana crew would tell a very different story, however, saying officers
locked Queirós in his cabin, no longer willing to serve a blustering buffoon.
Some officers even urged the Viceroy of Mexico to charge Captain Queirós
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Sailing into the Anthropocene 23
with incompetence, and, although this was not within the Viceroy’s power,
Prado, who later met up with crew from the Capitana, would say in his
account of the voyage that the Viceroy took Queirós to be nothing but a
“fool and a madman” who had “deceived” King Philip III of Spain.
For years afterward Captain Queirós would repeatedly petition the Span-
ish King to finance another trip to Espiritu Santo, comparing his discoveries
to those of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and to Ferdinand Magellan’s
voyage of 1519–1521, and claiming the South Pacific was a treasure chest of
riches, where the “clean, lively, and rational” natives would “be very easy to
pacify, and teach, and satisfy.” But Captain Queirós never would make his
way back to Espiritu Santo, in 1614 dying in Panama en route to Lima, still
dreaming of a return trip to the “new world.” Nor would Pablo ever return
home, dying shortly after arriving in Mexico, his captors guessing he was
eight years old.2
More than a hundred and sixty years would pass before the next
European—the French navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in 1768—
would reach Espiritu Santo. Six years later, the British explorer, Captain
James Cook, would follow, charting Espiritu Santo as the largest island in
an archipelago, which he named New Hebrides after the islands off the west
coast of Scotland.
Colonizing New Hebrides
Officers and administrators from France and Britain would come in the
wake of Bougainville and Cook to conquer, convert, and “civilize” New
Hebrides. Trade in sandalwood took off in the first half of the 1800s. As
profitable supplies of sandalwood declined, plantation owners and settlers
turned to growing and exporting bananas, coffee, cocoa, and especially
copra (dried coconut). Meanwhile, Christian missionaries and teachers
built churches and schools, and by the mid-1880s almost every island of
New Hebrides had a mission.
Like Captain Queirós, most missionaries—and many teachers—saw
themselves as saving a backward and uncivilized people. Like the explor-
ers before them, though, they brought disease and violence and spiritual
agony. As was true across much of the world, the peoples of New Hebri-
des had no history of (or immunity to) a long list of illnesses common
in Europe: smallpox, measles, diphtheria, dysentery, whooping cough,
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24 Chapter 2
influenza, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases, among others.
During this time traders and settlers were manipulating and mistreating
islanders. “Blackbirding” was common, where Pacific islanders were kid-
napped or tricked into slavery on the sugar and cotton plantations of Aus-
tralia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and Samoa. By the 1880s more than half of
the adult males of New Hebrides were laboring on these plantations. The
mortality rate was appalling. Of the 600 people “recruited” from the island
of Erromango between 1868 and 1878, for example, just one-third made it
home.3
The indigenous people of New Hebrides would barely survive European
imperialism. When Captain Queirós landed on Espiritu Santo in 1606 as
many as 1 million people may have been living on the islands of New
Hebrides—roughly equal to 1 in every 550 people on earth. By the mid-
1930s just 45,000–50,000 people remained: about 5 percent of the origi-
nal population. Life in the 1800s on Aneityum, the southernmost island
of New Hebrides, illustrates the calamity of contact with Europeans. The
population of 5,000 or so fell steadily from the 1830s onwards, with one-
third of the people (by then about 3,500) dying from influenza and measles
between 1857 and 1863. The population of Aneityum did not stop falling
until the 1930s and 1940s, when just 200 or so people remained.4
In 1980 New Hebrides would gain independence from France and Britain
(who then jointly controlled the colony). The country of 80 or so islands
was renamed Vanuatu. Since independence the population of Vanuatu has
been crawling back up. Still, if you were to travel to Vanuatu today, you
would only find a quarter of the population that existed before the arrival
of Europeans.
Yachts now line the docks of Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, as cap-
tains of leisure explore a life of cocktails and suntanning. Nearby is rue
D’Auvergne. Walking along this road a few years ago I could not help but
wonder what D’Auvergne did to earn a street name. Did my ancestors colo-
nize the Pacific? I know they were in the first wave of North American
colonists. But what was their impact on the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and South
America? Were the consequences of my own life, went my wandering mind,
really any different from those of my ancestors?
Unlike Captain Queirós I do not brandish a musket when exploring cit-
ies like Port Vila. Nor do I kidnap boys or steal pigs—or even pinch sou-
venirs. Compared to missionaries or traders or settlers my time in such
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Sailing into the Anthropocene 25
places is short and my purpose very different (or so I believe), as I travel to
“conduct research,” not to save souls or claim lands for a king. Yet passing
by the Chinese embassy and the Vanuatu Association of Nongovernmental
Organizations on rue D’Auvergne, I was well aware that my life relies on
a world economy emerging out of a traumatic history of imperialism and
colonialism, and that in the modern era of globalization the consequences
of consuming goods and resources are more far-reaching—and speed across
the world at a much faster clip—than was the case during the time of Cap-
tain Queirós.5
Being Traumatized
No single book could ever do justice to the environmental histories of
imperialism across all cultures, time, and ecosystems. The story of Captain
Queirós in Vanuatu reminds us of how the desires, values, and prejudices of
European explorers brought horrors for those being explored. More famous
captains had sailed the oceans before Queirós, notably Columbus in the
1400s and Magellan in the 1500s; and others would follow, such as Cook in
the 1700s. The point of telling the tale of Captain Queirós is not to damn
him or his crew in particular. Over the next four centuries even worse cap-
tains would invade Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But his voyage does
reveal the calamity of early European exploration for indigenous peoples—
an important reason for today’s global sustainability crisis.
The crew under the command of Captain Queirós was savage by any
standard of humanity, murdering and raping and kidnapping islanders
with pious impunity. Most of those abducted to serve as slaves or trophies
would die within months or years, some of hunger or beatings, but most
of raging fevers, in agony and weak from vomiting, coughing, and gasping
for air. Other Pacific islanders were equally vulnerable to European diseases.
By the 1800s, diseases such as smallpox, the flu, measles, and tuberculosis
were causing populations across the Pacific islands to drop precipitously. A
single outbreak sometimes killed a third or more of an island’s people, and,
as in Vanuatu, no culture survived intact. In this upheaval many societies
became unstable—a situation that traders and missionaries and colonizers
were quick to exploit and almost always make worse.
The indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas suffered similarly.
Australia’s first of three smallpox pandemics during the nineteenth century
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26 Chapter 2
may have killed one-third of the Aborigines. Smallpox killed half of the
Huron and Iroquois in the New York area in the 1630s and 1640s; in 1738
alone as many as half of the Cherokee died of smallpox. European impe-
rialism was equally traumatic in South America. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century the Chechehets were one of the largest tribes on the
Pampas. For generations they had avoided all Europeans as if they were
death adders. Panic ensued when smallpox eventually struck in the early
1700s: families fled, shamans were sacrificed, the sick were abandoned.6
The Chechehets would never recover. By century’s end their language had
faded away, and today the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes them as
“extinct.”
European diseases would rampage through societies across the Asia-
Pacific, Africa, and the Americas. In North America settlers overran the
remaining indigenous peoples. Already in 1634 John Winthrop, the first
governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was thanking god for killing the
indigenous peoples. “For the natives,” he wrote, “they are neere all dead
of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”7
Entire indigenous societies in the Americas and Australia were killed off.
Centuries of colonialism, racism, land appropriation, and forced assimila-
tion badly wounded the few to survive.
Being Colonized
Into these emptying lands European colonizers and settlers brought cows
and pigs and sheep while plantation owners bought slaves to till vast estates
of tobacco and cotton and sugar. Rats and rabbits invaded the continent of
Australia. Fields of grass and clover were sown across New Zealand—with
honeybees imported in 1839 to pollinate the new environment. Around
the world ranchers razed forests, farmers drained wetlands, and miners dug
out gold and diamonds. Whaling and fishing fleets plied the shores of the
new colonies. And settlers planted trees and tended gardens to make the
new worlds seem more like home.
The tiny Pacific island of Nauru, about 1,200 miles north of Vanuatu,
illustrates how steep the trajectory of unsustainability became in some
places. Peace had reigned for thousands of years before escaped convicts
from Europe introduced rifles and alcohol in the 1800s. It was a lethal
mix, and the island was in chaos when Germany annexed it in 1888. The
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Sailing into the Anthropocene 27
Germans imposed order, ruling until Australia captured Nauru in WWI.
Australia (cooperating with Britain and New Zealand) would then “admin-
ister” the island until 1968 (except during Japan’s occupation in WWII),
after WWI under the “mandate” of the League of Nations and after WWII
under the “international trusteeship system” of the United Nations. In the-
ory trusteeship required Australia to prepare Nauru for independence by
building political institutions and a stable economy. But, like other coloniz-
ers, Australia’s primary interest was in exploiting the people and resources
of Nauru to grow its own economy, and as in most of the postcolonial
world, Australia left behind weak institutions, poorly trained administra-
tors, a boom-and-bust economy, and a volatile political situation.
Few countries are facing a future quite as bleak as Nauru’s, as we’ll see in
the next chapter. Yet many postcolonial states are similarly in crisis: sub-
verted by and indebted to foreign powers, nearly bankrupt, rocked con-
stantly by disease and violence. A need to fit into the world economy—and
the power of foreign states and multinational corporations to entice and
punish—encourages postcolonial states to keep exploiting their natural
resources as fast as possible. Governments across the developing world are
exporting untenable amounts of timber, minerals, fish, crude oil, and food
(often to former colonial powers) in a bid to earn foreign exchange, service
debts, appease donors and bankers, and retain power. Given the impor-
tance of economic growth for political stability, few postcolonial states
have been able break this cycle of unsustainable development. In many
places, as in Nauru, natural resource exports to former colonizers went up
after independence, under pressure from organizations such as the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund, and as politicians became desper-
ate, as corruption spread, and as extractive industries and transport systems
were able to handle larger volumes.
Of course life in places like the South Pacific was far from idyllic before
Europeans arrived. Wars, cannibalism, rape, and torture were rife. So were
superstition and ignorance. Here and there some truly mad cultural prac-
tices had come about: widows in Fiji, to give one grisly example, were
strangled or buried alive to accompany their deceased husbands into the
afterlife.8 Yet often, as in the case of Nauru, a vibrant society was in place
when Europeans first sailed to their lands. Colonialism similarly shredded
the social fabric of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This helps explain why
coups and violence are endemic in so many postcolonial states. This helps
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28 Chapter 2
explain why corruption and incompetence are so rampant. And this helps
explain why so many postcolonial leaders are willing to forsake the future.
Unsustainability has reproduced over generations, becoming a way of life,
taking on new forms, harming not only ecosystems, but also economies
and societies—a process aggravated by globalization.
Being Globalized
Integrating societies into a world economy has been brutal and wrenching
since at least the voyage of Columbus in 1492. This is not to suggest that the
globalizing process over the past half-century has not brought opportuni-
ties and delicacies and goods to billions of people. It has. And globalization
of communication technologies has certainly spread creativity and knowl-
edge, including empowering social movements such as environmentalism.
Yet more freedom and wealth for some has come at the cost of adversity
and tragedy for many others.
Globalization today is inseparable from the history of men like Captain
Queirós pillaging “empty” lands and dislocating indigenous peoples. Wars
mark the making of the international society of states; slavery and violence
accompanied the rise of multinational corporations and world markets. As
during the sailing era of Captain Queirós, curiosity, greed, and zealotry still
explain much of why people travel, trade, and resettle to new lands. Even
the very idea of “one world”—of one people living on one earth—can only
be understood as emerging out of a history of imperialism and colonialism,
of bloodshed and cruelty, where Western values and ways of knowing have
come to dominate. Forgetting this history can make globalization seem
innocuous, as if it’s nothing more than the process of new technologies
connecting up the world, so people, money, and ideas can travel faster and
farther. Being globalized entails far more, though, than just being able to
fly from Los Angeles to Sydney in 16 hours, or regularly eating food grown
a half-world away, or connecting billions of people on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram.
Globalization can be violent and exploitative, little different than impe-
rialism. Manifestations include world powers forcing developing countries
to deregulate economic affairs, offering grants and demanding loan repay-
ments to open borders to trade, natural resource investors, and foreign
manufacturers. One sign of the resulting financial cost is the rising external
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Sailing into the Anthropocene 29
debt of the developing world, which has gone from $2 trillion in 2000
to more than $5 trillion today. The private sector accounts for more than
half of this debt—a debt that reinforces highly uneven and unequal South–
North trade flows, with developing countries exporting large quantities of
natural resources and low-priced goods (partly to earn foreign exchange to
service debt).9
Rising inequality and concentrating financial power are further signs of
the globalization of unsustainability. Just 1 percent of the world population
holds half of global wealth. Around 45,000 people are now worth over $100
million while 124,000 people are worth over $50 million. And the rich keep
getting richer. We see this with the thirteen-fold increase in the number of
billionaires since the mid-1980s. At the same time around 2.2 billion people
were still earning less than $2 a day in 2011—a figure not far off what it
was in 1980.10 This crude measure, moreover, misses much of the hard-
ship in the poorest countries, where monocrop plantations have displaced
subsistence farming, where good jobs in rural communities are rare, where
working-age adults have left villages, and where hundreds of millions of
people live in slums, some even surviving by scavenging for food and recy-
clables in rancid mountains of garbage.
Also, more income does not necessarily translate into quality food, or
better nutrition, or improved health. In the developing world, 1 in 7 people
were malnourished from 2010 to 2012. The worst off region is Sub-Saharan
Africa, where the UN’s World Food Programme estimates that one-quarter
of the population is malnourished. Rising consumption of tobacco, liquor,
and processed food are causing further health crises across emerging and
developing countries. Men in China, for example, smoke 35–40 percent
of the world’s cigarettes. And more than three-quarters of tobacco-related
deaths—around 6 million people a year and rising—are in the developing
world. Without tough measures, the World Health Organization predicts
that over the course of the twenty-first century smoking will kill up to 1
billion people, with the vast majority in the developing world.11
We cannot divorce the process of globalization from past—and
continuing—efforts by those with more power and money to gain con-
trol, impose beliefs, and extract profits. Nor can we disconnect the process
from inequality and gross concentrations of wealth. Nor can we separate it
from the exploitation of people and environments in poor and indebted
countries. To enslave children to harvest cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire. Or murder
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30 Chapter 2
striking miners in Peru. Or raze tropical forests in Indonesia. Or overfish the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
An undercurrent of Westernization has always surged through global-
ization. And power struggles, resistance, and value clashes are intrinsic to
the process, simultaneously stalling, reversing, and accelerating socioeco-
nomic and technological forces of global unity. Back in the 1970s feisty
opposition to the globalization of Western brands, international retail, and
multinational investors was common. Today, however, only aging Leftists
and grassroots activists seem to have any fight left, and they are no match
for big business and economic superpowers. Each passing year sees more
consumer goods crisscross the world’s oceans and highways and airways.
And the billionaires of business now have a stranglehold on the world
economy.12
This globalization of our lives helps explain why so many of us who
are trying to live more sustainably so often feel hypocritical. Like the mis-
sionaries and explorers of the past five centuries, most of us who call our-
selves environmentalists are never quite able to match our actions with our
beliefs. Angst is understandable. Yet thinking hard about the consequences
of our values, lifestyles, and careers—including those of our ancestors over
the last 500 years and our descendants for the next 500 years—is essential
for strengthening our sense of personal and collective responsibility for the
earth, unquestionably necessary for any chance of global sustainability.13
At the same time, there’s no doubt that it’s getting harder, not easier, to live
sustainably, as the consequences of our most routine decisions and most
basic needs ripple through a complex global system in unpredictable and
often untraceable ways, with billions of butterfly effects as we go about
our day. Particularly concerning, the gap between the costs of personal
consumption and the political capacity to control these costs continues to
widen as globalization diffuses, obscures, and deepens the consequences of
consumption, over generations gaining the power to destroy even the most
isolated places on earth, as the story of Nauru vividly illustrates in the next
chapter.
Dauvergne, Peter. Environmentalism of the Rich, MIT Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=4694114.
Created from ubc on 2018-02-23 16:21:24.
Copyright © 2016. MIT Press. All rights reserved.