It’s the Economy Stupid! – Not the Environment

BALIKPAPAN, Indonesia - Sept. 19, 2014 - PRLog -- In another week, there will be thousands of academics, diplomats, lobbyists and pundits converging on New York for a United Nations emergency session Climate Summit (http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/). Unfortunately, they’ll all be arguing about the wrong topic. As a pseudo Eco-Economist, I feel compelled to shout:

“It’s the Economy Stupid! – Not the Environment.”
I know. I plagiarized the title. But it cuts straight to the point. That’s not in vogue anymore. We’re supposed to be politically correct so as not to offend anybody. We tend to defer to so called experts while we snack on digestible sound bites, lacking in substance.

Leading up to this Climate Summit, Burger King has found itself in the cross hairs as the latest scape goat as the latest scape goat in this chronically superficial assault on unsustainability. The headlines read: “Burger King’s plan to merge with doughnut chain Tim Horton’s in Canada may be a bad sign for Southeast Asia’s rainforests.”

The reason we haven’t solved our environmental problems is because we have environmentalists working on solutions to what is fundamentally a systemic economic problem.

As if the merger changes anything with regard to their use of palm oil or the impact the two companies are already having independently on the environment.

We point fingers at Burger King because it means we get to side-step our own personal responsibility in the matter. Politicians and Economists like to point the finger at Burger King because they don’t have to deal with the deeper systemic problems that underlie the broader issues – for which they are culpable. Environmentalists like to point the finger at Burger King because they’re a big target and the headlines bring in big donations.

There’s a lot of snack-talk today about Climate Change, Environmental Footprints, Deforestation, Sustainability and Inequality. But, I prefer simple straight-forward talk. It reveals the true nature of things, more than the fancy-speak of talking heads.

I find it utterly dumbfounding, not to mention infuriating, that so many supposedly great minds have perpetuated the climate change and sustainability debate and yet there is still no honest statement of the problem and therefore, no hope of a clear solution. This is a classic example of diagnosing a symptom and not its cause.

I am the Founder of an organization called InfiniteEARTH (http://infinite-earth.com/). We save rainforests. Specifically, we save peat swamp forests on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet and home to the dwindling population of endangered orangutans. After 7 years of hard work, we won the right to protect and manage nearly 65,000 hectares (162,500 acres) of Indonesian rainforest, all of which was under imminent threat of slash and burn conversion to palm oil plantations. (http://infinite-earth.com/products/carbon-offsets/) You could fit most of Singapore inside our forest reserve, called the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve. (http://infinite-earth.com/)

From that description, you might make the forgivable assumption that I am an environmentalist. But, I am not. Truth is, I’m not sure what an environmentalist really is, but I don’t think I’m one of them. Not really. The reason we haven’t solved our environmental problems is because we have environmentalists working on solutions to what is fundamentally a systemic economic problem.

I am many things. I’m an economist by education, an entrepreneur by default – since I am fatally allergic to the bureaucratic quagmire of politics, corporations or NGOs. I am an adventurer, a naturalist and most importantly a father.

But what I really am, if you peel back the labels, is an insatiable glutton, a financial fraud, an addict and a thief, to the extent that I steal from my children to fund my addictions. I am… just like you. It was the eventual realization of this long list of shortcomings, as a species, that led me to create InfiniteEARTH (http://infinite-earth.com/).

So, you see, InfiniteEARTH (http://infinite-earth.com/) wasn’t created to save the rainforest in Borneo per se, even though that’s what we do. InfiniteEARTH’s Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve was meant to create a living, working example of how we can correct the underlying cause of a chronic economic problem, not put a band-aide on an environmental consequence. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it was created to provide restitution for an economic crime.

Our real problem is CREDIT. CHEAP, EASY CREDIT. Our current extractive economic model is based on credit. And we like it that way because it subsidizes our value meals at Burger King, the price of which accounts only for the cost of cutting down the forest for palm oil and pasture land, not for the environmental costs of replacing what was lost. But with this purely extractive cost model, we have all conscripted our children into debt slavery.

We are borrowing from our children’s futures to subsidize the cost of goods and services we consume today.

Read more here: http://infinite-earth.com/news/