Page 179 - Contribution To Phenomenology

172 ULLRICH MELLE

post-apocalyptic situation, a situation of never-ending doom without any
further hope of deliverance. The islands of wealth are shrinking by the
day, and the malignant tumour of poverty, misery, hunger, social
disintegration and human degradation is spreading rapidly. Never before
in human history have there been so many desperately poor people.
While the capitalist world-economy is less and less able to satisfy the
basic survival needs of food, clothing and shelter of almost a quarter of
the world-population, it is more and more driven by the luxury consump-
tion of the rich and the wealthy: "by the culture of the drive-in and the
duty-free built around the car and the airplane," as the Canadian political
economist Pierre Chossudovsky calls it.^
The small economy of abundance in one part of the world and the
vast economy of misery and starvation in the rest are both ecologically
destructive and unsustainable. The have-not's are destroying their priceless
natural environment because of their poverty, but what if they were to
develop and industrialize according to the American-European-Japanese
model? In his highly acclaimed book "Erdpolitik''(Earthpolitics) Ernst von
WeizsScker asserts we would face an "ecological inferno" if consumption
per head were to reach American-European-Japanese levels in the rest
of the world.^
The excessive material growth of the anthropogenic system—in the
economy of abundance mainly in the form of the expansion of the
material culture, in the economy of misery and starvation primarily in the
form of population growth—is leading to the extinction of other forms of
life, the depletion of natural resources and the general pollution of the
biosphere. The global human household as a whole is devouring an ever
increasing amount of natural resources and, as an unavoidable conse-
quence, is producing an ever increasing amount of waste.
The various destructive tendencies are interacting and reinforcing each
other. The resulting exterministic dynamic is like an avalanche which is
crashing downwards ever faster and in which we are all being rolled.
There is a growing gulf between the ever more visible signs of social and
ecological destruction on the one hand and actual poUcies on the other.

^ Pierre Chossudovsky, "Comment 6viter la mondialisation de la pauvret6?"
in: Le Monde Diplomatique (September 1991), 3.
^ Ernest von Weizsacker, ErdpoUtih Okologische Realpolitik an der Schwelle
mm Jahrhundert der Umwelt (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 2.
aktualisierte Auflage 1990), 123.