Environmentalists Warn of Natural Debt as Budget Cuts Loom – TIME
Environmentalists Warn of Natural Debt as Budget Cuts Loom – TIME
“But the truly scary possibility is that the collapse could come quite suddenly, after what may seem to be a long period of global prosperity. It would only be in retrospect, after the fall, that we would see that what we thought was success was built on eating into our capital, like a consumer maxing out his credit cards to buy a second house. The global rise in food prices, which have hit their highest level globally in several decades, might be an early sign that the agricultural system that sustains (some more than others) nearly 7 billion people with the help of fertilizers and irrigation may be hitting its limits. “When the crisis hits, we’ll act rapidly, but by then it might be too late for hundreds of millions or even billions of people,” says William Rees, an ecologist at UBC.
What’s amazing to me, though, is that the very politicians who are so worried about the public debt — and who want deep spending cuts now to save our future, whatever the cost — utterly dismiss the idea that we could face an equal crisis of natural debt.”
