Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth

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financial markets. They look after themselves in times of financial crisis
too. Funding can usually be found domestically or through the international
institutions to bail out their investors when their speculation turns sour.
When low- and middle-income countries require concessional liquidity,
they face dwindling levels of support and crippling conditionalities. Often
they are forced to turn to private banks for credit at market rates, diverting
resources needed for health and education to boost the dividends of the
banks’ shareholders.
4.2 Ecological and illegitimate debts
The period of neo-liberal finance and enforced structural adjustment has
added to the pre-existing social and ecological debts that the North owes
to the South. Acción Ecológica, an Ecuadorian civil society organization,
defines ecological debt as:
“… the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward
Third-World countries on account of resource plundering,
environmental damages and the free occupation of environmental space
to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial
countries.” 13
13
The concept of environmental space, or the “ecological footprint”, starts from the
assumption that every earth citizen has equal rights to the earth’s resources. The 20 percent
of the world’s population who live in the richest countries make 86 percent of all consumer
purchases; they consume 58 percent of all energy and account for 53 percent of all current
carbon emissions (and for 80% historically). Collectively this richest fifth owes an enormous
ecological debt to the majority of the world’s population, who endure some of the worst
environmental devastation and are often denied their fair share of the wealth produced.