finance huge projects that were revealed to be veritable ecological
nightmares. ...
Ever since the explosion of the debt crisis in 1982, Latin America
has sent each month (and over one-hundred and eight months)
four billion dollars to the North. Even sub-Saharan Africa, stuck in
the mud of its poverty, one way or another paid a million dollars a
month to reimburse its loans ... While countries are falling into ruin
to continue to export, the World Bank and the IMF urge them to
impose severe cuts in public expenditures. Budgets for protecting
the environment are inevitably the first to be sacrificed ...
The gravest ecological consequence of the debt is perhaps the
massive deforestation that it has encouraged. Trees are cut down in
the most irresponsible way to build furniture, window-frames and
chopsticks. Sometimes forests are simply levelled and turned into
pasture land for cattle whose meat is sent to furnish fast-food restau-
rants in the North. The levels of indebtedness are directly connected
both to the extension and to the rhythm of the destruction of the
forests; the more the debt rises, the better are the conditions for the
dump trucks and bulldozers. (Susan George, ‘La dette se paie en
nature’, ii, vi, citation revised to conform to original)^3Throughout the 1980s, the ruling groups promised possibilities of
unlimited enrichment for the mass lumpen bourgeoisie that has
formed in the northern sector of the planet as well as in some coun-
tries of the Third World. The media and advertising bombardment of
the 1980s has served to inject into the collective brain the stimuli
caused by hypertrophic needs. It seems rather difficult that this small
and decisive part of humanity, corresponding more or less to Western
Europe, the United States and Japan, will ever accept a change that
would endanger the motivation frenetically inculcated over a decade
as the only one that might provide meaning and identity: economic
motivation and competition.
In 1992, when Bush (Senior) appeared in Rio de Janeiro to respond
in an arrogant way to the accusations raised against him by several par-
ticipants, his speech had the strength of common sense, of the self-
evident. Many Third World countries, the organizing forces behind the
summit, and several European countries reproached the American
administration for not having accepted in any manner to start plan-
ning a reduction in toxic emissions in the course of the next decade.
But what does the reduction of toxic emissions mean? It means a slow-
down in the development of the automobile industry, the main factor26 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_05_cha04.pdf 10/3/08 11:33 AM Page 26