Also in Nature & Environment

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

by Herve´ Kempf

Foreword by Greg Palast

Reviews

Foreword Magazine
Issue Month: September/October 2008
Category: Sociology
Review by: Katerie Prior

Anytime fuel prices rise, people start conserving. They purchase cars with better mileage, make their homes more energy efficient, or start recycling. These gestures, writes Hervé Kempf in his book, How the Rich are Destroying the Earth, are futile. The world is in trouble, he argues, and serious measures are needed to save it.

Kempf’s argument begins with a look at various environmental crises; global warming and climate change, threatened species, ecosystem destruction, and depletion of natural resources. These problems are intrinsically tied to social issues worldwide—poverty being the most damaging. Kempf opens a chapter with a grim description of life in Relleno Sanitaro, a section of Guatemala City that literally is a garbage dump. The village consists of more than 500 people too poor to live anywhere better. Everyday, they sacrifice their health to scrape together a livelihood from items in the rubbish.

The knowledge that there are thousands of villages like this around the world makes the details of the oligarchy of the hyper-rich a nauseating litany. As Kempf chronicles their exploits—CEOs earning more than fifty times their employees salaries, tycoons competing to build the longest yacht, Paris Hilton—Kempf demonstrates how the outsized consumption of the super-wealthy is causing a crisis for everyone.

There is hope, Kempf says, but not in the measures people think. Sustainable development is pointless. The technology that supposedly will save us won’t develop in time. To stop the inertia of destruction, society, particularly the hyper-rich, need to soberly rethink their lifestyles.

Kempf, the environmental editor at Le Monde, France’s major newspaper, makes a common sense argument for anyone with a minimum knowledge of environmental issues. The book, first published in France, was an international bestseller. This English edition, skillfully translated by Thatcher, is sure to become a resource for policymakers and pundits. (September)

Publishers Weekly
Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 9/15/2008

In this frequently iconoclastic, and surprisingly humorous book, Kempf, environmental editor of Le Monde, puts together familiar themes—ecological crisis, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the threat anti-terrorism poses to democracy—to point out the elephant in the room: the fact that the income and conspicuous consumption of the “hyper-rich” need to be reduced so the world’s poorest can receive justice and the middle classes will “consume less; the planet will be better off; and, we’ll be less frustrated by what we don’t have.” Kempf references Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, arguing that Veblen’s theories—once made obsolete by the narrowing of incomes in the twentieth-century—are relevant again due to the rise of a new international aristocracy. He may infuriate right-leaning American readers allergic to discussions of class warfare, but he’s equally hard on the “wobbly” left, “pickled in the idea of progress as it was conceived in the nineteenth century.” Although the book’s message is deeply disturbing, its uniquely French style of lighthearted, even optimistic seriousness makes it a refreshing and entertaining read. (Sept.)