LISTEN: Hervé Kempf on Corporate Watchdog Radio
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French ecological journalist Hervé Kempf recently spoke with Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon on Corporate Watchdog Radio to explain the thesis of his book, How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth.
BB: Some view the negative impacts of economics and environment as separate. But Hervé Kempf sees financial inequality and environmental destruction as inextricably linked. The author of How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth, Kempf says the wealthy of the world are living unsustainable lifestyles, and everyone else is also trashing the Earth trying to keep up with the rich Joneses. The solution? Move away from materialism and growth.
BB: Hervé, the central idea of your book is that poverty and the environmental crisis are inseparable. So explain for our listeners that link that may not be obvious to everyone.
HK: We are living in a situation where there is at the same time an ecological crisis and social crisis. And they are linked because there have been in the last thirty years a big change in the capitalism, with a very large increase in the inequality in all of our countries—in the United States, but also in Europe, in Japan, and in other countries. And there was an oligarchy, a small group of the upper class, which keep the power, which keep the wealth of the nation, and a big part of the control of the media. And, at the same time, more and more class of poor people with growing and middle class with more and more in a difficult situation. And two of the way by which oligarchy tries to keep its power for the last ten to twenty years is always to say “we need to grow,” and they keep the wealth to escape the needed redistribution of income. When you are an economy with growing, apparently it is good for everybody, but it is also very good because there is no social asking for redistribution of income. But the problem now is that we know that the growth is very bad for the environment.
