Economy and Environment intrinsically connected

I know many of you will already know this.  It is obvious when one uses a strong sustainability lens that our economy relies on the many ecosystem services and resources that nature provides although I do know some economists who disagree with this.  However, recently I've come to understand the interlinking of the two in a slightly different way.

For some years now I've been concerned about climate change and peak oil and in fact peak everything (read the likelihood that the human race has moved into overshoot and has used up many of the resources that we rely on in the present day).  I have even spent a bit of time being an activist around this - usually in relation to local transport issues but also keeping my eye on the bigger picture.
I went to a talk the other night at the one of the local universities.  It was Robert Wade talking about inequality and may parts of it grabbed me.   The guts of his argument was that inequality of wealth is a major issue in today's world, and while many people are working on poverty, it would appear that we need to be thinking at least as much about the problems of too much wealth at the top.  Many people don't see that the economic structure that creates a small number of super rich people is what keeps millions if not billions in poverty.

On a worldwide scale, for example the world's richest 300 (yes, three hundred) people control the same wealth as the world's poorest 3 billion people (i.e. more than the populations of India, China, the US and Brazil combined).  On top of that the top 1% are also commandeering most of the economic growth where the costs of that are shared amongst us all.  Most economic policy in places like the US, the UK, parts of Europe and in New Zealand amongst lead to the rich getting richer and the poor becoming more so.

Prof Wade argued cogently that the rich control governments through funding arrangements and by their close relationships with those in government in some countries and therefore what we think of as a democracy is in fact a plutocracy that works for the advantage of the rich.

Add to this that the richer people get (and any of us are potentially susceptible to this) are less generous, less empathic, more likely to consider the poor are there because of their individual failings and also that they feel insulated from the bad things that happen to other people.





And now you have a recipe for why our environment continues to be degraded, and why all the warnings about the awful effects of climate change continue to be ignored by governments.  In other words, it seems very likely to me that until something happens - e.g. people take action, a mighty financial crash happens (both things that have happened in the past, and which look both immanent and very likely), we will make no progress on climate change, transitioning to new forms of energy or even looking squarely at the issues of peak everything!

The rich feel that it won't affect them and that they will have the resources to buffer themselves from any bad weather or loss of energy.  Jared Diamond discussed this in his book Collapse noting that more it was egalitarian societies that changed or transitioned rather than collapsing and disasppearing.  The greater the inequality, the less adaptable we are, and yes the rich may be able last longer than many of the poor (under some circumstances) but it may not not necessarily be the case.

There is obviously more and I can think of a few questions about this but this is something I suspect that environmentalists may need to consider.