CETRI
The coronavirus pandemic made a striking appearance overshadowing and revealing so much at the same time. It has both masked and unmasked this ecological crisis that precedes it, overtakes it and follows it. Masked, in the sense that it first took it off the agenda, set it aside from “emergencies”, outlawed “intensive care”, and then favored a “deconfinement” synonymous with a “return to normancy”, or even a productivist and consumerist “revenge”. Unmasked, in that by deepening inequalities and revealing, both upstream and downstream of the health drama, the close links that our ways of living on Earth establish between health and the environment, it has remobilized the energies of those who wish to revive the machine on other bases, socially fairer and ecologically more sustainable. We must change the mode of production of large industries and the level of consumption of the richest populations, otherwise we risk mortgaging the fate of future generations. That’s where we stand. For half a century. But four dilemmas still bridle transformative energies.
Is the ecological crisis central or marginal ?
The scale of the ecological disaster is staggering. And yet, important sectors continue to neglect the disaster, worse still, to refute it. Sectors of power - transnational industrialists, business circles, conservative politicians, liberal economists... - who refuse to reconsider the logic of their model of accumulation in view of (...)
