page_title: Ecological debt
section_title: Historical context
hierarchical_section_title: Ecological debt / Political dimension / Historical context
caption_attribution_description: Watch ~12 min video from this event at Vimeo. This image is on page 5 of WORLD WATCH Volume 23, Number 2, March/April 2010, "Vision for a Sustainable World".
context_page_description: Ecological debt refers to the accumulated debt of wealthier countries for having plundered poorer countries by the exploitation of their resources, the degradation of their natural habitat, the beggaring of local people and/or the free occupation of environmental space for waste discharge. The definition in itself has varied over the years and several scholars have attempted a greater specification of the concept.
  Within the ecological debt definition, two types of aspects are understood: the ecological damage caused over time by a country in one or other countries or to ecosystems beyond national jurisdiction through its production and consumption patterns; and the exploitation or use of ecosystems over time by a country at the expense of the equitable rights to these ecosystems by other countries.
context_section_description: There have been several debates around the notion of ecological debt, and this is mostly because the concept arises from various social movements in response to the distributional injustice of climate change's consequences on the environment and people's livelihood.
  Salleh, in particular, showed how the ecological debt manifested in the destruction of the environment and associated climate change the North has created is made possible through the process of modernization and capitalism. The rise of the nature-culture divide that emerged due to rapid industrialisation is a perfect illustration of a human-nature dualism in which human being has the central role above everything else. The notion of humans being embedded in the ecosystem that they live in is crucial to the discipline of political ecology.
  In political ecology, which reconnects nature and the economy, ecological debt is crucial because it recognizes that colonization has not only resulted in a loss of culture, way of life, and language for Indigenous peoples, but it has shaped the world economy into one that monetizes and commodifies the environment. For example, when the colonization of South America occurred over 500 years ago, European settlers brought with them their Eurocentric values, seeing themselves as better than and therefore entitled to the Indigenous people's knowledge and the land they lived on. In a perceived postcolonial world, large corporations and Western governments tend to present solutions to global warming by commodifying nature and hoping to make a profit out of it. This better-than-thou attitude has created the conditions for global warming to occur, making the North’s ecological footprint soar, while also constructing an ecological debt so large as to completely rid the entire Global South of their financial debt.
  During the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, attending NGOs created the Debt Treaty, a document gathering all information to better define the ecological debt concept. They demanded compensation for damages over 500 years (1992 is exactly 500 years after the arrival of Columbus in North America). It was the first push back, reversing the stream, but it stayed as a draft paper not recognized by international institutions or lead countries at that time.
caption: Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 - Action Aid demonstration
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