From the deforestation that caused the collapse of the Mayan civilisation to the fatal breaches in the mega-dam of Marib, the capital of Sheba, man-made environmental catastrophes have often set the precedent for the fall of empires. Rarely has the planet concurrently experienced such peril. Policy profiteering from Tibet to Angola has ensured the co-modification of every inch of 'discovered' land. We’re skating on thin ice: Though GDP has more than doubled during the past 25 years, over 60 per cent of the environment is critically exploited, from fisheries to farmland.

Monetised industrial economics, formulated on the basis of financial and intellectual capital, is delinked from mechanisms functioning relative to the value of natural resources; instead, our wealth is purely speculative and does not reflect the environment’s ability to carry or sustain us at the current rate of exploitation.

Whereas GDP measures brute quantity, the quality of growth is discluded from assessment. Trade distorting subsidies, deregulation and privatisation artificially depress the value of resources, guaranteeing a raw deal for developing nations and ecologies. The politics of pollution has yet to become an 'election issue'.

Economists do not take into account the impact and value of the loss of natural habitats (wetlands, forests, savannahs, etc), wildlife, arable land or non-renewable/finite resources. Nor do they account for the cost of air, water or soil pollution, affecting both the environment and human health. In terms of a commodified society, GDP does not indicate access, equity and quality of life i.e gender politics, percentage with access to education, medical care, housing, water and waste sanitation.

PRIMARY INDICATORS

Yet GDP is used as one of a few primary indicators measuring the economic pulse of a nation, legitimising ecological plunder as the necessary precedent bolstering growth. Lending institutions like the World Bank facilitate destruction, mandating that forests be razed to push GDP up by 10 per cent as is currently happening in West African countries – supplying wood, oil, water and crops to denuded 'first worlds'.

Equatorial Guinea’s rising GDP – the ninth highest in the world, is shooting through the roof like Wonka’s glass elevator. But the nation is mired in pollution, deforestation and poverty, with the gaps between rich and poor growing steadily wider. Obiang, the lapdog dictator, was welcomed by Condi Rice as 'a friend'.

The global financial machinery, hooked on the buy-now pay-later trajectory, is heading toward a global crisis of immense proportions via monetised paradigms that have marginalised the identity of the ecology, reifying deteriorating living ecosystems for short-term gain.

Sustainable economics, an interdisciplinary approach integrating financial, human, intellectual and ecological capital, is the obvious solution. But this approach requires a value system extending beyond financial capital and into formal ecological investments, guaranteeing the recognition of natural identity politics.

There is no legislation that grants legal standing to the ecology. Instead, Africa has continued to endorse inherited predatory colonial policies, systematically plundering 'commodified' environments. Likewise, monetising natural capital, devoid of legal rights, substitutes deficiencies by commercialising exploited ecosystems for purely financial value, externalising cost, and actively preventing realisation of the legally enforceable rights of nature.

UNHINDERED ACCESS

Lest we forget, colonialism was never about subjugating indigenous peoples for the purpose of slavery. The primary aim was to gain unhindered access to exploit natural resources, using people as complementary aids to mine, extract and farm.

This same mentality formerly framed the enclosures (privatisation) and enslavement of European peasants prior to the degradation of Europe’s ecology. It is the histories of resources, from timber to tobacco, that articulate the motives behind the 'civilising' force of imperialism, justifying rapacious appropriation through racial ideologies hinged on technological superiority.

And the ice is breaking. Take water: In West Africa, Lake Chad, straddling four countries, has experienced a rapidly diminishing surface area from 22 772 square kilometres in 1966, to 1 000 square kilometres in 1998.

The UNEP states that 50 per cent of the loss of surface area is directly linked to irrigation. In Africa, cash crops consume over 73 per cent of water.

The Niger basin drains from an area of two million square kilometres, or 33 per cent of the sub-region surface area, while the Volta basin is shared by five countries. Water in Africa is a trans-boundary affair. One missing link and the whole chain collapses.

'There is enough rain falling on Africa to supply, in theory, water for nine billion people or one and a half times the world population currently. But little is harvested,' says Achim Steiner, UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) director.

Meanwhile, the UNDP alleges that countries interlocked with the Niger and Volta basin will soon be mired in water wars. The UN puts the human figure at 200 million, by 2020.

One reason is embedded or hidden water: It takes over 2 000 litres of water to produce just 300 grams of cotton. Africa is a major producer of cotton, among other monocultures for export.

WATER PRIVATISATION

Each year Coca-Cola uses over 300 billion litres of 'third-world' water, from Nigeria to India. About three litres of fresh water is required to produce a litre of Coke. Meanwhile, a good portion of Nigerians have to purchase water from hawkers, coughing up hundreds of nairas each month. Water is privatised as part of structural adjustment reforms, the derivation of loans or alternately, HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) completion points. Fresh water is not a right for commodified societies, nor does it possess rights; it is viewed instead as property under the law.

In his 'I am an African speech', former president Thabo Mbeki spoke of an inclusive identity rooted in the rights-based system, valorising the experiences and lives of those generally set apart from Africanness.

Mbeki described the sands, mountains and rivers of the Kgalagadi, the Drakensberg and the Lekoathe, as the 'panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day'.

'At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

'South Africa is one of a handful of countries to legitimise the concept of sustainability. Our Bill of Rights upholds the essential human right, 'to have the environment protected… and to secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development'.

IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POSSIBLE WITH SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS?

During an interview, Steiner stated, 'Recently economists have been focusing their work on capturing the true economic value of the world’s natural or nature-based assets. The millennium ecosystem assessment or MA, published in 2005 with support from UNEP, is one such inspiring example. The MA started putting figures on the value of intact ecosystems versus their value when modified, degraded or lost.'

He continued, 'Take an example, the Mau Complex forest in Kenya. The Mau is the largest closed-canopy forest in Kenya, generating goods and services worth in excess of Ksh20 billion [or over US$320 million] annually for the country’s tea, tourism and hydro-power sectors. It is located on the western side of the Rift Valley.

'The ecosystems not only provide essential water to rivers and lakes in Kenya but also feed Lake Victoria, which is shared with Uganda and Tanzania and is part of the River Nile Basin, and Lake Natron, shared with Tanzania.

'Water provided by the Mau feeds rivers that nourish major tourist destinations including the Maasai Mara National Reserve and Lake Nakuru National Park – part of a sector that employs a million people in the formal and informal sectors.

'In total over 100 000 hectares or close to a quarter of the Mau Complex has been destroyed in the past decade, putting at risk livelihoods, businesses and existing and planned hydropower schemes.'

Though justifications in support of racial supremacy have been interrogated, colonial impressions of the environment – now endorsed by African leaders –continue to evade analysis and necessary corrective action.

HOW THEN DO WE IMPLEMENT?

'One option is an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity and ecosystems,' says Steiner, 'An issue debated by governments including many from Africa last month (Nov) in Malaysia.

'Armed with validated, unequivocal economic cost benefit analysis, governments will be able to make genuine decisions about the costs of, say, building a road through a nature reserve, versus whether to clear a forest for agriculture, or conserve it for international payments for carbon.'

IDEOLOGIES

Ideologies informing economic policies are heavily influenced by ideas of reality, including enlightenment philosophies such as Lockean empiricism – the progenitor of the modern political self. The philosophy, interpreted by Taylor as the 'punctual self' – describes a being distinct from the [unconscious] natural world, mandated with the right of dominion.

Such philosophies provided platforms, legitimising the conquest of those outside of the assumed white normative experience. The components of this colonial identity, no longer specified by skin color but mindset, has served to repress other commodified, unclaimed or marginalised (and narrativised) experiences, perceived as the mirror of uncultivated wilderness.

This may be of the natural world – from the trees and oceans to mountains and wildlife or mankind, marked by diversity in gender and ethnicity.

Is Africa’s essential identity composed solely of skin colour, and beyond that, of humanness? Or does it also rest in the biomes that Mbeki spoke of?

The question of determining African identity must be inclusive, for life remains within the context of environmental integration, protection and sustainability. The alternative, 'self-regulated' casino capitalism, is free of environmental and economic restraints, logic – and sustainability.

There is more to life than GDPs and speculative orgies, where even the winners are not winners but greedy and delusional losers. Until ecology possesses the innate and legal right to exist, we cannot progress. This truth is self-evident.

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