Product Information

Bringing to bear more than twenty years of experience as an environmental journalist, Kempf describes the invincibility that many of the world’s wealthy feel in the face of global warming, and how their unchecked privilege is thwarting action on the single most vexing problem facing our world.

In this important primer on the link between global ecology and the global economy, Kempf makes the following observations: First, that the planet’s ecological situation is growing ever worse, despite the efforts of millions of engaged citizens around the world. And second, despite environmentalists’ emphasis that “we’re all in the same boat,” the world’s economic elites—who continue to benefit by plundering the environment—have access to “lifeboats” that insulate them from the resulting catastrophes.

Societies have not been able to effectively combat the expanding ecological crisis because it is intimately linked to the social crisis in which the ruling form of capitalism has been organized to impede democratic initiatives. This link explains the failure to make progress against the greatest emergency of our time, because in this relationship the oligarchy plays an essential and destructive role. For this reason, solving the ecological crisis depends on disrupting the power of the world’s elite.

We cannot understand the entwined ecological and social crises, Kempf argues, if we don’t see them as the two sides of the same disaster—a disaster that comes from a system piloted by a dominant social strata that has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology. But Kempf also calls for measured optimism: “Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are emerging and—faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote—the desire to remake the world is being reborn.”

“Kempf’s warning, from the perch of Le Monde, needs to be heeded. Ecologists must read it to see the centrality of political economy; Lefties must read it to get a sense of the ongoing eco-cide.”–Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World

 

“Hervé Kempf wastes no words and pulls no punches in showing how the planet’s most privileged people are also its most dangerous. His book is to the early twenty-first century what The Theory of the Leisure Class was to the early twentieth–but with a couple of extra shots of much-needed adrenaline.”–Stan Cox, author of Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine

 

“In How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth Hervé Kempf has boldly dropped a mindbomb and broken a long standing taboo.”–Kalle Lasn, Editor-in-Chief of Adbusters magazine and author of Culture Jam

 

“Kempf’s elegant thesis puts a stake in the heart of neoliberalism, explains ecology like a poet, and unravels the self-serving economic theories of both the left and the right. Kempf is a modern day Lorax with a political conscience. He worries about the trees and the ad execs and the CIA, about ecology and economy and democracy–in short, he puts the pieces of the puzzle together. Santa’s getting this one for all my friends.”–John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA

 

“Speaks seldom-heard truths about economic growth, environmental destruction, poverty, and equity that hold the key to human survival and well-being. An important book.” – David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community and When Corporations Rule the World

 

“At last someone is speaking the truth that so many know yet few acknowledge: the rich are destroying the earth. And people are listening, reading, understanding. Read this book, then stop the rich from destroying our only home, and while you’re at it destroy the wretched system that allows the rich to do this. Thank you Herve Kempf, and thank you Chelsea Green.” –Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and Listening to the Land