ABSTRACT
Manfred Max-Neef (1982) once posed the paradoxical question to Ecuador’s politi-cians, whether the rich or the poor were more important for the functioning of a society. If the rich were to disappear he asked, what would be the effect on the lives of the poor? Surely quite small. But what if the poor disappeared? Then the whole functioning of society would break down. Analogously, one could argue that if the poor were to disappear, the effect on the environmental crisis would be quite limited, but if the rich were to disappear, the very basis of global unsustainability might also vanish. While in this chapter we do not suggest anything as extreme, we do argue that the roots of global unsustainability lie in the behaviour of the rich not the poor. As a consequence, we doubt that the current global discussions will lead to sustainability, exactly because they ignore this fundamental point.
