What is the effect of poverty, debt and corporate unaccountability on ecosystems?
While it may not always be obvious, the international policies that have created poverty and large-scale debt in many nations have resulted in repayment schemes that force them to mine their resources, increasingly in an unsustainable way. The long term costs are hard to measure. It is not just, say, the cost of cleaning up an oil spill, but the cascading effects it may have on the environment and the loss of benefits that the environment brings to humans, in the form of things like tourism, food and medicine, natural protections to soak up severe weather storms and so on. Corporate accountability is also often negligible, so, as Noam Chomsky often phrases it, the profits are privatized while the costs are socialized… Find Out More » – Related Section(s): Environment Issues / Trade Related Issues • A cyanide spill in a river in Romania from a gold mine has caused an ecological disaster. The spill, from a broken dam, has affected the river and surrounding life all the way into Hungary
