Feel Privileged

There's something in the air, something strong smelling and righteous.  It is a heady concentration which brings tears to the eyes.  Not tears of joy or pain but tears of self righteous fury.  The righteous bombast with which the world was pursued, explored and celebrated until only 10 years ago... and now it it being abused. 

From  where comes this dark, manly and pungent odour...?  Oh I see it now, they stand there, mighty, translucent in their fury, speaking forth their munificent consent as to the outrageous state of the world and their endearing realisation that conservationism must be prioritised above all else.  The inconsideration of those monstrous hordes; did they not know their place?  Did they not know that only one group was able to live thus?

Chinese and Indian tourism is increasing exponentially.  This is as a result of visa restrictions being lifted, economic development creating a huge middle class and the rest of the world realising that there is a substantial amount of money to be made selling things to this new middle class.  This is not a new phenomena, there have been waves of tourists before, but nothing has reached the scale of the outpouring of new tourists from China and India over the last decade.  Suddenly Westerners, used to stomping all over the world and murdering local custom (and customers), have to align themselves to a new reality.  They are visiting us.

They, unlike the Japanese who were quiet, submissive and not particularly numerous, are coming in vast numbers.  Hordes of new temporary interlopers.  They come with buses, airplanes, trains and cars.  They are impervious to our attempts to discourage them with hard-minded tutting racists, shocking infrastructure, unwelcoming nimbies and a score of unscrupulous rip off merchants looking to profit from their naivete.

Its hard to read the commentary about the spate of deaths on Everest without taking a step back and considering quite why this is becoming such an issue globally.  The fact that people are dying on Everest is not particularly new, or particularly surprising given its very high up and widely considered dangerous.  It's that so many of them seem to be of non-white origin...

Therein lies one of the potential problems with the rise in the ecological movement in certain, countries.  Conservationism is fine when it limits itself to pushing for renewable power, recycling and environmental protection; but there is something in this new wave, linked to the rise in the far-right, which hints at a darker side.  When viewed through a certain lens, conservationism, particularly anything which deals with population control and entitlement to resources (hello Melinda Gates, if you're so keen to spread your message then why isn't your book on empowerment free?) smacks of white privilege and an assertion that the reason the planet is going to pieces is not because of us but because of them. In order for us to save our planet, they need to forego what we have and if they're not prepared to sacrifice it, then this is a fantastic reason for us to continue to skew the rules in our favour and stop them from having it.

Trump could, by putting the world into recession and retarding the Chinese economic model, become the worlds greatest conservationist.  Just as the good people at Lehman Brothers, the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury inadvertently contrived to reduce carbon emissions globally by 5-10% with the largest world recession since the 1930's.  Trump seems to have belatedly realised his end-game is not to beat the Chinese on absolute terms, just to do so on a relative basis.  At the same time this will probably put the entire world back 15-20% in economic terms once his monstrous bull market lurches into a wall but by then we'll have invented a new number (Gross Happiness Product anyone?) and we can justify the world order on a new basis and with a new perspective where human well being is at the centre of development.  Plus the Chinese economy will be in chaos and he can claim victory.  The Ultimate. Pyrrhic. Victory.

GDP is a flawed metric, of that there can be no doubt, but without economic development we will not be able to pull those parts of the world which are currently mired in it, out of poverty.  What is becoming clear is that the diminishing returns that arise from economic growth as economies mature is a problem for those parts of the world rich enough to be concerned about this issue.  However, for those parts of the world unfortunate enough to not have partaken in the economic party thus far, a certain amount of economic development is absolutely necessary for them to bring the standards of living of their citizens up to the required level. 

We should definitively not be prioritizing economic growth as a panacea to the ills of modern western society, it demonstrably isn't working.  But likewise we should not resent other countries their turn at the wheel and we should celebrate their success, even if it makes us feel like we're missing out.  Like an older person who celebrates the success of their younger colleagues, the developed world should help the developing world, not lecture and tut and surreptitiously disrupt their progress...