A best seller in France, and already translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Korean, Hervé Kempf's How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth now appears in its first English edition. 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."

"Our biosphere is dying, and with it the livelihood of billions. But the global royalty that sets the rules for trade and commerce goes on in its bubble, oblivious to anything but its self interest. Filled with righteous anger, this book tells a truth that cannot be denied and may just save the planet and our lives."
--Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

"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

"An intellectually original and undeniably pugnacious endeavor."

—Patrick Piro, Politis

"Our biosphere is dying, and with it the livelihood of billions. But the global royalty that sets the rules for trade and commerce goes on in its bubble, oblivious to anything but its self interest. Filled with righteous anger, this book tells a truth that cannot be denied and may just save the planet and our lives."--Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

"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

"An invigorating book, to be read at once."

—L'Ecologiste

"Stunning survey . . . great journalism."

—Anne Crignon, Le Nouvel Observateur

"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

"Kempf powerfully draws attention to issues of wealth, poverty, and the ecological basis for life that have been too long neglected by economists and those who listen to us."--Julie A. Nelson, author of Economics for Humans

"An invigorating book, to be read at once."--L'Ecologiste

"[A] bombshell book."

—Louis-Gilles Francoeur, Le Devoir

Hervé Kempf has more than 20 years of experience as a reporter. He is the environmental editor of Le Monde, France's most influential daily newspaper, and the founder of Reporterre, a Web site devoted to discussion about the environment and social justice. He lives in France.