We are already quietly practicing Lifeboat Ethics: we are allowing the Third World to drown because we deny them access to our luxury Lifeboat. We are pushing them over the edge of survivability unnecessarily and prematurely, just to prolong our time of luxurious living in the North. We may all go over the edge eventually, but we are not keeping solidarity in the process. We are not even waiting until the scramble is on for necessities; we are keeping our luxuries at the expense of their necessities. It is not a zero-sum game, we win and they lose. It will either be a both-win game now, or a both-lose game, sequentially.

The distribution system is stacked and skewed in an incredibly cruel way. The marginal people (meaning those being pushed over the edge) are the poorest people in the poorest countries, mainly children. They are invisible to us. While millions of them die, we don’t perceive them as brothers and sisters. There is no grief or pity in our hearts, no sense of loss – except in times of unusual publicity, as in the Ethiopian famine of 1987.

In the coming eco-catastrophe, if the Netherlands is flooded, we will respond and fight to save their land by building dikes, because we see them as real persons. If the Maldives, Egypt and Bangladesh are submerged, we will look at the newspaper headlines, sigh briefly, and go on our way.

I am not saying that we deliberately exploit them. There is no evil intention. It is structural violence and perceptual blindness, perhaps fed by latent racism.

Yet they are our predecessors into the abyss. The centre will simply sink later than the periphery; not literally through submersion, but figuratively: we will slide into extinction for other reasons – food shortages through drought, or whatever. And the centre will have farther to fall, because we are so accustomed to the soft life. We are not used to daily suffering as they are. We are used to three meals a day and snacking in between, then going on diets against obesity. We consider it a hardship if we have to skip meals while traveling. “I am hungry”, we wail, in temporary discomfort. Yet their chronic hunger hurts, more than we have a way of knowing. It is a failure of the imagination.

Apocalypse is not in the future, it is now – for them. They go first into the Black Hole from which no one ever returns. The are the first lemmings over the cliff in our overcrowded world – the first, but not the last. We are behind them in the queue and pushing. Our time will come soon enough, but meanwhile we fiddle near the site of the all-consuming fire. We don’t hate them who fall in, we just ignore them, unaware that we pushed them. If we took notice, we might glimpse our own approaching fate; but we would rather fiddle and dance a bit longer. Closing ranks in solidarity does not appeal to us; does not even occur to us.

Our economic system is based on individual utility maximization. Economists never heard that “no man is an island…ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. We are not a family, but two cultures separated by a gulf of ignorance, almost two quasi-species in the sociosphere, though not in the biosphere. Divided in this way, we are far more likely to fall in the coming showdown with natural forces. United we might have a chance to stand