Ecological debt
[4] The term 'ecological debt' first appeared on paper in 1985, in a yellow booklet with the title "Women in movement" made by the German ecofeminist Eva Quistorp and edited by the Green Party in Germany in 1985.
In 1992, the term appeared again in two reports published in different places around the world: “Deuda ecológica” by Robleto and Marcelo in Chile and “Miljöskulden” by Jernelöv in Sweden.
[5] Robleto and Marcelo's report, published by the critical NGO Instituto de Ecologia Politica (IEP),[6] was a political and activist response to the global environmental negotiations happening during the Rio Summit.
It shed light on the debate occurring in Latin America since the 1980s about the crucial nature's heritage that had been consumed and not returned (i.e. ecological debt).
[9] They proposed 'debt for nature swaps', which essentially means that those countries that possess abundant biodiversity and environmental resources would give them up to the global North in return for the World Bank reducing their debt.
[9] Salleh justified this by explaining how the 500-year-long colonization process involving the extraction of resources has caused immense damage and destruction to the ecosystem of the Global South.
[11] In 2009 as well, Andrew Simms used the ecological debt in a more bio-physical way and defined it as the consumption of resources from within an ecosystem that exceeds the system's regenerative capacity.
The concept in this sense is based on the bio-physical carrying capacity of an ecosystem; through measuring ecological footprints human society can determine the rate at which it is depleting natural resources.
Ultimately, the imperative of sustainability requires human society to live within the means of the ecological system to support life over the long term.
There have been several debates around the notion of ecological debt, and this is mostly because the concept arises from various social movements in response to the distributional injustice of climate change's consequences on the environment and people's livelihood.
Salleh, in particular, showed how the ecological debt manifested in the destruction of the environment and associated climate change the North has created is made possible through the process of modernization and capitalism.
[9] The rise of the nature-culture divide that emerged due to rapid industrialisation is a perfect illustration of a human-nature dualism in which human being has the central role above everything else.
[13] For example, when the Colonization of south america occurred over 500 years ago, European settlers brought with them their Eurocentric values, seeing themselves as better than and therefore entitled to the Indigenous people's knowledge and the land they lived on.
In a perceived postcolonial world, large corporations and Western governments tend to present solutions to global warming by commodifying nature and hoping to make a profit out of it.
[5] Moreover, the language of debt, repayments, credits and so forth is understood in Northern countries mostly, and is mostly focused on recognition of wrongdoing but not payment for loss of services for instance.
