The affluent reside in largest numbers in the industrialised countries but certainly not only there. They are also to be found in significant numbers in every nation. In addition to having a great deal of money to spend, their major distinguishing characteristic is the virtually total control they establish over the structures of governance and business in their countries. It is through these structures, by influencing legislation and organisational strategies, that they collectively capture the major part of the economy’s rewards. Both to symbolise and to demonstrate their status in society, they acquire an insatiable desire for material goods and physical services and the means to generate an unlimited demand for these. These demands inexorably concatenate through the economy into the natural resource base, producing tremendous pressure on the earth’s biosphere.

One major category of impacts is, of course, the depletion of non-renewables including fossil fuels and minerals. A second group of impacts is the destruction, often irreversible, of the regenerative capacity of "renewables" such as water, timber and gene pools. The third set of impacts is the disruption of biogeochemical cycles and global life support systems such as the stratospheric ozone shield and the greenhouse effect. These impacts are not small: the anthropogenic movement of material world-wide is, today, approaching in magnitude the natural, geological flows of material – a trend that is clearly untenable for long without major breakdowns of critical life support systems. They also foreclose many options for a decent and healthy life not only for future generations but even for a large part of humanity today.

The consumption patterns and production systems adopted by today’s rich also produce large quantities of waste and pollution. Much of this is in the form of chemicals and toxic substances that are expensive to dispose off safely – and in many cases accumulate in dumps that will continue to endanger health for many generations to come. Even with the exemplary efforts of some industries over the past decade to adopt cleaner production methods, the emission of pollutants world-wide continues to grow rapidly.

The affluent in any country create other, more subtle and indirect, impacts too. By a combination of money, muscle, political power and social supremacy, they regularly manage to appropriate the best and most productive lands – squeezing the original inhabitants further and further into marginal, and ecologically fragile, areas such as forests, deserts and uplands. The "reasons" for displacing them come in many forms: factories, dams, power stations, roads, bridges. Or, just mechanised agriculture and plantations – always in the name of economic efficiency and social progress. Except that the poor, who keep having to pay the bulk of the costs in terms of personal loss, never seem to get any share of the wealth and progress created. They only get blamed for the ecological disasters they constantly find themselves squeezed into.

In fairness, it would be difficult to deny that the poor also create significant impacts on the resource base. The exigencies of survival and the lack of options available sometimes force them to undermine their own future by using their resources in a non-sustainable way. In villages, fuelwood collection certainly contributes to the loss of trees and the creation of wastelands; excessive pumping of water has, in many areas, drawn down water tables to levels that are now uneconomic to use. In urban areas, slum dwellers contribute their share of pollution hazards and social disruption.

Nevertheless, the poor can never hope to compete with the affluent in the magnitude of environmental destruction they cause. Moreover, the distribution of impacts in the two cases is quite different: the rich can escape from the problems they cause, the poor can not. In one case the environmental costs are largely externalised, in the other they are borne by the people who cause them, however involuntarily. q