In the last week a Mercedes-Benz W196 from 1954, once driven by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss sold at auction for €51.15million (US$52.5million).
When you compare this to the less than US$30million to modernise the CITES wildlife trade regulator’s permit system globally, to help save more than 40,000 endangered species from overexploitation, it is a vulgar and sad indictment of how people in high-income countries perceive status.
Right now, the new owner of the car may be admiring their new purchase. The reality is they are simply looking at a pretty machine, engineered 70 years ago by a handful of men. If they are like most of the world’s wealthy, they are completely ignoring the destruction of something irreplaceable made by millions of years of evolution.
When individual cars or apartments can sell for significantly more than it would cost to for a global roll out of a system that could help save the world’s wild species from overexploitation, you must wonder how we have collectively lost the plot.
Does the scale of desperation to consume point to the collective mental health of the world’s wealthy needing to be scrutinised, when saving the world’s wild species and ecosystems is known to be necessary for human survival? With every self-indulgent, unnecessary purchase, the people who already have everything are spending their kids and grandkids inheritance.
Something has gone seriously wrong with what we assign status to and what the wealthy spend their money on. Wildlife and ecosystems are being destroyed to fulfill the consumption addiction of the people who don’t need any more than they already have, but that’s OK because there is an opportunity to get media attention for a piece of conceptual art consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall selling for $US6.2 million. Or like a consortium of Silicon Valley investors, you can splash US$180 million on buying a non-existent sport franchise!
These frankly ridiculous choices are a perfect example of the leadership/wealthy – empathy gap. The rich have lost all touch with normal life and normal people. Money has become a plaything to them, when you are worth 300 billion dollars, there simply aren’t enough real assets to buy with that sort of money.
The neoliberal system has enabled too much unproductive money into the global system. This unproductive money is money used for speculation purposes or spent on unnecessary goods and services; this unproductive money is also parked in secrecy jurisdictions. All this wasted money, when we collectively need funds spent productively to tackle the biodiversity and climate crisis.
While the nature of money means that finding the money to deal with the extinction and climate crisis is the easy part, the selfish tech-utopias dreamed up by narcissistic man-children need to be taxed out of existence. They have displayed too little interest in restoring the natural basis of our existence, instead they have pursued immortality and dreams of living in the matrix.
But it is never too late for us to collectively decide, “What is too rich?”. The answer could be anything that threatens democracy to create wealth for the few, while destroying the planet for all. The shortfall to protect biodiversity has been estimated at $700 billion; there would be a project the billionaires could actually make use of all that wealth.
So, if there aren’t enough human-made assets to buy, why not invest in the planet? In restoring the damage we have done to the biosphere? Until simple, practical steps to save what we can become a topic of conservation there is little chance of reversing course.
With global warming continuing at increasing speed (we are at 1.75 degrees above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline already), the number of climate disasters will equally increase at record speeds. At some point, the number of people directly affected will have reached a critical mass and this current nonsense will stop. Hopefully, that will be soon enough for any changes we make to still have an effect.
When status is attained by spending money unproductively on speculation and the consumption of unnecessary stuff, the future doesn’t bode well. We can choose to only give status to the people contributing to rehabilitation of the planet and humanity. While we pay attention to the needy, who get status from consumption, they are leading us all down the path of collapse and what does that say about us collectively?
Lynn Johnson is a physicist by education and has worked as an executive coach and a strategy consultant for over 20 years. In her work she pushes for systemic change, not piecemeal solutions, this includes campaigning for modernising the legal trade in endangered species, to help tackle the illegal wildlife trade.
