After the borrowing crisis, the footprint crisis. We're in the process of drowning ourselves in an ocean of debts and here the WWF comes and sends us a curious sort of lifesaver in the guise of ecological footprint. To put it roughly, that honorable assembly of nature protectors reminds us that with respect to natural resources also, we are living on credit. We are exhausting our planet at top speed and are now in the process of eating up our capital. When will we reach the end? The World Wildlife Fund doesn't say, but it does amiably draw our attention to the fact that the present financial crisis is a walk in the park compared to the ecological crisis that looms on the horizon, say around 2030.

    The theme of natural resources exhaustion is obviously not new. Since the Club of Rome and even far earlier, we have known that our unbridled consumption of land, forest, water and air would run into a limit, but as that limit has receded while we advance, we've gotten used to living with this quite virtual threat. As we'd gotten used to not listening to those Cassandras who predicted the bursting of the real estate bubble. But precisely because the finance ceiling has fallen on our heads, we must take advantage of the occasion to ask ourselves how to prevent the environmental ceiling from crushing us completely.

    The dangers are known; the remedies also. We are too many, too rich, too extravagant. One problem is that one of the main reasons for the acceleration highlighted by the WWF report relates to the improvement in our standard of living and also that of millions of Chinese and Indians. Globalization and economic growth - which, whatever we say today, are all the same preferable to destitution and chaos - have widely contributed to the acceleration of the planet's decline. All the more so as this phenomenon was largely made possible by the very low price of energy the last ten years. So we have picked up bad habits that more and more people copy as soon as they are able.

    So then, rather than wait around indefinitely for someone to make a gesture because "those Chinese pollute more than we do," let's take things in hand. Here are four levers to give our Earth more breathing room: bring demography under control; consume less, but better; economize on energy, and bet heavily on technological research to improve our productivity and produce clean energy. Impossible? When we see the results of countries like Germany that have succeeded in reducing their environmental footprint even as they pursue growth, we observe that solutions exist. The [French] Environmental Summit shows the way. And if the government wants not only to counter the present crisis, but also to avoid the next one, it should measure every recovery initiative, every form of assistance and every big program by the criterion of their environmental footprint.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.