The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 144

Box 10.2 (continued)
early colonial period. Today, one in three people in PNG is connected to the
coffee industry, illustrating the way in which demand for commodities can
defi ne local socio-environmental relations even in places that are often thought
of as on the edges of the global market economy. Paige West ( 2012 ) has exam-
ined the movement of coffee from indigenous producers in PNG to consumers
around the world. Her research with the Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in
PNG's highlands, shows how eager they are to expand their business and social
relationships with the buyers, processors, and exporters, as well as with con-
sumers in cities such as Hamburg, Sydney, and London. At the same time, West
shows how the “market” for specialty coffee misrepresents the Gimi, using
images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the “back-
wardness” of PNG impedes economic development, these images obscure the
structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in
PNG. Coffee producers, in PNG, make about .15 cents per hour on specialty
coffee that sells for over $12.00 per pound at Starbucks, exemplifying the asym-
metrical relations that constitute the Anthropocene's global economic system.
As the United Nation's last Human Development Report makes clear, climate
change driven by fossil fuel consumption in the world's wealthiest nations poses the
greatest challenge to achieving environmental and social equity in the world (HDR
2011 ). The Anthropocene's poorer nations have contributed less than 1 % of the
cumulative emissions that are driving climate change (Steffen et al. 2011 , p. 746). At
the same time, it is the 1.3 billion people who rely on natural resources for their
income and subsistence (such as through export agriculture, forest products, and
fi shing) that are the least resilient to climate-driven environmental change. For exam-
ple, societies in resource rich Arctic regions contributed little to the causes of climate
change, yet they are among the fi rst to observe and respond to its impacts (Crate and
Nuttall 2009 ; Krupnik et al. 2004 ), as illustrated in Box 10.3 . Women in poorer coun-
tries, who are disproportionately involved in subsistence farming, gathering of forest
goods, and water collection, are even more vulnerable to the environmental impacts
of climate change (HDR 2011 ; see Mamani-Bernabé 2015 in this volume [Chap. 6 ]).
These socio-ecological inequalities are a result of what Leichenko and O'Brien
( 2008 ) have called a “double exposure” to global environmental change and pro-
cesses of globalization associated with market-driven drivers of change. Leichenko
and O'Brien's double exposure framework directs our attention to the non-linear
interactions and feedbacks of these two “transformative” processes of change, as
further illustrated in Box 10.4 . Importantly, they demonstrate how groups most vul-
nerable to the impacts of global environmental change often simultaneously experi-
ence the negative impacts of globalization. In other words, the interactions between
these processes contribute to “growing inequalities, increasing vulnerabilities, and
accelerated and unsustainable rates of change” (Leichenko and O'Brien 2008 , p. 9).