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Our overall observation is that the distributional conflict, largely over
pride and power, resulted in the material inadequacy of a livelihood for mil-
lions. The example speaks both to distributional inequity as well as to the
waste of natural resources engendered by conflict.
In contrast to the Zimbabwe tragedy, 75 soldiers from South Africa emerged
as unlikely heroes, while the floodwaters, which had ravaged neighboring
Mozambique during February and March of 2000, began to recede. Heroes?
Yes, heroes because they almost single-handedly rescued nearly 15,000 peo-
ple who were marooned on rooftops and in treetops and were clinging to
utility poles, as the rest of the world watched, wondered what to do, and
decided whether to act.
“We owe the South Africans a great deal of gratitude,” 1 said Silvana Langa,
director of Mozambique's disaster relief agency, an irony lost on no one old
enough to remember when the South African white minority not only ruled
South Africa through apartheid but also was at war with Mozambique. In
fact, it is likely that South Africa had once been Mozambique's worst enemy,
because it tried to topple the nation's socialist regime by supporting the insur-
gents. But much had changed in South Africa during the decade of the 1990s.
For example, the white soldiers and the black guerrilla fighters, once
sworn enemies, formed a single army committed to rescuing Mozambicans
from a watery grave. “I don't think any of us thought about the irony of the
past,” said Brigadier General John Church, a veteran of 33 years in the South
African Air Force. “We weren't thinking about who was white, and who was
black, and history. We were just trying to save as many people as we could.
. . . We just saw it as Africans helping Africans.” 2 The message here is con-
sistent with the Zimbabwe story but has the opposite outcome: Cooperation
and equity create material adequacy.
With the foregoing in mind, we reiterate that promoting an equitable
income distribution is a value-based concept, where the agreed-upon prem-
ises consistent with social-environmental sustainability are unapologeti-
cally allowed to dominate the so-called value-free impersonality of the overall
global marketplace. As we have said, far from being value free, the global
marketplace (both for products and inputs) is actually inculcated with strong
value judgments made, in fact, by the world's economic elite, and, as such,
has profound, equity-destructive distributional characteristics. The resultant
inequality pulls the world in powerful directions away from sustainability
(reminiscent of the blatant, social-economic inequity in the foregoing story
of Zimbabwe), especially as it seeks to rely on growth as the answer to pov-
erty and the uneven distribution of wealth.
The important conclusions for this chapter on distribution—a topic that
necessarily injects normative decision making into a highly resistant and
suspicious discipline—are twofold. First, given the impossibility of perma-
nent growth within our biosphere, we are forced, by our ecological crisis, to
find a better solution. Second, poor distribution means that a given resource
base for an economy, or for the world as a whole, is more likely to be deemed
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