NAOMI: I don’t believe that the model has completely failed. There is still some ad revenue. People are still willing to buy newspapers, they’re just not willing to buy them in the same numbers and buy the number of ads that satisfy shareholders. Another ray of hope is looking forward to the Copenhagen summit on climate change. This is the next big climate summit to come up with what they call the post-Kyoto consensus. And at this point, I think there’s a lot of rightful cynicism about the Kyoto protocol because the whole question of "How are we going to respond to climate change?" was entirely infected by market fundamentalism. Bringing it back full circle to where we started, the ideas that have dominated for the past 30 years have utterly shaped the environmental debate during the Kyoto era. So the idea was to always find “market-based solutions” to climate change, which meant that we couldn’t really legislate, and everything had to be creating market incentives for the private sector to solve the problem for us. And I think that’s a much harder sell today in the context of people rightfully losing faith in the ability of the market to solve our most pressing problems. So I think you’re going to see a lot of very different, non-market-based solutions being proposed ahead of the Copenhagen Summit, which is in December 2009.

JOAN: What’s an example of a non-market solution?

NAOMI: A non-market solution is this idea that I’ve become really interested in. It’s been kicking around academic circles for a while but for the first time it’s being applied, which is the idea of “ecological debt” or “climate debt.” I’ll give you a concrete example. Where this issue is most alive is in Ecuador right now. Ecuador is an enormously resource-rich country, as we know. They have very large oil reserves. But they also have a very, very active environmental movement and a very, very strong indigenous movement, particularly — though not exclusively — in the Amazon. This is one of the most biodiverse parts of the world, quite pristine wilderness. But there’s a lot of oil under the ground, and there’s a huge push to take the oil out of the area I’m talking about, which is called the Yasuni National Park. And there’s a battle that’s been going on, which is really about the limits of growth-based economics. It’s not just about the Right, because in Ecuador there’s a left-wing president, part of what they call the Pink Tide in Latin America. His name is Rafael Correa and he calls himself a socialist. He was originally in favor of extracting the oil and reinvesting the profits in health care and education. He doesn’t want the profits  to just fly out of the country, as they have so often in the past. He was going to negotiate a really good deal with the oil company, unlike his predecessors. That was his vision. What’s interesting is that he has come up against tremendous resistance from indigenous groups and from environmentalists in Ecuador saying, “That’s not good enough.” Their slogan is "Leave It in the Ground." They don’t want the oil being extracted. But then you have this problem: Ecuador needs money for health care and education and has been held back by regressive economic policies.

So what’s the solution? They’ve come up with this idea of ecological debt, which basically argues that the rich world, the industrialized world that has created the problem of climate change, knowing full well the science that has been in for a long time, owes an ecological debt to developing countries like Ecuador. What they’re saying is they’re owed an ecological debt because they are living through climate changes, and this is an Andean nation that is already dealing with water scarcity and many of the issues associated with global warming. And so they are proposing to the world, and Rafael Correa has signed on to this idea in theory, that there should be some sort of global fund where we in the rich world are paying them to leave it in the ground and reduce their emissions, particularly because this is a world heritage site and we all need the Amazon. Developing countries shouldn’t have to choose between having money for health care and education and reducing emissions. So it’s a completely different logic. Once again, as with reparations for slavery and colonialism, it turns the world on its head and asks this fundamental question of “who owes who?” — who’s the real debtor and who’s the real creditor?

I think these are the ideas that are going to take off in the next 20 years. And I’ll tell you something. I’ve been thinking about this idea and it definitely ties in with who I’m talking to, because I wrote it down: Who Owes Who. The acronym is W.O.W. It’s a pretty great name for a movement challenging the underlying causes of global inequality. The WOW project, that’s what we need.