The chariots of Pharaoh at the Red Sea The crises of capitalism and of environment. A modest proposal towards sustainability

The present global situation recalls us the two walls in which the Red Sea had split to allow that Pharaoh follow the people beloved by God. On one wall stays the economic crisis, that is tout court the capitalist crisis, on the other wall there is the predicament of environment. Then, it is reasonable to wonder if the walls will tumble down with severe damages to all the characters, this time, of this representation; unless a “modest proposal”, of the kind that we will try to formulate in this paper, be intensively pursued. Several of the themes here gathered have already been object of reflection in some previous works. In this paper we collect and enrich those ideas, and put a special attention to the so called economic “cycle” and a stationary ecological-economic model in a sustainability scenario. Some years ago, the financial “bubble”, burst with its destructive and lasting economic and social consequences, the bloody geopolitics of oil of the last decades, one sixth of the humankind under the threshold of surviving, the plunder of the resources of the Earth – from the rare ores up to the great pluvial forests –, the general environment crisis, dramatic for the climate change, exemplified in an also too much persuasive way that capitalist democracies as well as totalitarian States, those which have chosen the free market economy, were not able to face the two crises of our title.INGLES