Our Ecological Footprint by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees (1996) instigated a major strand in radical social thinking about construction of the future.

The authors not only defined a new concept — that of an ecological footprint — they also developed a metric for it, whose units are defined in terms of "global hectares," comparing the biological capacity of societies/countries (their ability to produce and reproduce the conditions for life on the planet) with their consumption of resources made available to them by this bio-capacity.

The authors' conclusions are worrying. At the global level, the bio-capacity of our planet is 2.1 global hectares (gha) per capita (i.e., 13.2 billion gha per 6.3 billion inhabitants). In contrast, the global average for consumption of resources was already — in the mid-1990s — 2.7 gha. This "average" masks a gigantic imbalance, the average for the Triad (Europe, North America, and Japan) having already reached a multiple of the order of four magnitudes of the global average. A good proportion of the bio-capacity of societies in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centers.

In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity. This expansion's logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of the peoples of the South — as "over-population" — or, at the least, their confinement to ever increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed that gives legitimacy to this type of "final solution" to the problem.

The interest of this work goes beyond its conclusions. For it is a question of a calculation (I use the term "calculation," rather than "discourse," deliberately) put in terms of the use value of the planet's resources, illustrated through their measurement in global hectares (gha), not in dollars.