here is one answer: that predatory economies inevitably drift into Exterminism.  italics original, bolding mine.  

"Progress," or "growth" chews threw the world like a feral pig - just as it chewed through the forest around my house.  No one intentionally killed the deer or the beaver.  Their deaths were simply a by-product... a statistical probability... the collateral damage of a social system reproducing itself.

Exterminism is this process writ large - writ worldwide.  Exterminism is the final stage of imperialism.

We cannot know the true meanings of Katrina in the familiar language of the Imperium; and we cannot link Katrina to either ecocide or the seemingly maniacal devotion of the neocons to the Iraqi bloodbath by simply comparing the costs of Katrina and the costs of the war.  This goes well beyond shopkeeper logic.

Ecocide - a terrifying danger often ignored on the left and the right - permanent war, and the malignant neglect of Katrina's victims, are intimately and structurally related.

"Exterminism" was first coined - as close as I can determine from cursory research - by Edward Thompson in 1980, in an essay for New Left Review called "Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization."

Exterminism, according to Thompson, describes "those characteristics of a society - expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity and its ideology - which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes."

Must be... as in "inevitable within the system."

It is, in other words, the tacit or open acceptance of the necessity for mass exterminations or die-offs (often beginning with mass displacements) as the price for continued accumulation and the political dominance of a ruling class.

"Shock and Awe" doctrine is an expression of exterminism.  Refusal to intervene in the AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa is equally an expression of exterminism.

Exterminism is not totally, or even most often, characterized by offensive action against whole populations, but frequently accomplished by calculated neglect - the instruments of which are poverty, disease, malnutrition , and "natural" disasters... and frequently facilitated by economic isolation and the mass displacement of populations.

Imperialism is not merely the oppression and control of nation by nation.  It is a system of inter-dependency in a very specific form - of capitalism.  There is no ideal and universal form of capitalism but only transient forms, bounded by changing externalities and driven by changing internalities.  Today's form is both imperial and exterminist.  It requires the plunder of nation by nation, and it necessitates mass displacement, mass neglect, and eventual death as part of its inexorable logic.

This is what we saw on a relatively small scale, even if we did not know it, with the spectacle of people starving and dehydrated on flood-besieged rooftops while a smiling George W. Bush cut a birthday cake for a smiling John McCain.  This is what we don't see - because it is not displayed in our cultural production - in the wasting away of tens of millions with HIV-AIDS in Africa.

In fact, many in the US - whether they will say it aloud or not - find this African die-off perfectly acceptable.

I recently had a brief exchange of notes with a senior faculty member, on the general topic of energy and sustainability.  After acknowledging that we were up a pretty narrow creek with no paddle, this cultured and civilised academic said, "I believe in conservation and possibly cellulosic ethanol.  I don't think that wind and tides can do that much.  Mainly I am in favor of x10 fewer people, at the very least."  This is a person who lives 60 miles and a mountain range away from the day job and commutes daily, and flies all over the world regularly each year to distinguished scholarly gatherings.  I somehow have the feeling that the culling that is imagined here is not a culling of the white western elite who live this fossil intensive lifestyle, but an elimination of all the other "hungry mouths" on Earth so as to keep this lifestyle going a little while longer.  I could be wrong, and hope that I am;  but to fly 50,000 miles per annum and then express the hope for a 90 percent reduction in the human population as a solution to our energy problems, strikes me as chilling -- about a 7.5 on the Wannsee scale.

Garrett Hardin has asserted the position that the West should stop giving aid of any kind to the South aka the third world, and just let millions starve as they are "naturally destined to do."  However I have not read any proposal from him for us to stop stealing their minerals, oil, water, land, protein, etc. nor to pay reparations for the damage inflicted over several centuries of colonial occupation.

In other words, "look at the time / let's just say that I'm / the winner..."

Disclaimer:  citing a link at FTW does not constitute a vote of confidence for MR.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...