For me, there is something supremely ironic in the awarding of a Nobel Prize last year to a banker named Muhammad.

There are plenty of successful bankers in New York City alone. Has one of them ever been nominated for such a prize? Why is Mr. Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh, a banker described by many people worldwide as a "banker to the poor," selected for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize?

I suppose it is because nowhere else on the surface of the Earth can anyone find another banker who is not servicing the rich and powerful and, therefore, willing to say something like, "Everybody is busy buying, everybody is busy consuming, but they don't realize how much of the exhaustible resources that we are using up by this wasteful way of living, the lifestyle. So we need to look for a new kind of lifestyle, which will be consistent with the resources that we have in this world."

The successful bankers I have met in the course of time uniformly display a certain imperious reserve associated with excessive wealth and power as well as a willful religiosity that forbids them from speaking out loudly and clearly what is true for them about such things as the unsustainability of the huge scale and rapid growth rate of economic expansion on a tiny planet the size of Earth.

Hopefully, the bankers to wealthy and powerful people, the ones who dominate and manage the activities of the global political economy, soon choose to follow the example of Muhammad Yunus before too much time has not been wasted, too much of the environment irreversibly degraded, too many species massively extirpated, many too many resources recklessly dissipated and too much of the world we inhabit utterly compromised by the patently unsustainable lifestyles of the rich and famous.