has then been reused by some environmental organizations from the Global South. Campaigns on the ecological debt were launched since 1997 by Accion Ecologica of Ecuador and Friends of the Earth. Overall, the ecological debt 'movement' was born of the convergence of three main factors during the 80s-90s: 1) the consequences of the debt crisis in the 70s due to the Volcker shocks or the drastic increase of interest rates (followed by structural adjustments made by the US to solve the stagflation in 1981, and thus putting heavily indebted third world countries in an impossible situation in regards to debt repayment); 2) the rising of environmental awareness as seen previously (activists and NGOs attending the Rio Summit in 1992); 3) an increase in recognition of the violence caused by colonialism over the years (the demand of recognition is over 500 years, since Columbus arrived in North America). In 2009, ecofeminist scholar Ariel Salleh explained how the capitalist processes at work in the global North exploit nature and people simultaneously, ultimately sustaining a large ecological debt in her article, "Ecological Debt: Embodied Debt". At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, politicians and corporate leaders from the global North introduced the supposed solution for the foreign debt crisis in the global South. They proposed 'debt for nature swaps', which essentially means that those countries that possess abundant biodiversity and environmental resources would give them up to the global North in return for the World Bank reducing their debt. Feminist environmentalists, Indigenous activists, and peasants from the Global South, exposed how the Global North is much more indebted to the Global South. Salleh justified this by explaining how the 500-year-long colonization process involving the extraction of resources has caused immense damage and destruction to the ecosystem of the Global South. In fact, scientists at the US National Academy for Sciences state that in the time period of 1961–2000, by analyzing the cost of greenhouse gas emissions created by the rich (the Global North) alone, it has become apparent that the rich have imposed climate changes on the poor that greatly outweigh the poor's foreign debt. All of this environmental degradation amounts to ecological debt, seizing the people's livelihood resources in the Global South. In 2009 as well, Andrew Simms used the ecological debt in a more bio-physical way and defined it as the consumption of resources from within an ecosystem that exceeds the system's