Monbiot - We're Doing Too Much of Everything.
In his 2004 book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," anthropologist Jared Diamond writes that when societies collapse it happens rapidly and just when that society has reached its zenith. It's like over-inflating a party balloon.
In George Monbiot's latest column in The Guardian, he describes something eerily similar underway now.
There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world.
Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.
A Full-Spectrum Assault on the Living World
What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.
...Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.
What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.
...Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.
A Bitter Pill We Will Never Swallow
We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.
We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.
Monbiot is probably right, we cannot afford the rich. His prescription of "doing less of almost everything" well, over my dead body.
Sometimes reefs survive the pollution, but not the people.
ReplyDeleteI visited Koh Kut, a remote Gulf of Thailand island in 2011, before it had much tourism. The first ATM on the island was eagerly awaited.
The most beautiful beach was mostly deserted due to the thriving coral reef that limited swimming.
Flash forward to 2017. The same beach was now packed with tourists.
The remains of the reef were stacked up in piles, off the beach.
'So long, and thanks for all the fish.'
I visited a Caribbean island where the locals pillaged the coral from their reefs to supply souvenir shops on other islands. Impoverished people don't have time for environmental niceties.
DeleteMichel Moore very convincingly made this point in his last film. We are not going to grow our way out of the climate change crisis. In fact, what we need to do is concentrate on sustainable solutions (and ones that don't exacerbate income inequality and generational conflict).
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, Mike, the Masters of the Universe aren't interested in Michael Moore's sustainable prescriptions. As for the plebs, we don't have much appetite for change of this magnitude either.
DeleteO/T
ReplyDeleteThe worms are emerging from the woodwork:
"Curiously, CSIS — Canada’s spy agency — took to Twitter to welcome the Michaels back to Canada, which is at the very least poor optics for two Canadians accused of being spooks."
https://appelorchard.substack.com/p/what-if-the-two-michaels-were-actually?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=
pass
Delete"His prescription of "doing less of almost everything" well, over my dead body."
ReplyDeleteSee i said you would scream bloody murder and you said you were too tired.
and now it is all "pry my credit card from my cold dead hands"
those our age around here
that have the means
and many do
are chanting "you don't want to die with money in the bank"
and the flurry of consumption is a bit boggling.
"the only things you can buy are ecological damage and landfill"
"your 'footprint' is exactly the amount of money you ever made this life
and spent , saved or invested it does the same damage"
Don't fret, Lungta. Nature will take care of itself. We'll learn that at some point.
DeleteYep, most days i wake up it seems like a clerical accounting error.
Deleteor a debt that i owe on a bet that i lost.