The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

If we are overshooting our planet’s ecological capacity at our existing levels of economic activity, what happens when we factor in exponential growth? Even the near future looks quite bleak. Scientists tell us that by 2050 our mature tropical forests will have disappeared. Species biodiversity will have declined by another 10 per cent.6 Stocks of all presently fished seafood will have collapsed by an average of more than 90 per cent from 1950 levels.7 Most major metal reserves will be exhausted, including gold, copper, silver and zinc, along with many of the key metals used in renewable energy technologies, like lead, indium and antimony.8 If Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are to be believed, we might be able to replace some of these metals by mining the moon and asteroids. But extraterrestrial extraction won’t help us much with the forests and the fish. Nor will it do much for our soil crisis: at present rates of depletion, the topsoils of the world’s farmlands will be more or less useless by 2050, and by 2075 they will be gone.9 Despite these obvious problems, for some reason we have come to believe that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress.