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Anne Larigauderie, the IPBES executive secretary, put it even more bluntly: ‘We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings.’
But the ultimate eco-fact is never going to arrive. It’s never going to be good enough. Just as in the PTSD dream, eco-facts never work as they’re supposed to. They always fail, and in the end we wake up crying in the middle of the night, shivering with unspeakable fear, because on some deep level we know that the trauma has already arrived. We’re already in the middle of it. We are living in a world that is dying.
Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.
He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of US Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine no longer support capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats, Pelosi’s party, could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a vision for an alternative economy.
In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.
We humans have been on this planet for nearly 300,000 years; fully evolved, fully intelligent, exactly as we are today. For approximately 97% of that time our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems.
What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate surplus, it has to get these things for as cheap as possible. In other words, capital works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more – from nature and from labour – than you give back.
The application of this logic to land and farming marked a fundamental transformation in human history. It meant that, for the first time, people’s lives were governed by the imperatives of intensifying productivity and maximising output.23 No longer was production about satisfying needs, no longer about local sufficiency; instead, it was organised around profit, and for the benefit of capital. This is crucial: those principles of homo economicus that we assume to be engraved in human nature were instituted during the enclosure process.
The English landowner and philosopher John Locke admitted that enclosure was a process of theft from the commons, and from commoners, but he argued that this theft was morally justifiable because it enabled a shift to intensive commercial methods that increased agricultural output.
For Bacon, science and technology were to serve as the instruments of domination. ‘Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her,’ Bacon wrote. And with the knowledge thus gained, ‘man’ would not ‘merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course’, but ‘have the power to conquer and subdue, to shake her to her foundations’. Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made into a ‘slave,’ ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded’ for human ends.
We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified, by its perpetrators, as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought. The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise not only lands and bodies, but minds.
The goal is to produce and sell them for one purpose above all others: to make a profit. In this system, it is the ‘exchange-value’ of things that matters, not their use-value.
The choice is stark: grow or die. And this expansionary drive puts other companies under pressure, too. Suddenly no one can be satisfied with a steady-state approach; if you don’t push to expand, you’ll get gobbled up by your competitors. Growth becomes an iron law to which all are captive.
Every time capital bumps up against barriers to accumulation (say a saturated market, a minimum-wage law, or environmental protections), then like a giant vampire squid it writhes in a desperate attempt to whip those barriers out of the way and plunge its tentacles into new sources of growth.3 This is what is known as a ‘fix’.4 The enclosure movement was a fix. Colonisation was a fix. The Atlantic slave trade was a fix. The Opium Wars against China were a fix. The western expansion of the United States was a fix. Each one of these fixes – all of them violent – opened up new frontiers for
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When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”.’ Cheap nature, he might have added.
Scientists have estimated ‘boundaries’ for each of these processes. For example, atmospheric carbon concentration should not breach 350ppm if the climate is to remain stable (we crossed that boundary in 1990, and hit 415ppm in 2020); the extinction rate should not exceed ten species per million per year; conversion of forested land should not exceed 25% of the Earth’s land surface; and so on.
Even the IPCC itself acknowledges that without BECCS and other speculative technologies, there’s no feasible way to roll out clean energy fast enough to get to zero emissions by 2050 as long as energy demand keeps growing.
The French economist Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, doesn’t mince his words: ‘A drastic reduction in purchasing power of the richest would therefore in itself have a substantial impact on the reduction of emissions at global level.’
At the World Bank and the IMF, the United States holds veto power over all major decisions, and high-income countries control the majority of the vote. In the World Trade Organization, bargaining power depends largely on GDP, so the countries that grew rich during the colonial period get to determine the rules of international trade.
In 1965, CEOs earned about twenty times more than the average worker. Today they earn on average 300 times more.
We can do the same thing with the external debts held by global South countries, which have been rising at an alarming rate. Big chunks of that debt are holdovers from the 1980s, when the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates so high as to put whole countries into permanent bondage to Wall Street.
On the contrary, it’s an economy that feels in key ways familiar, in the sense that it resembles the economy as we normally describe it to ourselves (in other words, perhaps as we wish it to be): an economy where people produce and sell useful goods and services; an economy where people make rational, informed decisions about what to buy; an economy where people get compensated fairly for their labour; an economy that satisfies human needs while minimising waste; an economy that circulates money to those who need it; an economy where innovation makes better, longer-lasting products, reduces
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That means kicking big money out of politics; it means radical media reform; strict campaign finance laws; reversing corporate personhood; dismantling monopolies; shifting to co-operative ownership structures; putting workers on company boards; democratising shareholder votes; democratising institutions of global governance; and managing collective resources as commons wherever possible.65
