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the insects on Earth weighed more than all the other animals put together, including humans.
We know exactly what we need to do in order to avert climate breakdown. We need to actively scale down fossil fuels and mobilise a rapid rollout of renewable energy – a global Green New Deal – to cut world emissions in half within a decade and get to zero before 2050.
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.
Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth.
It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.
51% of US Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine no longer support capitalism,
when people have to choose between environmental protection and growth, ‘environmental protection is prioritised in most surveys and countries’.43
we should buy and own less,
an economy that doesn’t require growth in the first place.
Psychiatrists are learning that spending time around plants is essential to people’s mental health, and indeed that certain plants can heal humans from complex psychological traumas.
It’s not just our economics that needs to change. We need to change the way we see the world,
It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance.
Take your local restaurant, for example. It makes a profit at the end of the year, but the owners are content with more or less the same profit year after year: enough to pay the rent, put food on the table for their family, and maybe go for a holiday in the summer. While such a business might participate in elements of capitalist logic (paying wages, making a profit), it is not capitalist as such, since ultimately the profit is organised around some conception of use-value.
For capitalists, profit isn’t just money at the end of the day, to be used for satisfying some specific need – profit becomes capital. And the whole point of capital is that it must be reinvested to produce more capital. This process never ends – it just continues expanding.
when investors assess the ‘health’ of a firm, they don’t look at net profits; they look at the rate of profit – in other words, how much the firm’s profits grow each year.
This restless movement of capital puts companies under enormous pressure to do whatever they can to grow
when capital sits still, it loses value (due to inflation, depreciation, etc.).
governments pursue growth because GDP is the currency of international political power. This is clearest in military terms: the bigger your GDP, the more tanks, missiles, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons you can buy.
Ramping up the extraction of biomass means
countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing.
It’s essential that we stabilise the size of the human population.
If we want a more accurate picture of national responsibility, we need to look beyond just territorial emissions and count consumption-based emissions too.
North America, Europe and Australia are among the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The real damage is happening across Africa, Asia and Latin America
technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time.
Facebook isn’t a multi-billion-dollar company because it allows us to share pictures with each other, but because it expands the process of production and consumption.
But the problem we face doesn’t have to do with technology. The problem has to do with growth. Over and over again, we see that the growth imperative wipes out all the gains our best technology delivers.
Societies with unequal income distribution tend to be less happy.
researchers found that Nicoyans’ extra longevity is due to something more. Not diet, not genes, but something completely unexpected: community. The longest-living Nicoyans all have strong relationships with their families, friends and neighbours.
any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit.
Step 2. Cut advertising
Cutting ads has a direct positive impact on people’s well-being.
Step 3. Shift from ownership to usership
Step 4. End food waste
up to 50% of all the food that’s produced in the world – equivalent to 2 billion tonnes – ends up wasted each year.
Step 5. Scale down ecologically destructive industries
When France downshifted to the thirty-five-hour week, workers reported that their quality of life improved.
working hours are directly associated with higher consumption of environmentally intensive goods, even when correcting for income.
In 1965, CEOs earned about twenty times more than the average worker. Today they earn on average 300 times more.
1) Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate. 2) Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb.
In the US, six companies control 90% of all media.64 It is virtually impossible to have a real, democratic conversation about the economy under these conditions.
from wet forest to dry forest, it takes an average of only sixty-six years for a forest to recover 90% of its old-growth biomass, completely naturally. All you have to do is leave it alone.
maintaining good relations with our partners and children and in-laws and neighbours is essential to maintaining a secure, happy life,
A team of scientists in Japan conducted an experiment with hundreds of people around the country. They asked half of the participants to walk for fifteen minutes through a forest, and the other half to walk through an urban setting, and then they tested their emotional states. In every case, the forest walkers experienced significant mood improvements when compared to the urban walkers, plus a decline in tension, anxiety, anger, hostility, depression and fatigue.
trees makes us more human
Walking in forests has been found to lower blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse rates and other indicators of stress and anxiety.
In Alaska, for example, wolves keep caribou populations in check. This prevents the caribou from overgrazing saplings, which in turn allows forests to grow and flourish. Forests prevent erosion, which keeps soils healthy and enables rivers to run clear. Good soils give rise to berries and grubs, while clear rivers provide habitats for fish and other freshwater creatures. Fish and berries and grubs in turn feed bears and eagles.
In areas where wolves have been exterminated, whole ecosystems fall apart: forests collapse, soils erode, rivers fill with silt, and eagles and bears disappear.
What’s powerful about gifts is that they place us in a position of self-restraint, where we are careful to take no more than we need, and no more than the other is able to share.
if you’ve received a gift from someone, you won’t accept another one until you’ve had a chance to give something back to them. In this sense, the logic of the gift is deeply ecological: it is about equilibrium, about balance. Indeed, it is how ecosystems maintain themselves.
We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?
