Unrelenting economic growth on a finite planet is laying waste to entire living systems
Meanwhile, governments everywhere are talking about “supercharging our economy.” —
No 2784 by fw, October 5, 2021—
George Monbiot
“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 plenty of other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But all these boxes 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 perceptual artefacts, rather than the world. Nature recognizes no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others…. 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’. …We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we ramp down 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 – which should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.” —George Monbiot
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books.
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