by Nafeez Ahmed
Last Friday, I posted an exclusive report about a new NASA-backed scientific research project at the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (Sesync) to model the risks of civilisational collapse, based on analysis of the key factors involved in the rise and fall of past civilisations. (Discussed here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112766567)
Doom is not the import of this study, nor of my own original research on these issues as encapsulated in my book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It. Rather what we are seeing, as I've argued in detail before, are escalating, interconnected symptoms of the unsustainability of the global system in its current form. While the available evidence suggests that business-as-usual is likely to guarantee worst-case scenarios, simultaneously humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves.
What the cross-disciplinary study I wrote about last week suggests - like previous research - is that our current trajectory is unsustainable because our demand for ecological resources and services is increasingly going beyond what the planet is able to provide. This 'overshoot' is already responsible for a range of overlapping crises - the financial crash, the food crisis, intensifying civil unrest to name just a few - and is likely to worsen without meaningful action.
The vast majority of the world's resources - not just monetary wealth, but land, resources and raw materials - is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of states, monarchs, aristocratic families, banks and corporations. It is no accident that the Queen of Great Britain - arguably the harbinger of contemporary global capitalism before its supercession by the United States - is the world's largest landlord, owning about 6.6 billion acres of land. That is one-sixth of the Earth's land surface. It gets worse. 1,318 corporations own 80 per cent of the world's wealth, and out of that, a tiny interlocking nexus of 147 'super corporations' own half of that.
As Nelder writes in his latest column, we find ourselves at a potentially exciting crossroads: the literal death throes of the fossil fuel industry, amidst the inexorable, sporadic rise of a new renewable energy system. Renewable sceptics are simply wrong, obsessed with the slow, centralised economic dynamics of fossil fuels rather than understanding the unique, distributed dynamics of the new.
The new emerging paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human - values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment.
= new reply since forum marked as read
