Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

I now believe that if I live into my 90s, I have a high chance of witnessing systemic environmental collapse.
By systemic environmental collapse, I mean something specific: an Earth system passing its critical threshold, then triggering the tipping of other systems.
I'm 58.

If this cascade begins, it could happen very quickly. There would be nothing we could do to stop it. The only means of preventing it is determined action now.
By determined action, I mean efforts one or two orders of magnitude greater than current efforts.

Preventing systemic environmental collapse requires systemic economic change. At the moment, the most any government offers is tinkering at the margins of the current economic system.

Systemic environmental collapse is beyond the scope of human imagination. It means the end of everything we love and know, everything that sustains us and makes life worthwhile, of all our current hopes and fears.
I would rather die earlier than live to see it.

I have lived all my life in hope. I've written hundreds of articles and several books exploring new systems where hope might lie, and explaining how we can avert disaster. I still have hope, but it is fading.

To have any chance of comprehending Earth systems and where they place us, we need always to try to see past the limiting frames we impose. A concept I've found helpful in seeing where we stand is Hutchinson’s n-dimensional hypervolume, and how it might apply to the human niche.

It's a crucial ecological concept, little known outside the field, but, as this paper shows, very widely applicable. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

I have a hunch that somewhere in the gap between this paper👆and this one👇, on the consistent mathematics of complex systems, our future will be discerned. nature.com/articles/s4159…

What distinguishes capitalism from all that has gone before, and ensures it interacts disastrously with other complex adaptive systems, is that it creates and ruptures its own n-dimensional hypervolume, extending remorselessly across space and time and through Earth systems.

This, from a paper by Jason W Moore, perfectly captures capitalism's creation and rupture of the hypervolume:

By pulling together these different strands of thinking - the hypervolume from ecology, critical thresholds from complexity theory and the crisis/accumulation dialectic from studies of capital - we might begin to see the bigger picture.