Thread by @SteB777

This is probably the most important newspaper article ever written, and every person in the world needs to properly understand what George has said here and in his thread. I can attest to the accuracy of everything George says. My own short thread below.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1443089997775745026

I've been trying to get this across for decades, there there is no climate crisis, just an ecological emergency, and that the climate crisis is just one small component of this, albeit a profoundly important component. The biggest ever mistake was dealing with climate separately.

It will be noted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, that all these crises were dealt with as a whole. That the climate crisis only get separated from the rest of ecological crisis after this summit.
un.org/en/conferences…

The justification given at the time for separating the climate crisis from the rest of the ecological emergency was the forlorn hope that they could get a rapid global agreement as they did over CFCs with the Montreal Protocol over the ozone hole crisis.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_…

Self-evidently, and with hindsight this strategy was a profound error, because here we are 30 years later with countries still dragging their feet over an agreement. What is more, supposed government solutions to it are fake solutions, which will not work.

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1442860615941468161

The UN is now belatedly trying to rejoin the climate crisis with the biodiversity crisis (which is a large proportion of the ecological crisis, but not all of us, and unfortunately very few people understand what the biodiversity concept is).
un.org/sustainabledev…

This division of the ecological emergency into components like the climate and biodiversity concepts, suits the powerful who rule over us by coercion, as they have always used divide and conquer tactics to maintain their iron grip on our societies.

These divide and conquer tactics don't just involve setting groups in our society against each other to stop anyone opposing them, but to divide our thinking, so we wrongly see humans as separate from nature, as if we can continue without nature, and it is a separate issue.

In fact, the term "nature" is deeply problematic, as it only has significance is nature is seen as apart from humans and that is what the term means. If humans are seen as part of nature, then is nothing apart from nature.
nature.com/articles/s4159…

If nothing is apart from nature, then nature just means everything, and is not a subdivision of everything. The whole seeing as nature as a subject apart from other things, is critical to the divisive and disjointed thinking, that George is rightly criticising.

The systems view of the world, the ecological view, is not just an idea. It is a demonstrable reality that everything in the world and universe is interconnected and interdependent. Just challenge anyone to cite something not interconnected, and the whole fallacy disintegrates.

I've struggled to quickly find a satisfactory reference, because so many internet explanations start off from fallacious ideas that there are separate thinks can be "natural or human-made". Just be aware of this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_t…

Ecological thinking is a better term. Unfortunately scientific ecology was artificially designed to only study the ecology of non-human organisms, which is highly artificial and contrived (I'm a graduate in scientific ecology - so I'm very aware of this error).

We often hear of people becoming disconnected from the natural world in our modern culture. This is what it really means. Our modern culture developed a divided view of the world, seeing nature as apart from it, so people could be induced to over-exploit natural systems.

The exploitation of natural systems for profit, only really suits one demographic, and that is the extremely. Those below that level benefit from this to a lesser degree, based on wealth, with those at the bottom not benefiting at all.

Essentially, the over-exploitation of natural systems is sawing off the branch on which humanity is perched. It is only done because the very rich are pathologically disordered wealth obsessives who cannot think straight and who think only of themselves and their wealth.

Therefore, to stop anyone thinking about what they are doing, over many generations the powerful and wealthy have abused their power to convince everyone to see the world in a divided and artificial way, so people do not know or see what they are doing.

It is debatable how much of this was by design i.e. conscious, and how much was unconscious i.e. it just happened over many generations, because it worked and stopped the people from challenging what was being done i.e. that we were destroying our future.

However, this debate is best handled with its own explanation. This is because as I say, it is a demonstrable fact that the reality is a fully integrated system, where everything is interconnected to everything else and is dependent on everything else.

Therefore any world view, that there are separate things, humans and nature, a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, then the economy, is a totally false view. Yet this is the predominant view of our modern culture i.e. it is based on a delusion, a demonstrably false belief.

@GretaThunberg @GeorgeMonbiot @KateRaworth @ProfSteveKeen @ClimateHuman @ClimateBen @JKSteinberger

PS. Again, I commend @GretaThunberg's great speech yesterday, and those attacking her for it, are true ignoramuses of the highest order, who are utterly in denial of reality. Because everything she said is THE TRUTH.

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1442860615941468161

@threadreaderapp Please unroll?