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.
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1. This week’s column is about something we badly want to believe, regardless of the evidence: that livestock farms are benign and harmonious. Why? Mostly, I think, because it chimes with books and cartoons we see as very young children. Also: a threadtheguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. It discusses a film enjoying unexpected success in UK cinemas: Six Inches of Soil. In many ways, it’s a good film. But it tells us a story we want to hear, and in some respects is misleading and wrong. sixinchesofsoil.org
3. This is especially the case with the carbon calculations for the cattle farm it features: first we see a temporary, cyclical gain reported as making the farm carbon negative. Then entirely hypothetical figures treated as if they are real. Both cases are serious misinformation
1. There’s a telling sequence in the Netflix docuseries Raël. A completely mad cult claims, without a jot of evidence, to have cloned a human. And the world’s media fall for it, hook, line and sinker. All it took to fool them was 2 people in white coats and some lab equipment.🧵
2. What do we learn from this?
A. That the media is as susceptible to evident BS as the members of the crazy cult.
B. That it has a massive diversity problem – and not just the one(s) you are probably thinking of.
3. In any major newsroom, just about the only people with science degrees are specialist reporters. Almost without exception, the senior staff and main decision-makers have non-science degrees. Their knowledge of basic science is approximately zero.
Nowadays, when you discuss the far right, people insist “That’s not far right!”.
Folk who have plainly shifted to the far right claim to have “transcended left and right”. Or state that the terms have no meaning.
What’s going on?
Hold onto your seats, it’s a wild ride. 🧵
For the past few years there has been a concerted effort on the far right to reposition Nazism and fascism as left/socialist movements.
I know, I know, but bear with me, because this is now a widespread thing, and unsuspecting people have been fooled by it.
As usual with these matters, it began - and continues - with utter blithering idiocy. “Nazism stands for National Socialism: ergo it’s socialism.” Hitler and Goebbels both mentioned socialism in public statements, therefore they were socialists.
In the UK and around the world, environmental defenders are being attacked with ever more extreme laws. Who designs these laws? Corporate lobbyists. Who demands they are imposed? The billionaire media.
THIS IS NOT JUSTICE.
This week's column. 🧵 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
In the UK, you can now receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – meaning peaceful civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter.
Ordinary criminals are being released from prison early, and the spaces filled with environmental defenders.
Around the world, corporate lobbyists (often disguised as "thinktanks") have been drafting new laws against those who challenge destructive industries. The billionaire press then demands the introduction of these laws, while demonising peaceful campaigners. It's totally corrupt.
This is a shocking exposure of how the BBC has been captured and disciplined by government minders. It might explain why, almost every day, the BBC still lets corporate lobbyists from Tufton Street junktanks pose as independent, objective commentators.🧵prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/64…
This is in direct contravention of the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. It breaches them day after day. Almost the only times when these corporate lobbyists are held to account is when guests challenge them about the way they hide their funding.
I don’t want to have to do this. I want to get on and argue about the issues. But transparency is essential to democracy, and when corporations and oligarchs can get what they want by hiding behind their secretly-funded lobbyists, we are all the poorer for it.
The UK government's criminalisation of rough sleeping, now passing through Parliament in the Criminal Justice Bill, is overseen by a Prime Minister who owns four luxury homes for his own use. One of them, in Kensington, is reserved for accommodating family guests.🧵
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Anatole France
What we are seeing play out in the UK, in ever more extreme forms, is class war. The war being waged by the rich against the poor.