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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#IDthought 6: At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵
It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.
There is no means of refining our choice, of accepting some items and rejecting others. With one decision, we are presumed to have consented to thousands of further decisions. We do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵
Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.
I don’t just mean housing rents. I mean all *access fees* to essential services that have been captured by private wealth: water, energy, health, railways etc. And the interest payments arising from the financialisation of higher education.
#IDthought 1: Throughout the media we see an unremitting, visceral defence of capitalism, but seldom an attempt to define it, or to explain how it might differ from other economic systems. We propose a definition that seeks to distinguish it from other forms of economic activity
I did produce a neater definition, which has the virtue of parsimony, but the disadvantage of being incomprehensible to almost everyone.
"Capitalism is an economic system that both creates and destroys its own n-dimensional hypervolume."
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.