We are the biggest herd of mammals to graze the globe, ever. We are consuming life on Earth faster than nature can replace it. Every day there are fewer forests and fewer fisheries, less coral and less snow, fewer other species and less arable land – and more humans consuming that emptying larder faster. Going on 9 billion people are seeking more stuff from a planet that is every day able to supply less.
At the heart of this mess is the globally revered God of Growth, the incubus of capitalism. The world’s governments and media are obsessed with growth. If growth goes up, we are told to feel like happy achievers. If it goes down, we risk recession, depression or disaster. We will be punished if growth is not kept ascendant. Growth is God.
We apply the same blind faith to population growth, despite years of warnings. Last century, scientist Paul Ehrlich toured the world explaining his book The Population Bomb. Yet the topic remains taboo in business circles, and governments still aspire to population growth to feed their ridiculous economic indices.
Most ordinary people, while they might welcome breakthroughs such as renewable energy and vegan hamburgers, nevertheless also aspire to growth: they want more goods. But if the poorer people on Earth catch up with the average North American’s, European’s or Australian’s use of the planet’s resources (and who are we to tell them that they shouldn’t?), and if consumption continues to grow at 3 percent per annum, Earth will have to supply 300 percent more resources this century. We are already using Earth’s living resources at twice the rate of replacement. By the time today’s infants reach old age, we would need three to six more planets to keep humanity going.
It is a disaster of our own making. As Gandhi observed, the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed. Our only option is to tighten our belts.
Ice caps are melting. Tundra is releasing huge quantities of methane. Forest and peat carbon stores are burning in both hemispheres. The ocean is rising, and Greenland’s ice melt alone is on its way to making that 6 metres. Global extinction rates have not been this high since the Yucatan meteorite collision 65 million years ago. The Great Barrier Reef, sometimes described as Earth’s biggest life form, is half dead. The little wildness left is being handed to miners, loggers and luxury tourism racketeers.
For decades, the world’s top brains have been pointing out a quartet of global heating agents that we must not burn: coal, oil, gas and forests. Yet we have continued to burn more and more of them. The world’s growth-grovelling bosses, cheered on by compliant consumers, have put their foot on the accelerator when we needed the brake.
The planet can no longer stand it. The coming downfall is obvious, but the capitalists keep praying, like St Augustine in the early centuries of Christianity, ‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet!’
Bertrand Russell observed that ‘most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do so’. The gross imbalance in wealth on our planet means that people die in poverty each day, killed by the inaction of the wealthy. Just 1 percent of men and women own half of Earth’s wealth, measured in monetary terms. Meanwhile, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just 1 percent of the wealth – a disparity of 2500:1. An updated Groucho Marx might quip, ‘Show me a billionaire and I will show you a crook!’
Karl Marx (no relation) saw conventional religion as the opiate of the masses, but the modern high priests of growth have mesmerised us with money and have taught us to measure wellbeing by it. The rich, most favoured by growth, invest in advertising to perpetuate this message.
However, more and more people are calling growth out. Acquiescent apathy is receding. In its place, we have a tide of young, intelligent anger. This defiance is nowhere near its full potential, because it is uncoordinated, unfocused and dispersed. But it is growing.
The antidotes to our current condition are an understanding of our shortcomings; optimism that we will change in time to avert catastrophe; and commitment to a new prosperity based on creativity and innovation. Human history is a race between the biological imperative driving our current greed (Darwin’s ‘law of the jungle’) and a thoughtful ethical revolution to prevent our future self-destruction. That is, instinct versus intelligence.
Pessimism won’t help. Optimism in the face of overwhelming odds may seem misguided – but the course of human history remains in our collective hands, and change is driven not by defeatism, but by intelligent, courageous, compassionate defiance of the prevailing rules. This is the key to guaranteeing the future.
Successful defiance is a front-foot thing. It is active, not passive, in taking power from those who are degrading the planet. It also requires space for good times: as Emma Goldman put it a century ago, ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’
The divisive old dogmas based on personal material gain will not be given up easily by anyone, least of all the capitalists who like to claim that their accumulation of wealth is due to ‘hard work’ – although almost none of them has ever dug a ditch or milked a cow. The needed change will come when enough of us ordinary mortals take a stand.
This is an edited extract from Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders by Bob Brown is available in all good bookshops and online through Black Inc.
