2 OVERVIEW
In my youth a wise teacher taught me that history is the resultant in the parallogram of opposing forces.
After retirement I started looking back on how the world had moved in my lifetime - and found tremendeous change.
Entering old age I am searching for wisdom - the reasons and forces behind all this change - and I basically found modernity or more specifically capitalism.
Preparing to leave this world I get concerned about the violence of the current driving forces of development.
I now feel responsibility for what my generation has achieved to put in motion - and guilt for the damage to come.
We are headed for +4C in this Century.
We are headed for The 6th Mass Extinction.
We are headed for Civilizational Breakdown.
We are headed for Transition away from Capitalism.
We are headed for Emergence of Eco-Socialism.
2.1 On Climate
The world is heating - and has been doing so for all my lifetime. As climate change becomes observable we are slowly waking up from our industrial business.
But the observed warming is only the precursor - the canary in the mine - of what is in the pipeline of global warming.
The climate system is full of lags and feedbacks. What we in our ignorance have ignited will spill out long after science understood what was happening. The lagged effects of what we have already completed will stay with us however much we now regret.
Ironically - as our fight against atmosperic pollution helps improve health - the clearer sky accelerates global warming. We are headed for +4C in this century.
2.2 On Nature
Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans.
The Living Planet Index tells us that studied animal populations have seen an average decline of 68% since 1970.
We are headed for The 6th Mass Extinction
2.3 On Civilization
Enlightenment brought us science - the explanations of the links between causes and effects.
Enlightenment also brought us democracy and the rule of law.
As feudalism vaned, capitalism took hold.
Accumulation entered center stage.
Industrial business became the name of the game.
Conquistadors and colonialism after the great exploarations brought us raw-materials and slavery to found the new Western Civilisation.
Energy and technology merged to boost development.
The four cheaps - cheap labour, cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw-materials - build modernity and the population explosion.
As Capitalism was build the Labour Movement’s rise became a threat. Capital bribed Labour with the class-compromise and secured the system - for a while.
More recently, neo-liberialism broke Labour and created the New Inequality - a society of the super-rich and the precariate.
Despite financial crises Capitalism has thrived for all my lifetime. Capitalism as an era of free nature and free atmosphere is now hitting the wall.
No longer so: Capitalism’s boom has spawned failures of systemic context. The so-called green revolution of food solutions has produced a lot of food and made profits for large corporations, but depleted soil nutrients, spread toxins, severed mycelial networks, and disrupted nutrient cycles, creating eutrophic lakes and dead zones in our oceans.
Capitalism is up for a reckoning - cheap nature is striking back on modernity.
We are headed for Civilizational Breakdown.
2.4 On Transition
Progress without Growth
The ongoing Great Acceleration with loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution and urban expansion is inherent to capitalism as an economic system.
Doughnut economics, post-growth and degrowth are new ideologies that challenge mainstream conceptions of economic growth and offer valuable insights, but without breaking the current societal order.
But ‘Green transition’ to sustainability is an illusion. Decoupling of GDP-growth and resource consumption at a global level is not possible.
Technological change combined with voluntary changes in consumption and social practices are efforts to reduce the pressure on climate and nature while staying within the current economic order - it may dampen and delay the breakdowns.
Economic Growth - Capitalistic Accumulation - is a defining characteristic of Western Civilisation. As long as Capitalism prevails the breakdowns of Climate and Nature will go on.
But in the end broken climate and nature will undermine continued accumulation. Capitalism is over when economic growth stops.
New cultures, politics and institutions will have be be build democratically on the ruins of Capitalism.Change requires us to address these barriers democratically. Communities that live simply offer inspiration for social innovation in the new era.
The ongowing debate moves on an idealistic level:
“societies need to rethink what is meant by growth and progress and their meaning for global sustainability”
and stops there!
Progress without Capital
The deep structural changes needed affects the constituting features of Capitalism.
This means depowering today’s capitalists - and empower a new breed of sustainabilitilists.
Doughnut economy and degrowth are preludes to the required abandonment of capital accumulation.
We are headed for Transition away from Capitalism.
2.5 On Emergence
Capitalism has created problems that cannot be solved by - Capitalism!
I remember thinking, in the 1970s, that once people became aware of the ecological crisis — disappearing species, polluted rivers, poisoned air — that the necessary changes would be simple to achieve. Humanity only had to curb industrial waste and destruction, preserve wilderness for other species, put limits on our consumption, stabilize human population, and just be smart about how to live on Earth without destroying it. Of course, I was naive to think any of that would be easy.
Since that time, human population has doubled, consumption of material resources has quadrupled, biodiversity collapse has accelerated, and after 34 international climate meetings, we are emitting more carbon than ever before. Meanwhile, we have not exactly ended war, vanquished racism, nor achieved gender or economic parity. Even worse, giant corporate interests actively work to halt and reverse any ecological regulation on industrial activity. (Weyler (2020) Thresholds, cascades, and wicked problems1)
We are in a war-like situation and need war-like instruments. The neo-liberal ideology of always relaying on markets has brought us the problems - and are unfit to correct them.
We have to scrap standard economists mode of thinking about steering through incentives and nudging.
We do not have the time for designing sophisticated indirect measures.
We know what the problems are and have to attack them directly. This means New Economic Planning.
We are headed for the emergence of a new civilization: Eco-Socialism.
2.6 Figures
2.6.2 Nature
Fig: The Living Planet Index tells us that studied animal populations have seen an average decline of 68% since 19703