800 animals and 2,000 species of trees, detailing how the changing composition of rain forest trees resulting from the fracturing of the ecosystem is leading to further problems. “Policies to reduce carbon emissions from tropical countries have primarily focused on deforestation,” notes Carlos Peres, a member of the research team. “But our research shows that a decline in large animal populations poses a serious risk for the maintenance of tropical forest carbon storage.”70 Because 95 percent of trees indigenous to the rain forest depend on these animals for seed dispersal. It is only large animals, which are the group in the greatest decline—such as tapirs, fruit-eating monkeys, and large birds like toucans—who can eat the big seeds of hardwood trees and disperse them through defecation. This means that even where rain forests survive, they are gradually losing giant hardwood trees, including important food sources like Brazil nut, cacao, and acai trees.
THE EXAMPLES OF THE LEATHERBACK TURTLES and the large rain forest animals serve to underline the interconnectedness of the biosphere. They also demonstrate why only systemic change, making it possible to tackle all of these problems simultaneously and without political constraint, can reverse the damage. Taken together, our ecological and social crises—together forming a single interwoven socioeconomic crisis—provide a damning indictment of our economic, political, and social system and the way it operates.
Conversely, with the exception of extinction events, these crises are eminently reversible—as long as we can remove the root cause: capitalism. This is critically important news. Since these effects are created by human society, they can be undone by a differently oriented society.
*For convenience, we use 200,000 years to refer to the range of 150,000 to 200,000 years ago commonly given for the emergence of anatomically modern humans.
The Root of the Social-Ecological Crisis
A stark choice faces humanity: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.
—FAWZI IBRAHIM1
WE MAINTAIN THAT CAPITALISM, of necessity, operates to create our global social-ecological crisis. But before we go into a more detailed explanation of why this is so, let us first briefly examine some of the other explanations for today’s crisis that are commonly put forward—overpopulation, innate human greed and destructiveness, a flawed growth paradigm, and bad policy choices.
One of the most common arguments for the crisis is the “population problem”: there are just too many people in the world, using too many of the Earth’s resources. This is the chief cause of pollution, hunger, resource depletion, and poverty. It is true that the human population has increased greatly over the last few hundred years and that higher populations tend to create more stress in particular locations. Some countries do not have enough agricultural land to feed their people. Many of these countries—for example, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Great Britain—simply purchase food from abroad. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, China, and several European countries have even leased or bought outright land in parts of Africa or Ukraine, with its deep and rich but underutilized soil, in order to grow food for their home markets.
Not all countries can afford to purchase additional food when there are widespread crop failures or short supplies and the price of food jumps on the world market. In 2008, such price spikes led to food riots in twenty-eight countries. Yet at the same time, there were sufficient global food stocks.2 As one example of what was available during that year when so much suffering occurred, about 30 percent of the enormous U.S. corn crop was converted to ethanol to feed cars instead of people.
It’s not overpopulation that’s the problem; it’s unequal distribution of wealth and resources. Quite simply, people are hungry or starving because they are poor and unable to exert effective demand in the market, which requires money. The wealthiest 10 percent of the global population uses about 60 percent of Earth’s resources and is responsible for about the same portion of global pollutants released into the biosphere. The so-called population problem is in reality a wildly skewed social system, with gigantic waste built into the economy and overconsumption by wealthy people.3 In the United States, working people are constantly blamed for consuming too much, but in fact 38 percent of all consumption in 2012 was by the richest 5 percent.4
Ecological havoc is often attributed to human nature: our greedy and destructive instincts cause us try to dominate nature, regardless of the consequences. Although there are certainly examples of past civilizations that have caused lasting local or regional ecological harm, others have tread lightly, surviving and flourishing in ways that allowed land and water to regenerate by developing relatively low-impact agricultural systems. In many cases the practices of humans have resulted in a more biologically diverse local ecosystem than would have been the case otherwise. As historian Neil Roberts observes:
It is easy to fall into the trap of describing human impact on the natural world solely in terms of ‘degradation’ and ‘impoverishment,’ especially when considering issues such as soil erosion or deforestation. In fact, agriculture—at least in its pre-modern form—has generally been an agent of ecological diversification. It caused the relative homogeneity of primeval forest ecosystems to be replaced by a mosaic of … ecosystems, created and maintained by human action, and their fates came to be intimately associated with particular modes of agricultural production.5
Ecological damage done by ancient peoples occurred because of class dynamics, low levels of technology, and lack of knowledge of long-term impacts, not because of any ingrained tendency to destroy. Once such damage occurred, many ancient agricultural societies adapted to the changes they had caused or moved elsewhere. In the Mediterranean region they modified their landscapes, building terraces to reduce runoff and erosion; or they raised perennial crops more adapted to hilly land, such as olive trees and vineyards. Wheat, which requires annual soil plowing, was then grown on the more level fields or purchased by selling olive products and wine. Human societies have generally been able to adapt and modify practices as mistakes were made or in the face of environmental change over which they had no control, such as multi-year or multi-decade droughts.6
Some people feel that too much growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. We need to move to a zero growth economy, they say, and the way to do that is by changing our “growth paradigm.” Instead of focusing on the gross domestic product (GDP)—which is the measure of all goods and services produced annually in a country—economists and the media should focus on a gross national happiness index, which would measure people’s quality of life. Others have likened the perpetual growth of capitalist economies to a societal addiction, requiring therapies to help cure the addiction.7 But growth paradigms or addictions do not create the system—they are products of the system. Simply altering what is measured, how something is described, or undergoing societal therapy will not change the trajectory of an economy.
Other explanations for the ecological crisis tend to be variations of the “growth problem”: for example, there are people, sometimes referred to as “neoprimitivists,” who believe that industrial society itself is the problem and therefore we should return to a simpler lifestyle, hunting and gathering, presumably with many fewer people. Then there are the “green capitalism” advocates who maintain that people aren’t buying the right things—everything would be fine if we all just bought “green” stuff. Some explanations get a little closer to the heart of the matter, pointing to the need for more regulation so that businesses would not be allowed to pollute at will.
But these explanations for the environmental and social problems we face focus on symptoms while ignoring the root cause of the global crisis—the capitalist system. More insidiously, each of these explanations—overpopulation, individual overconsumption, human nature, growth paradigms, value judgments—have something in common: everyone is to blame for the problem. Or, in the words