Less is More, by Jason Hickel

An economic model structured to make profits rather than meet human needs engineered the collapse of the biosphere. Reversing this model is totally achievable—not for having less, but more.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Living in an age of mass extinction

In late 2017, a team of scientists reported that three-quarters of flying insects in Germany had vanished over the course of 25 years. According to their conclusion, the collapse was likely caused by converting forests to farmland and the intensive use of agricultural chemicals. The study went viral. One of the scientists declared, “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. . . . If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse.”¹ Concerning the unraveling of the biosphere, insects are like the canaries in the coal mine. They signal the breakdown of nature’s interconnected systems—systems upon which humans depend.

In 2019, a task force set up by the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), published its first comprehensive report, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists.² Simply put, the extinction rate is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution. “We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings,” said Anne Larigauderie, the IPBES executive secretary.

This book, however, is not about doom but hope. The author says, “It’s about how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world.” Therefore, the first step of this shift is to acknowledge how much the unrestrained industrialization of human activity has impacted the natural world and, consequently, the very conditions of our survival.

In this regard, the industrialization of agriculture, or the “Green Revolution,” which started in the middle of the twentieth century, has been anything but green. Complex ecological systems were reduced to a single dimension for greater yields and profits. As a result, 40% of the planet’s soils are now seriously degraded. As of now, agricultural soil is still being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed with the worms, grubs, insects, fungi, and millions of microorganisms it needs to avoid turning into lifeless dirt. This is why crop yields are now declining on a fifth of the world’s farmland. It is calculated that, at that rate, the Earth can support only another sixty years of harvests.³

What about oceans? Just as with agriculture, corporations have turned fishing into an act of warfare, leaving lifeless ocean plains behind them. Farming chemicals and consumers’ plastics, for their part, further endanger the oceans’ fragile ecosystems by ending up in the sea. Because of greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere, oceans heat up, and nutrient cycles are disrupted, leading vast stretches of marine habitat to die off. The same carbon emissions are causing oceans to become more acidic. On that point, when ocean pH dropped by 0.25 66 million years ago, 75% of marine species were wiped out. On our present trajectory, the pH will have dropped by 0.4 at the end of the century. Marine animals are already disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.⁴

This is the state of affairs on planet Earth at the moment. But beyond the dire warnings of scientific data, it is important to understand that nature works as a whole. In other words, we cannot assess the dynamics of the ecological crisis today by using the same reductive and mechanistic type of thinking that caused it in the first place.

Climate change, for example, has started to get real to many people because extreme weather events happen more frequently. But its most dangerous aspect is barely acknowledged. “Ecosystems, says Jason Hickel, are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. . . . This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning.” In practical terms, climate change engineers its own feedback loops, such as the albedo effect, the release of methane previously caught in permafrost, the dying of forests, etc.—all completely irrespective of human emissions. Above 2°C of global warming, the phenomenon could very well spiral out of control.⁵

1. Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers, by Damian Carrington. The Guardian, Wed 18, Oct 2017
2. IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2019. See also: Gerardo Ceballos et al., Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(30), 2017.
3. Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues, Scientific American, December 5, 2014
4. Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal. Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Mon 21, Oct 2019. See also Malin Pinsky et al., Greater vulnerability to warming of marine versus terrestrial ectotherms, Nature 569(7754), 2019, pp. 108–111.
5. Will Steffen et al., Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(33), 2018, p. 8252–8259.