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.
| This post is part of a reading series on Less is More by Jason Hickel. To quickly access all chapters, please click here. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the author’s ideas. |
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.
Footnotes
- Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers, by Damian Carrington. The Guardian, Wed 18, Oct 2017
- 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.