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The Social and Ecological Planetary Emergency

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.

—SITTING BULL, LEADER OF THE HUNKPAPA LAKOTA SIOUX¹

Climate change is a social justice issue. With the climate crisis, as with the economic crisis, governments have prioritized the interests of those who caused the problem, despite the consequences for ordinary people. We are not “all in it together.” An increased understanding of this has led the climate movement to grow in size and to adopt more radical slogans.

—SUZANNE JEFFERY²

ON JUNE 24, 2012, IN THE GALÁPAGOS archipelago, birthplace of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lonesome George took his final breath. This giant Pinta Island tortoise, five feet long and over two hundred pounds, was the last surviving member of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii. Giant tortoises can expect to live well into their second century. At roughly a hundred years old when he died, George was in the prime of his life.

A sad little note scrawled on a blackboard at the Darwin Research Station marked Lonesome George’s death: “We have witnessed extinction. Hopefully we will learn from it.”³ But what can we learn from these giant tortoises? What can we learn from this irrevocable loss? What is the cultural, scientific, and biological significance of these tortoises to humans?

When the Spanish first landed on the islands 600 miles off the coast of modern-day Ecuador in the sixteenth century, giant tortoises numbered around a quarter million. Because they were so abundant, the archipelago was named after the old Spanish word for tortoise, galápago. Three centuries later, in his diary entry of September 15, 1835, Darwin noted what “seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals,” which have “of course been greatly reduced.” Darwin went on: “It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as 700,” though giant tortoises were still abundant when he made his visit.⁴ On October 8, Darwin describes himself and the ship’s crew as living “entirely on tortoise meat” and that “young tortoises make excellent soup,” but he nevertheless found “the meat to my taste is indifferent.”⁵

Almost inevitably, then, these giant tortoises formed part of Darwin’s earliest musings on natural selection:

When I recollect the fact that [from] the form of the body, shape of scales and general size, the Spaniards can at once pronounce from which island any tortoise may have been brought; when I see these islands in sight of each other and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure and filling the same place in nature, I must suspect they are only varieties. The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant asserted difference between the wolf-like fox of East and West Falkland Islands. If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of archipelagoes will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species.⁶

The phrase “such facts would undermine the stability of species,” written down for the first time in his notebooks documenting the five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle, point toward a theory that only emerged in print two decades later. Immediately recognized by the other revolutionary giant of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, the importance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, could not be overestimated. According to Marx, Darwin’s book, published in 1859, was an “epoch-making work” that formed “the basis in natural history for our view,” because it undermined the God-centered view of creation and gave life science a firm theoretical footing on solid materialist ground.⁷

Giant tortoises have existed on Earth for ten million years. In contrast, Homo sapiens have walked the Earth for approximately 200,000 years, a mere 2 percent of that time.* Yet in less than the life span of one individual giant tortoise, the subspecies has gone from numerous enough to fill the holds of ships to the extermination of all of C. nigra abingdonii by humans. In the world as it currently exists, the extinction of this giant tortoise leaves us not with the question “will we learn?” but with “which species will be threatened next?”

Perhaps it will be the leatherback turtle. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s oldest and largest nature conservation organization, which compiles the Red List of Threatened Species, has placed this primordial leviathan on the “critically endangered” list—one category away from “extinct in the wild.”

Relics of a distant past, leatherbacks have existed on Earth practically unchanged for 100 million years—ten times longer than the Galápagos tortoises. Next to the leatherback, Homo sapiens pales into temporal insignificance. Mature leatherbacks can be over six feet long, four feet wide, and weigh up to a ton. Able to swim to depths of 3,600 feet—over three times deeper than a nuclear submarine—leatherbacks change their body temperature to cope with the cold, their pliant shells allowing them to survive the immense pressure of the ocean depths.

To sit on a tropical beach in the middle of the night, close to an egg-laying mother, listening to the heaving power of her gargantuan lungs, gazing at a creature of such evolutionary perfection, is a deeply affecting moment. How much will humanity lose if these creatures are lost forever?

We don’t know exactly what the average leatherback life span is, but we do know that species placed on the critically endangered list are likely to be extinct within ten years. Leatherbacks have experienced a population decline of more than 90 percent since 1980.

The turtles are threatened by the full gamut of economic activities dictated by the profit motive. Industrialized fishing methods, such as gillnet, trawl, and long-line fishing, trap the turtles as unwanted “bycatch.” One study of Pacific Ocean turtles estimates that more than 200,000 loggerheads and 50,000 leatherbacks are killed each year solely through inadvertent entanglement in long-line fishing.⁸

Just as turtles have become rare, the system responds and sets in motion further declines. Local consumption of turtles and their eggs was once a sustainable practice, but with the growth in world trade, a highly profitable multinational black market in turtle eggs has developed. While a turtle egg might sell for $1 in Costa Rica (a not insignificant sum considering a single nest can hold more than fifty of the perfectly round, pearl-white eggs), international consumption and smuggling associated with the drug trade means the price can reach as high as $100 to $300 per egg in international markets.⁹

As turtles return to the same beach that they were born on, largely unchecked coastal economic growth for tourism or real estate development is a further threat. Electric lighting on previously dark beaches confuses the turtles’ navigation, resulting in fewer females making it onto land to lay their eggs.

Along with thousands of other species, leatherbacks are threatened with extinction by an economic and social system that is based on relentless, profit-driven expansion that promotes industrial fishing methods, chemical pollution, and egg harvesting for the black market. Which begs the question: How can we save these magnificent wild animals and, by extension, humans?

The current biodiversity crisis, whereby species are being driven to extinction at rates up to a thousand times greater than the geological statistical norm, is simply one aspect of a global ecological crisis. Whereas in the past such crises were local or regional, humans are now changing the whole biosphere in a multiplicity of ways: our actions are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere; acidifying the oceans; contaminating the soil, the water, the air, and organisms worldwide with toxic chemicals; altering the land through deforestation of vast areas of tropical and boreal forests; and warming the entire planet. Whereas once we wiped out individual species, now we threaten whole biota.

THE AGE OF HUMAN-INDUCED GLOBAL CHANGES

The decline of sea turtle populations is but one example of the changes to global ecosystems that have been caused by human activity. Since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, humans have lived in the geological epoch called the Holocene. But according to the 2016 panel of geologists convened to examine the issue, in their report to the Geological Congress, we have now entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, which is dominated by the activities of a single species. Scientists have drawn this conclusion from an analysis of the long-term impacts of human activities on the biosphere: climate change from fossil fuel combustion that increases carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and causes ocean acidification, plastic pollution, the disruption of the natural cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus by modern methods of agriculture, the widespread introduction of toxins into the environment, and the irradiation of the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing.

One way of viewing these huge changes has been put forward by an international group of scientists who proposed nine planetary boundaries “within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.”¹⁰ We have already crossed or are close to crossing four of these nine boundaries—climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. As lead researcher Will Steffen notes, “Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human well-being in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries.”¹¹ One of the proposed boundaries is biodiversity, or “biosphere integrity.” As Colin Waters and his colleagues note in Science magazine:

Although Earth still retains most of the species that were present at the start of the Holocene, even conservative estimates of extinction rates since 1500 CE are far above mean per-million-year background rates, with a notable increase from the 19th century onward. Current trends of habitat loss and overexploitation, if maintained, would push Earth into the sixth mass extinction event (with ~75 percent of species extinct) in the next few centuries, a process that is probably already underway.¹²

The article goes on to note that the most significant reason for mass extinction is due to land-use changes and the restriction of “wild” nature to smaller and smaller areas. “The terrestrial biosphere has undergone a dramatic modification from 1700 CE, when almost 50% of the global ice-free land area was wild and only ~5% was intensively used by humans, to 2000 CE, when the respective percentages were 25% and 55%.”¹³

Species evolve in interaction with one another and depend on the presence of others. Thus, when one species becomes extinct or shifts its range, detrimental effects may occur to the stability and survival prospects of other species and the healthy functioning of the ecosystem as a whole.

The Warming Planet

The Paris Climate Agreement, signed in December 2015 by world leaders from 194 countries and the European Union, states that human-caused climate change represents “an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet” that will require “deep reductions in global emissions.” The agreement notes “with serious concern” the “significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”¹⁴

The agreement goes on: “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”¹⁵ Currently there is no mechanism in place to achieve these lofty—and urgently necessary—objectives.

Based on temperature records dating back to the nineteenth century, 2016 was the third year in a row to set a global temperature record. Compared to the base period of 1880-1920, the earth was warmer in 2016 by an average of 2.27°F (1.26°C), a level last seen over 100,000 years ago.¹⁶ Even if we stopped all production of fossil fuels right now, today, we are already locked in to at least another 1.8°F (1°C) of average warming. The amount of warming guaranteed if the Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement do everything they say they’re going to, will put the world on track for a truly catastrophic warming of up to 7.2°F (4°C), warmer than the planet has ever been during our existence as a species. Scientists have estimated that the extra energy we have been putting into the atmosphere since 1998, by trapping more greenhouse gases, is equivalent to exploding four atomic bombs every second—over two billion nuclear detonations.¹⁷

The last time that global temperatures dropped below the twentieth-century average was February 1986. And the record heat of 2016 brought the world within touching distance of the 1.5°C maximal limit declared dangerous at the Paris meeting the previous year. As of September 2016, eleven of the twelve previous months had set monthly high temperature records. July 2016 set a record for the warmest month ever recorded and then August tied the record.

Such rapid warming of the land and sea is devastating, particularly as it combines with other impacts and leads to further instability and detrimental cumulative effects. The significance of turtles to humans and to the integrity of the ecosystem goes beyond their contribution to human culture and how they are simultaneously threatened by that culture. They are also natural predators of jellyfish, helping to keep their populations in check. As drift animals, jellyfish are swept into every ocean, and the gigantic leatherbacks migrate over vast oceanic distances to chase their prey. Since jellyfish are almost all water and not much protein, leatherbacks must eat huge quantities of jellyfish to stay alive. One study reports that in a single day leatherbacks eat 73 percent of their body mass in jellyfish, an amount that equates to several hundred lion’s mane jellyfish per turtle.¹⁸ With leatherbacks driven to near extinction, jellyfish populations have been proliferating, leading to another, even greater problem. Jellyfish subsist by eating huge quantities of fish eggs and fry. If jellyfish populations are not kept in check by their natural predators they will help to undermine the base of oceanic ecosystems.

But the ultimate threat to life on earth, particularly leatherbacks and other nesting reptiles that bury their eggs in sand, is rapid climate change prompted by warming of the atmosphere and oceans—a fact recognized as early as 1953. In The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson explained the importance of a stable temperature to the oceans:

Life in the aggregate is lived within a relatively narrow range of temperature. The fact that our planet Earth has a fairly stable temperature helps make it hospitable to life. In the sea, especially, temperature changes are gradual and moderate and many animals are so delicately adjusted that they cannot tolerate an abrupt or extensive change in temperature of the surrounding water. If such occurs they must migrate or die…. Now our climate is changing and we are moving into a warm cycle of unknown duration.¹⁹

Turtles lack sex chromosomes. Their genes do not directly determine whether a baby turtle is male or female. Instead, buried eggs take their gender cue from the ambient temperature of the sand. For leatherbacks, temperatures below 85°F (29.4°C) produce a clutch that is mostly male; above that, it’s mostly female. With a relatively tiny 3.6°F (2°C) increase, a nest will produce all females, which is already beginning to happen.²⁰ A few degrees higher yet, and the “boiled” eggs don’t hatch at all.

Unless we do something about limiting climate change to less than 2°C, these majestic creatures, from a species that is 100 million years old, will be driven to extinction because they will only produce females.

Warmer Oceans

The world’s oceans are absorbing an estimated 90 percent of the excess heat generated by global warming.²¹ The effects of the increasing water temperatures go way beyond affecting leatherback turtles. As Rachel Carson noted, species are forced to migrate to colder waters, displacing those already there. Greater rates of evaporation put more water vapor into a warmer atmosphere that can hold more water, thus leading to more severe downpours and extreme rainfall events.

Temperatures are increasing in the Arctic and Antarctic at greater rates than in the middle latitudes. As a result, over the last fifty years, Arctic Ocean ice has vanished from an area twice the size of Alaska and the remaining ice is 50 percent thinner. The lowest maximum winter ice in thirty-seven years of satellite data occurred in February and March of 2016. The year 2016 tied with 2007 for the second lowest Arctic summer sea-ice level on record; the lowest occurred in 2012.²² Later in the same year the situation became even more striking: “On October 20, 2016, Arctic sea ice extent began to set new daily record lows for this time of year.” When Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents are combined for September through November 2016, the quantity is dramatically lower than for those months in any previous year on record.²³

During the summer months ice reflects 50 percent of the sun’s rays, helping to cool and regulate planetary temperature. By contrast, open water absorbs 90 percent of incoming sunlight, warming the water even more. Warmer air temperatures play a major role in ice melt, as does the self-reinforcing impact of ice disappearing. In a classic example of a positive feedback loop, warming Arctic waters lead to more ice melt, which exposes more dark sea, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, and so on. It should come as little surprise that the loss of sea ice appears to be accelerating.

More and more evidence indicates that decreasing Arctic Ocean sea ice is altering the jet stream and already affecting weather patterns around the world.²⁴

The accelerated melting of the gigantic Greenland ice sheet is as dramatic as the disappearance of Arctic sea ice: over 50 percent of the surface was melting during the summer of 2015, contributing to the thirty-sixth consecutive year of global glacier loss.

In contrast to the melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet, the greatest danger for ice loss resulting from warming air and oceans in the Antarctic is the flow of the continental glaciers into the sea. As they reach the sea, “ice shelves” in contact with the water are formed, with the shelves still attached to the ice sheet on land. Melting from below and under tidal forces, these shelves produce the greatest amount of ice loss in Antarctica. As the ice shelves melt and icebergs calve off, more ice flows from the land into the sea. The loss of ice in this most active ice-loss region “shows signs of becoming ‘unstoppable.’ There’s enough water locked up in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea region alone to raise the global average sea level by four feet, and it’s the fastest-melting spot on the continent.”²⁵

As a result of thermal expansion and melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels rose about seven inches during the twentieth century, causing saltwater intrusion to damage low-lying coastal agricultural soils in Bangladesh, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and other areas of the world. The sea level is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.²⁶

Plastics Are Forever

Plastic production, an essentially post–Second World War industry, increased from less than 2 tons in 1950, to over 340 million tons by 2014.²⁷ After a single use, 95 percent of all plastic is lost to the production process, escaping into the wider environment: oceans, landfills, or incinerators. Because plastics are synthetic carbon-based polymers that didn’t exist on Earth until seventy years ago, few organisms have evolved to be able to metaboliz them.²⁸ One-third of all plastic is not recaptured, going directly into the environment, often ending up in the ocean (the second-largest percentage goes to landfill). If things continue as they are, in thirty-five years the plastic in the oceans will weigh more than fish.²⁹

Needless to say, vast quantities of plastic threaded throughout the watercourses of the world have drastic implications for life of all kinds. In yet another negative ramification for leatherback turtles, plastic bags floating through the oceans look almost exactly like large undulating jellyfish. When plastic bags are ingested, they will often choke the turtles, causing them to be asphyxiated or starve. A study from 2015 estimates that more than half of all turtles and 90 percent of seabirds have ingested plastic.³⁰ In January 2016 necropsies on twenty-nine beached sperm whales stranded in the North Sea showed the animals had ingested massive quantities of plastic, including, in one case, a 40-foot-long fishing net. Robert Habeck, minister of the environment for Schleswig-Holstein, observed that the animals were made “to starve with full stomachs.”³¹ Just like those whales, humans who eat fish are almost certainly ingesting chemicals derived from plastic, along with a host of other contaminants.

Estimates vary, but upward of 500 billion plastic bags are manufactured every year, requiring 12 million barrels of oil.³² Paper bags are no friendlier to the environment: it takes four times as much energy and three times as much water to make paper bags, producing fifty times more water pollution and about 70 percent more pollution than the manufacture of plastic bags. Millions of trees are cut down that could otherwise be absorbing carbon dioxide; paper is difficult to recycle and takes up more space in landfill.³³ The real answer is not to manufacture any bag designed for a single use (or for that matter, most other products). But because industry is so strongly opposed to that, efforts to ban single-use plastic containers have had limited success.

As plastic is now pervasive throughout the environment and will last so long without degrading, it has been proposed as one way to measure the impact of humans in the Anthropocene:

Plastics are now widely enough distributed to characterize such strata over large parts of the world, even in remote environments such as that of the deep sea floor and the polar regions. Especially in marine sediments, microplastics form superficially invisible, but potentially widespread markers, directly akin to microfossils in more conventional palaeontology…. Stratigraphically, plastics within sediments comprise a good practical indicator of Anthropocene strata…. Their correlation potential, though, now stretches out into space, as they have now been carried across the solar system by spacecraft, and placed in orbit around the Earth and on the surface of the Moon and Mars.³⁴

In other words, not only has a single planet been poisoned—contamination of the whole solar system is occurring. A product with extremely useful and important properties has been produced but maladapted to its most appropriate and least damaging applications, used in short-term ways that cause immense pollution and long-term harm to the biosphere and beyond.

The Scourge of Air Pollution

Considered to be the largest environmental problem to threaten human health, the severe health implications of air pollution are only beginning to be fully quantified.

Energy production and use is the single largest contributor to air pollution. The smoke emitted by indoor sources for cooking, heating, and light (wood, charcoal, kerosene, etc.), which are used by 2.7 billion people, is estimated to be responsible for 3.5 million annual premature deaths.³⁵

An estimated 166 million people—over half the U.S. population—live under conditions exposing them, simply by breathing, to high ozone and particulate air pollution.³⁶ In 2011, air pollution from the U.S. energy industry caused $131 billion in damage, mostly in health impacts.³⁷ According to a slightly earlier study by the National Academy of Sciences, all 137,000 coal miners in the United States could be given tax-free pensions of $50,000 a year for only 10 percent of the cost of the air pollution generated by the production of energy from burning coal.³⁸ On a global scale, the economic and health impacts of air pollution are staggering. According to the World Health Organization, the cost in Europe alone comes to almost 10 percent of the combined European Union economy, $1.6 trillion:

Over 90% of citizens in the Region are exposed to annual levels of outdoor fine particulate matter that are above WHO’s air-quality guidelines. This accounted for 482,000 premature deaths in 2012 from heart and respiratory diseases, blood vessel conditions and strokes, and lung cancer. In the same year, indoor air pollution resulted in an additional 117,200 premature deaths, five times more in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.³⁹

It’s important to bear in mind that Europe is often held up as a model of environmental probity. Yet in 2016, some areas of London exceeded their annual limit for nitrogen dioxide levels within the first week of January. Despite the much-touted imposition of congestion charges and early adoption of bike-sharing programs, as well as air pollution controls dating back to the 1950s, London exhibits levels of nitrogen oxides on a par with Beijing and Shanghai.⁴⁰

The World Health Organization has conducted pollution research in over 2,000 cities across the world. María Neira, head of public health at WHO, comments on the results:

We have a public health emergency in many countries from pollution. It’s dramatic, one of the biggest problems we are facing globally, with horrible future costs to society…. Air pollution leads to chronic diseases which require hospital space. Before we knew that pollution was responsible for diseases like pneumonia and asthma. Now we know that it leads to bloodstream, heart and cardiovascular diseases, too—even dementia. We are storing up problems. These are chronic diseases that require hospital beds. The cost will be enormous.⁴¹

Health impacts in less developed countries with little or no pollution controls, such as India and China, are even worse. In China alone, 4,000 people die every day from the health impacts of breathing polluted air—close to 1.5 million per year. Worldwide, an estimated 6.5 million people die prematurely each year because of air pollution, “making this the world’s fourth-largest threat to human health, behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking.”⁴²

The number of cars in the world is set to double in fourteen years to over two billion, the vast majority run on fossil fuels. The effect of this increase will completely wipe out any potential gains in fuel efficiency. As a result, climate change and the effects on humans and all other life forms of air pollution, already severe, can only worsen.⁴³

William Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” speaks of “dark Satanic Mills,” evoking a time in England of child labor, sixteen-hour days, and rampant, unchecked pollution. But this is no bygone era: the ever-growing capitalist economy that by its nature ignores environmental effects has taken Blake’s dark vision global. “This is the first generation in human experience exposed to such high levels of pollution,” says María Neira. “In the 19th century pollution was bad, but it was concentrated in just a few places. Now there are huge numbers of people living with high levels of pollution. Nearly 70 percent of people in cities are exposed to pollution above recommended levels.”⁴⁴

According to a study in the journal Nature, premature deaths from outdoor pollution in Asia amount to 3.3 million people per year, which is more than the combined death toll from malaria and HIV/AIDS.⁴⁵ The majority of this pollution is from cooking and home heating using coal, kerosene, and biomass such as wood and animal dung as energy sources. A simple and entirely possible switch to clean, renewable energy sources would have immediate and immensely positive health impacts for humans and other species. Eliminating or vastly reducing the use of fossil fuel–based private transportation—cars and trucks—through the reorganization of cities and the provision of powered public transportation, could further reduce these impacts.

Race, Class, and the Environment

Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. It is responsible for giant quantities of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide production in addition to highly toxic heavy metals such as mercury. Studies have shown that the extent of exposure to those pollutants varies with income and race. For example the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People documents this disparity in its report “Coal Blooded”: the average per capita income for people living within three miles of a coal plant is $18,400, significantly less than the national average of $21,587; and those who live near these coal plants are disproportionately people of color.⁴⁶ People of color and the poor are much more likely to live next to toxic waste sites than white or middle-class populations, in numbers out of all proportion to their percentage in the local population.⁴⁷ A study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that in the United States people of color typically breathe air that is 38 percent more polluted than the air breathed by whites. The study’s lead researcher, Julian Marshall commented:

We were quite surprised to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution…. Especially the fact that this difference is throughout the U.S., even in cities and states in the Midwest…. The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial…. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO₂ levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.⁴⁸

This disparity is not particular to the U.S.; it is a global phenomenon. Since colonial times European countries have outsourced their own pollution, devastating the environments of their colonies. As a result, richer countries make only limited efforts to clean up their local environments of the most egregious and obvious pollutants. Not only do richer countries relocate the most polluting industries to countries in the Global South, they export waste materials to poorer countries and extract large quantities of resources, frequently leaving ecologically devastated zones in their wake. Such practices, along with promotion of changes in land use to provide the wealthy countries with products like palm oil, are forms of ecological imperialism.⁴⁹

About 3.9 million square miles (10 million square kilometers) of forests have been cut down since the last ice age—half since 1945. Yet in this period Europe and the United States have gained forest cover, indicating that virtually all of the deforestation in the last seventy years—an area more than twenty times the size of Great Britain—represents deforestation in the Global South, mostly to serve markets for industry and agriculture in the North. Soil chemist Justus Liebig made exactly this point as long ago as 1840, when the leading global colonial power was Great Britain, which “seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility…. Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say the whole world, sucking its best blood.”⁵⁰

Over 90 percent of those dying or displaced due to climate-related disasters are people from the Global South. When climate disasters hit a wealthy country, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas, it is the poor and people of color who suffer most.

In 2015 it was revealed that the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead. The citizens of Flint were being systematically poisoned because state-appointed officials changed to an unsafe water source to save money in 2014. When President Obama boasted of laying enough pipeline for oil and gas production to encircle the Earth yet none is laid along the sixty miles that would get get clean water to Flint, the priorities of our current social system are brought into stark relief.

The Social Crisis

The effect of air pollution and lead contamination of water are only part of the huge environmental impacts on people. A wide variety of chemicals cause millions of deaths worldwide from life-threatening and chronic diseases; they also disrupt hormone activity, leading to an array of mental and physical disorders.

Aside from the many environmental impacts, a host of other critical problems face humanity. Approximately one billion people are either routinely hungry or malnourished. Over one billion people across the world, mostly in rural areas, are forced to defecate in the open because they lack sanitation and toilets. Aside from the problems of human health and loss of dignity, the lack of toilets is particularly dangerous for women, who are left vulnerable to attack. Some 2.5 billion people—about one-third of the Earth’s population—have little or no sanitation.⁵¹ Close to 700 million have no access to “improved” drinking water. A further two billion people live on less than $2 a day. Billions lack access to needed medicines or regular health care because they cannot afford them. In the United States, tens of millions of people do not have adequate access to good or affordable health care. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa have little to no regular access to electricity.

The extent of hunger and malnourishment makes it appear that there isn’t enough food to go around for the seven billion people on the planet, and the media constantly tell us that we have already, or are about to, run short. But, says Eric Holt-Gimenez, executive director of Food First and the Institute for Food and Development Policy,

“Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.”⁵²

Profit Over Planet: The Priorities of a Sick System

At the same time that huge amounts of poverty, deprivation, and environmental degradation exist, a staggering amount of wealth has been concentrated at the top of society. A mere 8 people have accumulated as much wealth as the combined wealth of the poorest half of the world, some 3.2 billion people and the richest 1% had more wealth than the remaining 99%.⁵³ The wealthy go to great lengths to hide their riches from sight—and tax. A 2016 Oxfam report estimates that the money stashed away in offshore tax havens is around $7.6 trillion. Hiding that amount from government tax collection agencies annually deprives the public of an extra $190 billion that could be spent on cleaning up the environment as well as health care, education, or other urgently needed public services.⁵⁴ “As much as 30 percent of all African financial wealth is estimated to be held offshore, costing an estimated $14 billion in lost tax revenues every year,” notes the Oxfam report. “This is enough money to pay for healthcare for mothers and children that could save four million children’s lives a year and employ enough teachers to get every African child into school.”⁵⁵

In 2012, President Obama boasted, “There are politicians who say that if we just drilled more, then gas prices would come down right away. What they don’t say is that … America is producing more oil than at any time in the last eight years. We’ve opened up new areas for exploration. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”⁵⁶

Even as the United States was supposedly part of saving the world during the Paris climate talks in December 2015, Obama signed a bill backed by Exxon and the Koch brothers to expedite pipeline construction permits.⁵⁷ Similarly, the Obama administration approved over 1,500 offshore fracking permits in the Gulf of Mexico; some were approved even as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill raged out of control in 2010.⁵⁸

The routine immorality of how for-profit corporations operate is topped by Exxon, which knew from its own research as far back as the 1980s that its products were the primary cause of climate change. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” senior company scientist James F. Black reported to Exxon’s management committee at corporate headquarters in 1977. This spurred Exxon to set up a research program to investigate the potential for warming by as much as 18°F (10°C). When the study verified the potential for such warming Exxon curtailed the research and hid its findings.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the corporation poured tens of millions of dollars into the coffers and bank accounts of think tanks and climate change deniers—scientists and politicians who have essentially rejected the company’s own research findings and helped to delay political action against climate change by decades.

But as an investigation by Inside Climate News of internal documents and interviews reveals, Exxon was far from alone in suppressing this knowledge. The American Petroleum Institute, together with the nation’s largest oil companies, ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry as a whole was aware of its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than previously known. The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company.⁶⁰

Contrary to regularly made claims that President Obama is engaged in a “war on fossil fuels,” his administration could hardly have been friendlier to increased oil production, according to a 2016 Bloomberg News article:

U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter. Instead of shutting down the hydraulic fracturing process that has unlocked natural gas from dense rock formations, Obama has promoted the fuel as a stepping-stone to a greener, renewable future.

The administration has also permitted drilling in the Arctic Ocean over the objections of environmentalists and opened the door to a new generation of oil and gas drilling in Atlantic waters hugging the East Coast. [Obama] also signed, with reservations, a measure to lift a 40-year-old ban on the export of most U.S. crude.⁶¹

It was only in the final days of the Obama administration, when confronted with Donald Trump as successor, that the president signed an order prohibiting new oil and gas drilling in large areas of the continental shelf under government control in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. Congress, however, can reverse this order.

Then there are the proposed international trade deals, which completely subvert any hope that governments are serious about addressing the climate crisis. On the international front, the Obama administration was just as busy as his predecessor in promoting corporate interests. In the final year of his presidency Obama hoped to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Modeled on the environmentally and socially disastrous 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton, both deals incorporate language designed to protect against “loss of future profits.” Translation? “Under either trade pact, if a new air rule, for instance, creates disincentive for an international energy company to build a coal plant, it can sue the government for investment losses if the company can prove the policy was adopted after initial plans for the plant were made.”⁶² Both international trade deals appear to be dead in the water as a result of persistent organizing against them and in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. International trade deals such as NAFTA have little to do with trade and lowering tariff barriers; they are primarily about allowing unhindered capital movement, protecting intellectual property rights, undermining workers’ ability to organize and fight for better conditions in the North and the South, and weakening environmental regulations, all of which facilitate corporate profit-taking.

Under these so-called free trade agreements, corporate interests always trump environmental protections. But it doesn’t merely end with corporations being able to sue governments; it includes limitations on how environmental issues will be addressed. As reported in the journal Nature Climate Change,

A number of unproven approaches to environmental policies underpin free trade agreements. Among them is the market-based approach to carbon pricing, such as an emissions trading scheme, often considered to be a dysfunctional alternative to stringent industrial standards or carbon taxes. Less direct than a carbon tax, market-based carbon pricing can also be easier to manipulate, as shown by previous experience in Europe.⁶³

Taking into account the healthcare costs caused by pollution, the International Monetary Fund estimates subsidies for the production of fossil fuels at $5.3 trillion in 2015, or 6.5 percent of the global GDP.⁶⁴ Contrast this with aid to developing countries: the United Nations has spent decades trying to get developed countries to push their contributions up to a mere 0.7 percent of their GDP, only to be continually rebuffed. In 2014, the United States donated $32 billion in overseas aid (much of it tied to the purchase of U.S. products or as loans rather than actual gifts), a miserly 0.19 percent of GDP.⁶⁵

Are There “Green” Alternatives?

Just as we are told that there aren’t enough resources to feed everyone or lift people out of poverty, we are told that efficient renewable energy technologies don’t exist, or that they would be too expensive to build, or that wind and solar power are unreliable. A 2016 study by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows otherwise: the United States, which is responsible for 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, could “transition to a reliable, low-carbon, electrical generation and transmission system … with commercially available technology and within 15 years.”⁶⁶

This would mean an almost 80 percent drop in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by the electricity-generating sector by 2030. This new electrical generation and transmission system would not even require storage because it would be regionally integrated. This is exactly the kind of change required for staying within 3.6°F (2°C) of average global warming. It could be done at less cost than continuing to use fossil fuels to produce electricity. Electrical production currently accounts for two-fifths of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

In a world heading rapidly toward irreversible and devastating climate change, not only are renewable sources of electricity the best option; they are the only option if we want reliable electricity. Why? Because thermoelectric power plants, which currently supply 98 percent of global electricity (whether using nuclear, fossil fuel, hydroelectric, or biomass fuel), need massive quantities of water to generate steam for cooling and to pump power for dams. One study estimates that because of lower water levels and warmer temperatures in many rivers, generating capacity could be reduced “by as much as 86% in thermoelectric and 74% in hydro-electric plants.”⁶⁷

Once seen as an ultra-reliable source of “green” power for developing countries, hydroelectricity is showing itself to be anything but. Brazil, a country that produces 75 percent of its electricity from hydropower (for South America as a whole it’s 63 percent), suffered extensive blackouts in 2014 owing to a four-decades-long drought.⁶⁸ Despite that, the shortsighted, profit-driven priorities of capital mean that Brazil is still building more mega-dams. These dams displace indigenous peoples from their cultural home and way of life and bury rain forests beneath newly created giant lakes; the lake beds—once rain forest, now a mass of rotting vegetation—contribute massive quantities of the climate-warming gas methane to the atmosphere. Despite massive and ongoing protests by workers, farmers, and indigenous groups, the Brazilian government is still attempting to build the ecologically and socially devastating Belo Monte Dam, the third biggest dam in the world.

According to researchers, the most vulnerable areas for shortfalls in electricity due to water reductions and warmer water are “the United States, southern South America, southern Africa, central and southern Europe, Southeast Asia and southern Australia … because declines in mean annual stream flow are projected combined with strong increases in water temperature under changing climate. This reduces the potential for both hydropower and thermoelectric power generation in these regions.”⁶⁹

When rain forest is cut down for pastureland or other forms of development, buried under thousands of tons of water behind a dam, and people are displaced from their homes a vital ecosystem linkage is being broken—but it is not the only one. Tropical forests store 40 percent of all terrestrial carbon, and deforestation is a significant contributor (15 percent) to carbon emissions. Hardwood trees, with their thick trunks, giant size, and long lives, are the most significant contributors to that carbon storage mechanism.

A study from São Paolo State University in Brazil analyzed the interactions between 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.