What's At Stake in the Ecological Crisis? Everything

Let’s face it: environmentalists want to take away your tasty cheeseburger, your cushy SUV, your suburban McMansion. You might think that we want to take away prosperity itself. I want to argue that this conception, while understandable, has things backward.

In my view, prosperity comes from the natural world refined by human labor.1 The natural environment is ultimately the source of both our necessities and our luxuries. And so a natural environment in crisis threatens whatever society values. In the collapse of the planet’s life-sustaining systems, everything is at stake.

The environmentalist Guardian columnist George Monbiot writes that we tend to think of environmental crises in discrete “boxes” such as climate, biodiversity, and deforestation among others. These are indeed crises, but for Monbiot they should not be addressed as stand-alone issues: “Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.” This gives a sense of the magnitude of the ecological crisis as a whole, as does a statistic cited in Monbiot’s article from a 2021 scientific paper: “only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered ‘ecologically intact.’”

The gist of the environmental picture is that the systems that sustain life on Earth—yes, that includes you and me—are breaking down. Monbiot identifies a simple culprit: “the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it.”

I want to emphasize that this is not a question of either/or. It’s not either we can have an economy that produces things such as SUVs, McMansions, and (a lot of) cheeseburgers or we can have a healthy biosphere. Instead, if the systems that sustain life fail, economic prosperity will come to an end too. Environmentally devastating forms of economic production will halt one way or another, the question is whether they take down the planet with them.

For now, I want to sidestep the question of whether a growth-based economic system (such as capitalism) can be made compatible with thriving ecosystems.2 Instead, I am content here to make two basic points: first, that it is vital to repair the damage caused to the planet and restore ecosystems and second, that we need to make the economic changes necessary to accomplish this