Responding to Global Warming and the Pillaging of the Earth
Viewed from the perspective of the looming disaster of global warming accompanied by the exhaustion of our planet, three institutions central to our human culture stand in the way of any effective response by our species to this self-inflicted horror.
Organized Religion – The First Plague
For many years, I have said, when confronted by religious people, that organized religions are a plague on our species. I am not really troubled by individuals who believe in some god. The universe is a big place, and our insignificance in it causes troubles for many. So, I can understand the need for some explanation or perceived protection from the unpredictable whims of our world.
But, when you look at organized religions, you can’t help but see them as a plague. They have been, and continue to be, a huge source of conflicts at the personal and societal levels. Even the most cursory review of European history alone shows organized religions at the center of endless wars. This seems to be because organized religions are all exclusionary. They believe that nonbelievers are to be converted, shunned, or burned at the stake.
Then, we have the fact that all organized religions are run by men. They oppress women and non-straight men in many different ways. Now, many of the so-called liberal religions in the Protestant division will claim this is not so. One only needs to look at the most recent eruptions within the Methodist sect to see that this counter-claim is on very thin ice.
Organized religions, as proclaimers of the received words of their gods, compel their followers to believe in magical thinking and undermine faith in science or even arguments by the predominance of the evidence. This serves the needs of the leaders of organized religions to the detriment of facing up to the serious issues our species confronts.
Finally, organized religions consume huge human and material resources that might otherwise be available to address real needs. Recently, I visited Spain, which included visits to many very large ancient religious buildings, each built on the backs of peasants over the centuries. More recently, on a road trip through parts of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, the number of churches, even in obviously poor rural towns, was overwhelming.
Capitalism – The Second Plague
There are many troubling features of capitalism. But, from the perspective of global warming and the exhaustion of the earth, two stand out as absolute show-stoppers: perpetual growth and external costs.
There is no such thing as a steady-state capitalism. Given the central role of a small class of owners, each competing for wealth with others, capitalism requires continuing growth. Otherwise, capitalism will self-implode. This means that there will be endless requirements for further extractions from the finite earth that we live on. This is clearly not physically possible.
A further trouble for capitalism is its built-in feature of externalizing costs. Every capitalist tries to hand off the costs of production to third parties. Air and water pollution, landfills, animal feedlot waste pools, single-use plastics, landfill dumps that are prominent geographic features in places as flat as Florida, and more, all of these are what economists call “external costs”, someone else is paying for them. The illnesses caused by ultra-processed industrial foods are another example of external costs. You get the idea.
Externalizing costs is not an optional feature for capitalist enterprises. Capitalists externalize costs because it increases their profits. Every enterprise must externalize at least as many costs as its competitors. Otherwise, even over the medium term, they will fail against their competitor’s higher profit margins.
There are many other troubling features of capitalism: income and wealth inequality, poor or no health, housing, and education for the masses at the bottom of the pile. However, perpetual growth and external costs are simply not sustainable.
The Nation-State – The Third Plague
In thinking about our species’ situation on our planet, we can identify a number of global problems:
(presented in random order)
- global warming
- exhaustion (pillaging) of the earth’s resources
- overpopulation
- mass extinctions of many other species
- a capitalist economic system that produces pollution as a necessary systemic feature
- a capitalist economic system that requires continuous growth
- a capitalist economic system that concentrates income and wealth in the hands of an extremely small portion of our species while impoverishing the vast majority (>95%).
- a capitalist economic system that gives private investment decisions priority over investments for the common good.
- a political system that uses violence and wars as a method of governing the planet
All of these are global problems. None can be meaningfully addressed by individual nation-states or even a coalition of them. Even the United Nations is of no help. Embedded in its charter is the sovereignty of individual nation-states. “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter;….”1 The nation-state is the basic political unit of the world. As such, its replacement with a governing process that can address our problems is a central problem.
We should take note that there is one system that is acting at the global level. The capitalist economic system, in particular its leaders, the rich and corporations, have made great strides toward achieving global economic hegemony. With the application of neoliberal principles2 to create a global marketplace for goods, services, and money, the rich and corporations are, in fact, acting at a global level. Global corporations and finance are substantially either in control of the nation-states they inhabit or, in the case of much of the developing world, acting as they wish with no effective countervailing forces. A central problem is that their decisions are completely self-serving and bound by the economic processes embedded in their system. With their deepening focus on financialization3, their planning and investment horizons are becoming ever shorter and more disconnected from the creation of products and services.4
Let’s return to the nation-state. Most histories of the development of the nation-state as a form of human organization date the initial phases with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 in Europe. By the beginning of the 20th century, the nation-state had become sufficiently widespread as an organizational form to drive two world wars. Today there are 193 nation-state members of the UN. So, the nation-state has been evolving for more than 375 years.
Running Out Of Time!
Do we have 300-plus years to evolve a system of global governance to address the very evident problems of our environment and the exhaustion and predation of the earth? The way forward seems scarily uncertain. As a species, we have evolved our present human culture over a span of some 300,000 years. By culture, I mean: “…… behavior peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behavior. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements.”5 It is the shared innovation and knowledge that we learn and develop, then pass to next generation.
If you lay out the entire history of the planet as though it occurred in one 24-hour day, our species arrives in the last 4 seconds of the day. Our 10,000-year history of living in groups larger than 150 – 300 or so occurs in the last 1/5 of the last second of the day. This suggests that there are many adaptations built into our culture that reflect the lessons of the first 290.000 years of our history. Perhaps these are now maladaptations. That is evolutionary adaptations that worked well over the first 290,000 years but are now not so helpful in our present environment?
On a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center, I noticed this on a wall:
For this discussion, I might re-write it a bit:
Footnotes
- Chapter 1, Article 2, Section 7. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1
- For a relatively brief introduction to neoliberalism see my About Neoliberalism(opens a new tab).
- Financialization is an important element of the neoliberal enterprise. For a discussion, see my Financialization – from production to extraction(opens a new tab)
- see William Lazonick, Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation, Cambridge Elements: Corporate Governance (Cambridge U. Press, 2023)
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/culture
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