2020
Is This the Tipping Point?
We are facing an existential crisis, and it isn’t COVID-19.
The Current System
Consumer capitalism is a profit-driven economic system that has increased resource consumption, waste and pollution. It has contributed to a global financial system that is unstable and fosters inequality, promoting short-sighted individualism over collective needs with devastating long-term effects to the environment.
In, A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough bears witness to the unprecedented destruction of the natural world that has occurred over the past ninety years — from the destruction of the Borneo and Amazon rainforests, to the death of massive coral reefs and the melting of polar ice caps.
Each year we cut down 15 billion trees and overfish the oceans to critical levels. Over the past hundred years we’ve removed roughly 90% of large fish from the oceans and currently 30% of fish stocks are at critical levels.
Around the world we have replaced rare and biologically diverse areas with land we use to grow crops and raise animals for our consumption. At present half of all fertile land is farmland. Half of wild animal populations have disappeared since the 1930s. Currently, humans and the animals we raise for our consumption constitute ninety percent of the mass of mammals on the planet leaving only 4% for rare and biologically diverse, and most of whom are threatened with extinction.
Attenborough warns that we are at a very real tipping point that could either lead us toward a future within the next hundred years that will result in a largely uninhabitable Earth — four degrees Celsius warmer, with a population of 11 billion, a landscape unable to sustain us characterised by exhausted soils and the disappearance of rainforests that stabilise the environment.
The disappearance of polar ice caps that deflect much of the sun’s heat will cause the process of global warming will ramp up with devastating effects. Increasingly acidic oceans will see the death of coral reefs and a drastic fall in fish populations. Carbon dioxide levels will reach critical levels, a factor Attenborough notes, played a key role in all of the previous five mass extinction events that occurred over the estimated four billion years of life on our planet.
Inertia
Change takes work, it takes fighting against inertia, the tendency of things to continue along their current course. It requires more energy to initiate change then to let things be, whether it be getting something at rest to move or getting something already in motion to stop.
Since the 1990s there has been a widespread sense in the U.S. counter-culture of being trapped in a slow death march of mindless consumerism. David Foster Wallace’s line that all advertising is a mechanism to ‘create an anxiety relievable by purchase’ rings truer than ever today.
Consumer capitalism thrives on individual neurosis, discontent and isolation. While many of us can identify that it’s not a good, healthy or sustainable system to live under, we’re trapped by our own inertia, in our own inability to get out of the water we’re all swimming in.
The Tipping Point
2020 may provide the tipping point we all need. We have a small window in which to act before irreversible damage to the environment prevents us from getting back the fragile biological balance we lose more of each day.
In a recent article in Science, a clear link is drawn between deforestation and the emergence of new viral diseases the cross over into human populations. The study estimates that an investment of $9.6 billion in direct forest-protection payments could result in a reduction of deforestation and result in a 40% reduction in ‘virus spillover’.
There are more viruses on the planet than all other forms of life added together with at least one hundred million different kinds that literally cover the planet, in a virosphere. From polar ice caps to acid lakes, these ancient life forms have a tenacity for survival and adaptation. There are an estimated ten billion viruses per litre of sea water that play a crucial role in sustaining life on earth.
We have been beneficiaries of the Holocene, an 11,500 year period characterised by a remarkably stable environment in our planet’s history where average temperatures have remained stable, not wavering above or below a range of 1 degree C year to year. This is a pin prick in the four billion years of life on our planet and we are rapidly unravelling this precarious balance that has allowed us to thrive.
There have been five mass extinctions since the beginning of life on the planet. In the last extinction that wiped out the last of the dinosaurs, 75% of all species disappeared. Global warming and the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere played a role in all of these mass extinctions.
So, let’s hope 2020 is a tipping point, the moment we collectively decide to shift away from a system that puts profits and products over people and the planet.
