Earth 2014 - Village Magazine

50 November 2014

ET us imagine that in 3030 BC the total

possessions of the people of Egypt ﬁlled

one cubic metre. Let us propose that

these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How

big would that stash have been by the Battle

of Actium in 30 BC? This is the calculation

performed by the investment banker Jeremy

Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of

the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The

Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A

little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar sys-

tems. It does not take you long, pondering

ENVIRONMENT

Also in this section:

Fluoridation 52

Reply to Monbiot 54

John Robert McNeill interview 56

Aquaculture 58

Septic tanks 60

Parks Special

Twelve steps 61

Phoenix Park 62

Berlin parks 63

Pocket parks 64

Wood Quay, Galway 66

Liﬀey Quays 67

Church St 68

Rural towns 69

Where success still

embraces destruction

of the planet’s

natural capital.

By George Monbiot

Earth

2014

November 2014 51

this outcome, to reach the paradoxical posi-

tion that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail

is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we

have created. Ignore if you must climate

change, biodiversity collapse, the deple-

tion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all

these issues were miraculously to vanish,

the mathematics of compound growth make

continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use

of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal

were extracted, every upswing in industrial

production would be met with a downswing

in agricultural production, as the charcoal

or horse power required by industry reduced

the land available for growing food. Every

prior industrial revolution collapsed, as

growth could not be sustained. But coal

broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hun-

dred years – the phenomenon we now call

sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism

that made possible the progress and the

pathologies (total war, the unprecedented

concentration of global wealth, planetary

destruction) of the modern age. It was coal,

followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the

mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expan-

sion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now,

as the most accessible reserves have been

exhausted, we must ransack the hidden cor-

ners of the planet to sustain our impossible

proposition.

In May, a few days after scientists

announced that the collapse of the West

Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable, the

Ecuadorean government decided that oil

drilling would go ahead in the heart of the

Yasuni national park. It had made an oﬀer

to other governments: if they gave it half

the value of the oil in that part of the park,

it would leave the stuﬀ in the ground. You

could see this as blackmail or you could see

it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil depos-

its are rich: why, the government argued,

should it leave them untouched without

compensation when everyone else is drill-

ing down to the inner circle of hell? It asked

for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is

that Petroamazonas, a company with a col-

ourful record of destruction and spills, will

now enter one of the most biodiverse places

on the planet, in which a hectare of rainfor-

est is said to contain more species than exist

in the entire continent of North America.

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping

to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park,

Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of

Congo; one of the last strongholds of the

mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpan-

zees and forest elephants. In Britain, where

a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has

just been identiﬁed in the south-east, the

government fantasises about turning the

leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this

end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable

drilling without consent and oﬀering lavish

bribes to local people. These new reserves

solve nothing. They do not end our hunger

for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows

that the scouring of the planet has only just

begun. As the volume of the global economy

expands, everywhere that contains some-

thing concentrated, unusual, precious will

be sought out and exploited, its resources

extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse

and diﬀerentiated marvels reduced to the

same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible

equation with the myth of dematerialisa-

tion: the claim that as processes become

more eﬃcient and gadgets are miniatur-

ised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials.

There is no sign that this is happening. Iron

ore production has risen 180% in ten years.

The trade body Forest Industries tell us that

“global paper consumption is at a record

high level and it will continue to grow”. If,

in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our

consumption of paper, what hope is there for

other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set

the pace for global consumption.

Are their yachts getting smaller?

Their houses? Their artworks?

Their purchase of rare woods,

rare ﬁsh, rare stone? Those with

the means buy ever bigger houses

to store the growing stash of stuﬀ

they will not live long enough to

use. By unremarked accretions,

ever more of the surface of the

planet is used to extract, manu-

facture and store things we don’t

need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising

that fantasies about the coloni-

sation of space – which tell us

we can export our problems

instead of solving them – have

resurfaced.

As the philosopher Michael

Rowan points out, the inevitabil-

ities of compound growth mean

that if last year’s predicted glo-

bal growth rate for 2014 (3.1%)

is sustained, even if we were

miraculously to reduce the con-

sumption of raw materials by

90% we delay the inevitable by

just 75 years. Eﬃciency solves

nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built

upon growth and its destruction of the

Earth’s living systems are the overwhelm-

ing facts of our existence. As a result they

are mentioned almost nowhere. They are

the 21st century’s great taboo, the sub-

jects guaranteed to alienate your friends

and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside

a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame,

fashion and the three dreary staples of mid-

dle class conversation: recipes, renovations

and resorts. Anything but the topic that

demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the

outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated

as exotic and unpardonable distractions,

while the impossible proposition by which

we live is regarded as so sane and normal and

unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of men-

tion. That’s how you measure the depth of

this problem: by our inability even to dis-

cuss it. •

This article ﬁrst appeared in The Guardian.

www.monbiot.com

Global paper

consumption

is at a record

high level and

it will continue

to grow – if,

in the digital

age, we

won’t reduce

even our

consumption

of paper,

what hope is

there for other

commodities?

“