This initiative is important in making a strenuous plea for urgent action on the global “poly crisis”. But it fails to make clear the fundamental cause of the problem, or the way out of it.
The call comes from 26 agencies including the Club of Rome, the Council for the Human Future, Extinction Rebellion and 23 other major bodies. It includes short statements by about thirty well known activists, summarising the situation and putting forward things that must be done. It will be a valuable prod to greater recognition of the dire situation and to greater action by individuals and governments.
But the report is open to the fundamental criticism that it fails to represent the situation properly, and fails to deal with the basic causes of the predicament.
It is excellent in identifying the many elements in the crisis and their seriousness, but the considerable space given to “solutions” more or less just says we need to take steps such as ”Develop a World Plan of Action to combat the crisis”, “Reconstruct the architecture of our governance systems worldwide”, “Develop an Earth System Treaty, under the UN”, “Act urgently to prevent planetary ‘tipping points’ from escalating into irreversible crises.” All of these are admirable and many are beyond dispute. But they almost entirely do not go near what is the basic cause of the predicament and what has to be done if it is to be solved.
The fundamental cause of just about all the big problems now threatening our existence is simply over-production and over-consumption, and the blind obsession with the pursuit of affluence and growth driving these. We are far beyond levels of resource use and the consequent environmental damage that are remotely sustainable or that could be spread to all the world’s people. There is a strong case that present rich world per capita resource use would have to go down to one-sixth or less of present levels before a sustainable and just world could be achieved.
This is causing resource depletion, environmental destruction, imperialism, deprivation of poor countries of a fair share of world resources, and resource wars. Yet just about all governments, elites and people in general are determined to increase “living standards” and the GDP as fast as possible and without limit. This suicidal commitment is hardly mentioned at all in the World Call document (although a few do politely question “consumption”.) It means that solutions to the predicament cannot possibly be achieved unless........