Jason Hickel - Our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.
Soil is the second
biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four
times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world. But human
activity like deforestation and industrial farming – with its intensive
ploughing, monoculture and heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides –
is ruining our soils at breakneck speed, killing the organic materials that
they contain. Now 40% of agricultural soil is classed
as “degraded” or “seriously degraded”. In fact, industrial farming has
so damaged our soils that a third of the world’s farmland has
been destroyed in the past four decades... As our soils degrade,
they are losing their ability to hold carbon, releasing enormous plumes
of CO2 into the atmosphere. There is, however, a
solution. Scientists and farmers around the world are pointing out that we can
regenerate degraded soils by switching from intensive industrial farming to
more ecological methods – not just organic fertiliser, but also no-tillage,
composting, and crop rotation. Here’s the brilliant part: as the soils recover,
they not only regain their capacity to hold CO2, they begin to
actively pull additional CO2 out of the atmosphere
When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels – it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system. If we don’t keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year, it plunges into crisis. That means we have to double the size of the economy every 20 years, just to stay afloat. It doesn’t take much to realise that this imperative for exponential growth makes little sense given the limits of our finite planet.
Rapid climate change
is the most obvious symptom of this contradiction, but we’re also seeing it in
the form of deforestation, desertification and mass extinction, with species
dying at an
alarming rate as our consumption of the natural world causes their
habitats to collapse. It was unthinkable to say this even 10 years ago, but
today, as we become increasingly aware of these crises, it seems all too clear:
our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.
The question is what
to do about it. How can we redesign the global economy to bring it in line with
the principles of ecology? The most obvious answer is to stop using GDP to
measure economic progress and replace it with a more thoughtful measure – one
that accounts
for the ecological and social impact of economic activity. Prominent
economists like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz have
been calling for such changes for years and it’s time we listened.
But replacing GDP is
only a first step. While it might help refocus economic policies on what really
matters, it doesn’t address the main driver of growth: debt. Debt is the reason
the economy has to grow in the first place. Because debt always comes with interest,
it grows exponentially – so if a person, a business, or a country wants to pay
down debt over the long term, they have to grow enough to at least match the
growth of their debt. Without growth, debt piles up and eventually triggers an
economic crisis.
