Link of the day, Feb 3 2014: Remarkable factual account of the Earth's environmental balance sheet, from truthout.org

Capitalism ! (Photo credit: ♦ Biel's ® ♦ Gabriel Machado ♦)

 In November, Truthout.org published a remarkable article by Richard Smith, a major brain on the environmental side of human affairs,  in which he tried to estimate what is needed if humanity is to stop destroying the capacity of the Earth to support life. This is a long article, but it is certainly worth anyone’s reading. It is entitled  Capitalism and the Destruction of Life on Earth: Six Theses on Saving the Humans.

To encourage readers to undertake the task of reading this article, I include the six theses around which it is built:

1. CAPITALISM IS, OVERWHELMINGLY, THE MAIN DRIVER OF PLANETARY ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE

2. SOLUTIONS TO THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS ARE BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS, BUT WE CAN'T TAKE THE NECESSARY STEPS TO PREVENT ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE BECAUSE, SO LONG AS WE LIVE UNDER CAPITALISM, ECONOMIC GROWTH HAS TO TAKE PRIORITY OVER ECOLOGICAL CONCERNS OR THE ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE AND MASS UNEMPLOYMENT WILL BE THE RESULT

3. IF CAPITALISM CAN'T HELP BUT DESTROY THE WORLD, THEN WHAT ALTERNATIVE IS THERE BUT TO NATIONALIZE AND SOCIALIZE MOST OF THE ECONOMY AND PLAN IT DIRECTLY, EVEN PLAN MOST OF THE GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY?

4. RATIONAL PLANNING REQUIRES DEMOCRACY: VOTING THE BIG QUESTIONS

5. DEMOCRACY CAN WORK ONLY IN CONTEXT OF ROUGH SOCIO-ECONOMIC EQUALITY AND SOCIAL GUARANTEES.

6. THIS IS CRAZY, UTOPIAN, IMPOSSIBLE, NEVER HAPPEN

Reading Smith’s argument made me think of a lecture given a few years ago on Archaeology and the Future by Bruce Trigger, the McGill University professor of anthropology (and a man regarded before his untimely death as the world’s premier expert on the history of archaeology). After dividing the history of human kind into various phases and deciding that we have entered a phase where the major problem is to exercise human control over our galloping technology, Trigger came to the conclusion that the nation-state as at present constituted cannot carry out the reforms needed, and that what is needed are the very qualities the archaeological record has suggested were common among paleo-hunters many millenia ago: tolerance, sharing and the like.

Richard Smith’sremarkable fact-laden analysis takes us along the same road, confronting uswith the sheer, unbearable facts, Even the many footnotes contain indispensibleinformation, such as a Congolese resident’s description of why the fight forthe nation’s rare resources has resulted in imposed impoverishment of itspeople. The article can be read here.