Skip to main content
Read page text
page 45
come from to build more and more cars, and where do we dispose of the old ones? Just how many cars can be built and bought? How many roads can cover the landscape? How many new houses can we build on open land? Where will our food come from when the topsoils that we have overused are left destroyed? And how expensive will that food become as transport costs continue to rocket? How much carbon can fill the skies? How much plastic can be dumped out at sea? How many giant dead spots before the oceans give out? How much Nature can be transformed into commodities and still remain viable? “We imagined ourselves isolated from the sources of our existence” and we invented instead “a myth of endless progress”, says the Dark Mountain Project, a new movement Greed by Gerry Baptist Illustrations are from a boxed set of woodcuts: The 7 Deadly Sins by Gerry Baptist www.gerrybaptist.co.uk and community of scholars, writers and artists based mainly in the United Kingdom. “The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century.” The World Conservation Union adds that extinction threatens 23% of mammal species, 25% of conifers, 32% of amphibians, 35% of mangroves, 20% of coral reefs. And that’s before we get to the full effects of climate change. The South African environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan, author of Wild Law, reports on the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), performed in 2001–5 with the participation of 1,300 scientists worldwide: “The MA found that about 60% of ‘ecosystem services’ are now threatened, including, for example, the ability of water to purify itself and of forests to contribute to clean air.” Economist Eric Zencey, of Empire State College, New York, has this to say: “In the standard view, the financial crisis besets an economy that consists solely of humans acting within formalised systems of their own creation – systems that have no connection to a larger world. That’s why the standard views won’t fix the problem... [It’s] what happens when an infinite growth economy runs into the limits of a finite world. The Issue 275 Resurgence & Ecologist 43

Page Text

View plaintext

come from to build more and more cars, and where do we dispose of the old ones? Just how many cars can be built and bought? How many roads can cover the landscape? How many new houses can we build on open land? Where will our food come from when the topsoils that we have overused are left destroyed? And how expensive will that food become as transport costs continue to rocket?

How much carbon can fill the skies? How much plastic can be dumped out at sea? How many giant dead spots before the oceans give out? How much Nature can be transformed into commodities and still remain viable?

“We imagined ourselves isolated from the sources of our existence” and we invented instead “a myth of endless progress”, says the Dark Mountain Project, a new movement

Greed by Gerry Baptist

Illustrations are from a boxed set of woodcuts: The 7 Deadly Sins by Gerry Baptist www.gerrybaptist.co.uk and community of scholars, writers and artists based mainly in the United Kingdom. “The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century.”

The World Conservation Union adds that extinction threatens 23% of mammal species, 25% of conifers, 32% of amphibians, 35% of mangroves, 20% of coral reefs. And that’s before we get to the full effects of climate change.

The South African environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan, author of Wild Law, reports on the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), performed in 2001–5 with the participation of 1,300 scientists worldwide: “The MA found that about 60% of ‘ecosystem services’ are now threatened, including, for example, the ability of water to purify itself and of forests to contribute to clean air.”

Economist Eric Zencey, of Empire State College, New York, has this to say: “In the standard view, the financial crisis besets an economy that consists solely of humans acting within formalised systems of their own creation – systems that have no connection to a larger world. That’s why the standard views won’t fix the problem... [It’s] what happens when an infinite growth economy runs into the limits of a finite world. The

Issue 275

Resurgence & Ecologist

43

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content