Interspecies Eugenics
Until April 2022 the Declaration of Human Rights made no mention of the fact that humans cannot thrive without healthy ecosystems. In April 2022 the ‘Human Rights Council resolution 48/13 unequivocally recognized the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment for all people.’
By then, we had already detected a century of insect decline; indicating that the Sixth Mass Extinction was destabilising ecosystems. The 2020 Living Planet Report from WWF stated: ‘The most comprehensive global review of long-term insect declines in abundance and biomass to date, released in 2020, confirms widespread losses of terrestrial insects since 1925, with a mean global loss of 8.8% per decade.’
Suddenly we add a ‘right to a healthy environment’ added to our anthropocentric Human Rights. We agreed this without adopting any obligation to ensure that we keep our own population to levels where biodiversity can thrive; in other words, with no obligation on us to stay within the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet. The steady decline in insects indicates we are exceeding the carrying capacity of Earth since 1925. Our global population was 2 billion at the outset, a mere quarter of the 8 billion that we exceeded in 2022.
The screenshot below is from the animation that introduces the Charter for Ecological Justice. It shows how we have been constantly degrading our environment, and digging ourselves into deeper ecological debt.
Our global economic model seeks to increase Gross Domestic Product; this increases all three of the I=PAT drivers which cause eco-systems damage:
IPAT: Environmental Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.
Thus, growth economics combines with our anthropocentric human rights to encourage a global form of eugenics that prioritises human life and non-essential luxuries over healthy ecosystems. Life forms that are useful to us as livestock or pets have been allowed to expand in a manner that we control. The lives of animals that we consider useful to us are dominated by our decisions regarding their ability to breed, eat, or roam freely. These animals have no protection from what is considered justifiable or benign exploitation within our legal system. The growth aspiration dominates the global human culture to the extent that humanity now exceed the carrying capacity of Earth by 300%.
Everything essential for thriving biodiversity is now creaking at the seams. We have destabilised Earth’s climate, Earth’s ecosystems, and our global finance is looking increasingly unsound. Our current global socio-economic model is both ecocidal and suicidal on a global scale.
Unrealistic Development Goals
We have drawn up a set of ambitious ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ which, like our socio-economic model, also ignore the fact that the Bank of Nature is badly overdrawn and is in danger of going bankrupt. We would do well to retitle and re-envisage these noble goals as ‘Equitable Degrowth Goals, required for sustainability’. The most challenging rewrite would be SDG8 which seeks ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’. A rewrite for SDG8 has been suggested in a separate article.
Equitable economic Degrowth is a pre-requisite for us to be able to return within the carrying capacity of Earth. Some suggestions as to how that might be peacefully achieved now follow.
Equitable Degrowth and Universal Basic Provision
The equitable Degrowth mindset involves significant rethinking of our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is required because our basic need to feel that we are safe from existential threats, is now weakening everywhere in the world. The revised outlook results in just three tiers; which are summarised in the image below. These ideas are embellished in a separate article.
This change in our perceived Needs promotes a wider understanding of the urgent need to collaborate and share resources fairly. The recognition of our interdependence defuses the desire to dominate and control. It promotes the understanding that such huge global challenges require peaceful global collaboration, sharing resources, and working to minimise our average consumption per capita.
Wars are driven by people competing for resources and for control. Often hunger and deprivation are used to control and subjugate a population. Shared Degrowth ambitions coupled with ‘Universal Basic Provision’ would open the door to defusing all fights over resources. The word ‘Provision’ is used rather than ‘Income’, because money will devalue rapidly during ecosystems collapse.
To maximise mitigation from ecosystems collapse, we need to minimise consumption globally. This means that non-essential eco-costly jobs become redundant. Providing a ‘Universal Basic Provision’ (UBP) is key to allowing workers to disengage from eco-costly, nonessential commerce. The distribution of the UBP could also serve as a vehicle for rationing everyone’s consumption. Surplus resources earned by individuals can then go into communal benefits or eco-restoration. This would meet the first two SDGs, ‘No Poverty’, ‘Zero Hunger’.
There is an article on how the money to initiate the Degrowth driven ‘Universal Basic Provision’ might be found. If UBP successfully defuses the appetite for warring, then military budgets could also be redeployed more wisely. Another article gives some insight into how our judicial system might be reformed to become much less resource intensive.
We would be wise to encourage and facilitate a voluntary global birth strike, to give global ecosystems a breather whilst we work to implement such profound changes to our infrastructure.
The Cultural Chasms that we must Overcome
A documentary film made in a Kenyan village suffering from climate change, reveals the depth of the cultural challenges when transitioning to the Degrowth mindset. If you watch the interview at about 8:20, you will see that the wife is embarrassed and she laughs when her husband says that he recommends using contraception to protect the environment. The local culture is so strong, that even though the wife is directly involved in an environmentally disastrous flood situation, she still sees family size as an indication of wealth. The wife is assuming that such extreme floods will not happen every year and will not get worse. The husband is more aware about climate change and realises that things are far more likely to deteriorate, year on year.
We see a very similar cultural block in the affluent global North. People regard financial affluence as ‘wealth’, when in fact affluence is one of the key drivers of environmental damage. Many cannot understand that ecosystems collapse will cause their money to devalue very rapidly. Their affluence has disconnected them from the reality that we all depend directly on Earth’s ecosystems to subsist. Thus, the idea of voluntarily limiting personal affluence, or use of technology, or family size, are ideas that can easily be considered ridiculous within both modern cultures and those that rely on subsistence farming.
Our modern education creates a mindset that encourages denial with regards to the environmental consequences of the I=PAT drivers which cause eco-systems collapse. Population, affluence and technology are advertised as ‘solutions’. These three drivers are not solutions, they are all tools that have been used very unwisely and have caused irreparable damage to Earth’s ecosystems.
Furthermore, we are not taught the insights offered through the Jevons paradox; which warns us that regardless of improvements in the efficiency of our energy use, the demands will always outstrip any gains. So far, we have not acquired a strong enough mindset to overcome the Jevons paradox or the IPAT insights.
Education and Emotional Maturity
Sir Ken Robinson was ahead of his time when he taught about the need for a paradigm shift in our Education. All the denial that is entrenched in our society concerning our ecocidal and suicidal socio-economic model, means we shall need to review a lot of the material in SDG4 which deals with ‘Quality Education’.
An example of how we are using intellect and creativity to perpetuate denial and delusion regarding the feasibility of growth economics is offered by an organisation called ‘Brilliant’ (such irony in their name). Their video is a very alluring sales pitch for growth economics. It builds in the arrogant assumption that people from low-consuming countries will wish to share the hectic pressures and emotional demands which accompany a high-consumption lifestyle.
Even knowing all the reality about carrying capacity, such a colourful and plausible video-bite might well persuade the complacent and lazy audience to prefer to continue with business-as-usual. It is so tempting to allow ourselves to believe that our future will continue like the past. However, any attempt to continue to ignore the insights from the second law of Thermodynamics, the I=PAT equation and the Jevons paradox will only weaken our short and medium term prospects for survival.
Mortality rates increased in 2021/22. Most demographic predictions simply extrapolate mortality and natality trends from the past. There is one which factors in ecosystems pressures, suggested by Chris Bystroff in 2022. The Bystroff model offers different predictions depending on the level of our eco-protection and eco-restoration behaviour. The bottom line represents business-as-usual, the top line represents releasing 50% of Earth’s biocapacity. Below we see figure 4 from his model. The top-line looks rather optimistic given the carry-capacity of Earth; however, this model is more likely to be accurate than predications which ignore ecosystems collapse. The methods used in the model will be a better guide than simple extrapolation, and would help us to understand how to prioritise our downsizing.
With over 10,000 people wiped out in floods in Libya, our recent past is looking less and less attractive. We are now into the exponential phase of climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse, and yet we are still entrenched in an ecocidal economic model. We shall need to grow up fast. Emotional maturity will be key in the next stage of our evolution. This idea is discussed further in a separate article.
We can no longer ignore the interspecies eugenics that lies at the heart of all our institutions.
Barbara Williams is the architect of the UN Charter for Ecological Justice. This concept was including in a submission to the 2023 global stocktake for the Paris climate agreement. This brief animation offers an introduction to the concept: https://youtu.be/yyEEJGoaLd4?si=tgJTdbq_seEMcTDV
