The Human Plague and the Ecological Cataclysm

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Marxism and Collapse - Climate Cataclysm

The Human Plague and the Ecological Cataclysm

La Plaga Humana y el Cataclismo Ecológico

The destructive impact of the human species today confers upon us, as a biological and social species, the status of the worst plague in the history of planetary life.

Never before has a species played such a destructive role on such vast planetary scales and so rapidly as humanity does today.

Humanity is a plague!

We are the worst plague in the history of the world!

All scientific evidence shows how our species shares each of the characteristics of biological plagues in terms of reproductive rates, consumption patterns, invasive use of space, extinction of other species, destruction of ecosystem balances, etc.

-The Human Plague (1):

(Uncontrolled Demographic Growth)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxz1fLOkbf4

-The Human Plague (2):

(Father of Environmentalism David Attenborough Defines Humanity as a Plague)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/21140259#:~:text=In%20an%20interview%20with%20the,if%20people%20had%20smaller%20families

-The Human Plague (3):

(Father of Environmentalism David Attenborough Defines Humanity as a Plague)

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2013/01/23/actualidad/1358942572_869278.html

-The Human Plague (4):

(The Need for Drastic Birth Controls to Reduce Our Numbers)

https://www.marxismoycolapso.com/post/la-plaga-humana-the-human-plague

Nevertheless, despite this irrefutable evidence, significant sectors of society (ranging from the climate change-denying right to the industrial-ecocidal Marxist left) deny this evident reality.

In the case of Marxism (for example, ecocidal Trotskyism), a number of crude anti-scientific arguments are often used, claiming that the problem is not humanity as a "biological plague"... but rather, the existence of capitalism and class society.

Crude ideas—because it is a fact that over the last century, not only capitalism and class society contributed to the current levels of ecological destruction and to the development of the resource use and consumption patterns that have turned our species into a planetary plague, but so did… every single socialist experiment as well!

All the socialist revolutions of the last century and all the societal projects that emerged from them... polluted just as much or even more than capitalism!

All the experiences of workers' and popular power (for example, the Russian soviets, the Chilean industrial cordons, or the Argentine interfactory committees)... destroyed the world just as much or even worse than Monsanto!

Even worse, current experiences of workers' control such as the "factories without bosses" Zanón or Madigraf in Argentina... continue to devastate the environment just as much or more than the most polluting capitalist companies!

-The Human Plague (1):

(Uncontrolled Demographic Growth)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxz1fLOkbf4

-The Human Plague (2):

(Father of Environmentalism David Attenborough Defines Humanity as a Plague)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/21140259#:~:text=In%20an%20interview%20with%20the,if%20people%20had%20smaller%20families

-The Human Plague (3):

(Father of Environmentalism David Attenborough Defines Humanity as a Plague)

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2013/01/23/actualidad/1358942572_869278.html

-The Human Plague (4):

(The Need for Drastic Birth Controls to Reduce Our Numbers)

https://www.marxismoycolapso.com/post/la-plaga-humana-the-human-plague

Below, we present an excerpt from the debate "Climate Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy, and Socialism (I)" between Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes, and Guy McPherson, where the issue of humanity as a "planetary plague" is discussed.

This addresses the question:

Is capitalism the only one responsible for the current ecological crisis?

...

-Climate Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy, and Socialism (I)

(English)

https://en.dialektika.org/society-politics/noam-chomsky-versus-collapse-theory-a-new-debate-of-the-century/

-Catástrofe climática, Colapso, Democracia y Socialismo (I)

(Español)

https://dialektika.org/catastrofe-climatica-colapso-democracia-y-socialismo-1/

...

-Marxism and Collapse:

Have the human species become a plague for the planet? If so, how can we still conciliate the survival of life on Earth with the promotion of traditional modern values associated with the defence of human and social rights (which require the use of vast amounts of planetary resources) in a context of a potential increase of world’s population that could reach over twelve billion people this century? The latter in a context in which (according to several studies) the maximum number of humans that Earth could have sustained without a catastrophic alteration of ecosystems should have never exceeded one billion. Can the modern concept of liberal (or even socialist) democracy and its supposedly related principles of individual, identity, gender, or cultural freedom survive our apparent terminal geological situation, or it will be necessary to find new models of social organization, for example, those present in several indigenous or native societies? Can the rights of survival of living species on Earth, human rights, and the concept of modern individual freedom be harmoniously conciliated in the context of an impending global ecosocial disaster?

-Noam Chomsky:

Let’s begin with population growth. There is a humane and feasible method to constrain that: education of women. That has a major effect on fertility in both rich regions and poor, and should be expedited anyway. The effects are quite substantial, leading to sharp population decline by now in parts of the developed world. The point generalizes. Measures to fend off “global ecosocial disaster” can and should proceed in parallel with social and institutional change to promote values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, collective responsibility, democratic control of institutions, concern for other species, harmony with nature — values that are commonly upheld by indigenous societies and that have deep roots in popular struggles in what are called the “developed societies” where, unfortunately, material and moral development are all too often uncorrelated.

-Miguel Fuentes:

Chomsky’s allusions to the promotion of women’s education and the social values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, and harmony with nature, as “moral values” disconnected from a broader critique of the industrial system, capitalism, and the class society within which threats such as global warming have been generated and aggravated, become mere phrases of good intentions. On the contrary, the realization of these principles must be thought within a context of a large-scale world social transformation. Such a transformation is necessary if those principles are to be effective in combatting the challenges facing humanity today, the kind of civilizational crisis that is beginning to unfold as a product of the multiple eco-social (ecological, energy, and resource) crises that are advancing globally. In other words, we need a process of historical transformation that can envisage the abolition of the current ecocidal industrial economic system and its replacement by one in which production, exchange, and distribution can be planned in accordance with social needs.

But even a traditional socialist approach to these problems, such as the one above, falls short of accounting for the kind of planetary threats we face. Let’s put it this way, the discussion around the ecological crisis and the rest of the existential dangers hanging over the fate of our civilization today really only begins, not ends, by giving it a proper Marxist contextualization. One of the underlying reasons for this is that the traditional socialist project itself, in all its variants (including its more recent ecosocialist versions), would also already be completely insufficient to respond to the dangers we are facing as a species. That is, we face today dangers and interpretative problems that none of the Marxists theoreticians of social revolution over the last centuries ever imagined, from Marx and Engels to some of the present-day exponents of ecosocialism such as John Bellamy Foster or Michael Lowy.

One new problem that revolutionary theories face today is that of the uncontrolled demographic growth of humanity. This is a problem that already confers on us, amongst other things, one of the worst biological (or, in our case, “biosocial”) plagues existing to this day, if we consider the devastating role that our species has been exerting on the biosphere in recent centuries. A plague comparable in its destructive power is that represented by the cyanobacteria that triggered the first mass extinction event on Earth some 2.4 billion years ago. However, in our case, the mass extinction happens at an even more accelerated and “efficient” pace than that. Is this statement too brutal? Maybe, from a purely humanist point of view, alien to the kind of problems we face today, but not from an eminently scientific perspective. Nor can there be any doubt that our species is a “planetary plague” for any ecologist studying the current patterns of behaviour, resource consumption, and habitat destruction. Is that too brutal a statement? Tell that to the more than ten thousand natural species that become extinct every year as a result of the role of a single species on the planet: ours! Tell it to the billions of animals killed in the great fires of Australia or the Amazon a few years ago! Tell it to the polar bears, koalas, pikas, tigers, lions, elephants, who succumb every year as a result of what we have done to the Earth! Very well, we are then a “plague,” although this term would only serve to classify us as a “biological species.” Is understanding ourselves in this way too “limited,” too lacking in social and historical perspective.

Not really. The fact that we possess social and cultural systems that differentiate us from other complex mammals does not mean that our current status as a “plague of the world” is confined to the biological realm alone. On the contrary, this just means that this status could also have a certain correlation in the social and cultural dimension, in the sphere of the social and cultural systems particular to modern society. To put it in another way, even though our current condition of “plague of the world” has been acquired by our species within the framework of a specific type of society — the mode of production and particular framework of historical relations characteristic of industrial modernity — this condition should not be understood as a merely historical product, as excluding any biological and ecological dimension. In fact, beyond the differentiated position and role of the various social sectors that make up the productive structure and the socioeconomic systems of the industrial society (for example, the exploiting and exploited social classes), it is indeed humanity as a whole: rich and poor, entrepreneurs and workers, men and women, who share (all of us) the same responsibility as a species (although admittedly in a differentiated way) for the current planetary disaster. An example of this is how almost everything produced today by big multinationals — down to the last grain of rice or the last piece of plastic — is consumed by someone, whether in Paris, London, Chisinau, or La Paz. And we should also remember that even biological plagues (such as locusts) may have different consumption patterns at the level of their populations, with some consuming more and others consuming less. Just because one sector of a given biological plague consumes less (even much less), it should not necessarily be considered as separate from the plague in question.

Another similar example: It is often claimed in Marxist circles (sometimes the numbers vary) that 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the planetary resources. This means that approximately 1.6 billion out of the total population of 8 billion consume 80% of planetary resources. That is a number roughly three times the current European population. In other words, a much larger segment of the world’s population than the capitalist elites (and their political servants) bear a direct, even grotesque, responsibility for the unsustainable consumption patterns that are aggravating the current planetary crisis. Or, to put it in more “Marxist” terms, a large percentage (or even the totality) of the working classes and popular sectors in Europe, the United States, and even in Latin America and other regions of the so-called “developing countries,” are “directly complicit” in the destruction of our planet, at least in regards of the reproduction of the current ecocidal modern urban lifestyle.

But let us extend the discussion to the remaining 80% of humanity, to the approximately 6.4 billion people who consume 20% of planetary resources per year. To begin with, let us recognize that 20% of global resources is not a negligible percentage, production of which entrails substantial and sustained levels of environmental destruction. The latter in the context of an ever-growing world population that possibly ought never to have exceeded one billion, so that we could be in a position today to stop, or at least slow down, the disastrous impact we are having on ecosystems. Let us not forget that this 6.4 billion is more than four times higher than the entire human population at the beginning of the 20th century, which means that the number of basic resources necessary for their survival is an inevitable pressure on the earth’s natural systems, even if consumption levels are kept to a minimum.

In short, there is therefore no doubt that humanity has indeed become one of the worst planetary plagues in the history of terrestrial life, constituting this a fundamental problem for contemporary revolutionary thought and, more generally, for the human and social sciences as a whole. In other words, this is a problem that cannot be solved by a mere change in the mode of production, the class structure, or the sociopolitical system, but must rather be associated with the very “genetics” of industrial society, which is based on a voraciously destructive form of human-nature relationships. Such relationships remain the “structural basis” of all possible and conceivable models of capitalism or socialism. Whether in the framework of a neoliberal market economy or a socialist and/or collectivist planned economy, the industrial system and modern mass society in all its variants, whether capitalist or socialist — its megacities, its productive levels, its consumption patterns and lifestyles, its “anthropocentric spirit” — is structurally associated with demographic patterns in which the Earth is conceived as a mere space for human consumption and reproduction. That is the main problem.

Is it possible to reconcile current levels of overpopulation with the survival requirements of our species? No. We have become a planetary plague and will remain a planetary plague until such time as, by hook or by crook (almost certainly by crook) our numbers are substantially reduced and remain at the minimum possible levels, for at least a few centuries or millennia. Is it possible to solve the problem of overpopulation and at the same time defend the legitimacy of traditional modern values associated with the promotion of human and social rights, at least as these values have been understood in recent centuries? No. Modernity has failed. Modernity is dead. We are going to have to rethink every single one of our values, including the most basic ones, all of them. We are going to have to rethink who we are, where we are going and where we come from. The existence of almost 8 billion people on our planet today, and, moreover, the likely increase of this number to 10 or even 12 billion is not only incompatible with the realization of the very ideals and values of modern democracy in all its variants (capitalist or socialist), but also with the very survival of our species as a whole and, possibly, of all complex life on Earth. This simply because there are not enough resources to ensure the realization of these values (or even our own subsistence) in such a demographic context. There simply won’t be enough food and water. Our situation is terminal. Modernity is dead. Democracy is dead. Socialism is dead. And if we want these concepts — democracy or socialism — to really have any value in the face of the approaching catastrophe, then we will have to rethink them more humbly than we have done so far.

Modern civilization has borne some of the best fruits of humanity’s social development, but also some of the worst. We are in some ways like the younger brother of a large family whose early successes made him conceited and stupid and who, thinking of himself as “master of the world,” began to lose everything. We are that young man. We should therefore shut up, put our ideologies (capitalist and socialist) in our pockets, and start learning a little more from our more modest, slower, and more balanced “big brothers”: Traditional or indigenous societies that have been able to ensure their subsistence for centuries and, in some cases, even millennia. Compare industrial society, which has not even completed three centuries before endangering its own existence and that of all other cultures on the planet. We must start learning from those traditional societies that have developed social systems that are more respectful of ecological and ecosystemic balances. Those “ecosocial balances” are, in the long view of the evolution of species, the real basis for the development of any society. Because without species (be they animal or plant), human culture is impossible. Scientific and technological progress? Excellent idea! But perhaps we could take the long route, think things through a bit more, and achieve the same as we have achieved today in two centuries taking a bit longer — say ten, twenty, or even a hundred centuries? Who’s in a hurry? Let us learn from the tortoise which, perhaps because it is slow, has survived on Earth for more than 220 million years, until we (who as Homo sapiens are no more than 250,000 years old) came along and endangered it.

-Guy McPherson:

As ecologists have been pointing out for decades, environmental impacts are the result of human population size and human consumption levels. The Earth can support many more hunter-gatherers than capitalists seeking more material possessions. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the latter rather than the former. Ecologists and environmentalists have been proposing changes in human behaviour since at least the early 20th century. These recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. However, even if it is possible to achieve substantial changes in human behaviour, and if they result in an effective slowing down or stopping of industrial activity, it is questionable whether this is a useful means of ensuring our continued survival. One reason for this lies in the knowledge of what the effect of “aerosol masking” could mean for the climate crisis.

The “climate masking” effect of aerosols has been discussed in the scientific literature since at least 1929 and consists of the following: At the same time as industrial activity produces greenhouse gases that trap part of the heat resulting from sunlight reaching the Earth, it also produces small particles that prevent this sunlight from even touching the surface of the planet. These particles, called “aerosols,” thus act as a kind of umbrella that prevents some of the sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface (hence this phenomenon has also been referred to as “global dimming”). In other words, these particles (aerosols) prevent part of the sun’s rays from penetrating the atmosphere and thus inhibit further global warming. This means, then, that the current levels of global warming would in fact be much lower than those that should be associated with the volumes of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today (hence the designation of this phenomenon as “climate masking”). To put it in a simpler way, the global warming situation today would actually be far more serious than is indicated not only by the very high current global temperatures, but also by the already catastrophic projections of rising global temperatures over the coming decades. This is especially important if we consider the (overly optimistic) possibility of a future reduction in the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere as a result of a potential decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years, which should paradoxically lead, therefore, to a dramatic increase in global temperatures.

Global temperatures should then not only be much higher than they are today, but the expected rise in global temperatures will necessarily be more intense than most climate models suggest. According to the father of climate science, James Hansen, it takes about five days for aerosols to fall from the atmosphere to the surface. More than two dozen peer-reviewed papers have been published on this subject and the latest of these indicates that the Earth would warm by an additional 55% if the “masking” effect of aerosols were lost, which should happen, as we said, as a result of a marked decrease or modification of industrial activity leading to a considerable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This study, published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications on June 15, 2021, suggests that this could potentially lead to an additional (sudden) increase in the earth’s surface temperature by about 133% at the continental level. In conclusion, the loss or substantial decrease of aerosols in the atmosphere could therefore lead to a potential increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius of global warming above the 1750 baseline very quickly. I find it very difficult to imagine many natural species (including our own) being able to withstand this rapid pace of environmental change.

In reality, a mass extinction event has been underway since at least 1992. This was reported by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, the so-called “father of biodiversity,” in his 1992 and 2002 books The Diversity of Life and The Future of Life, respectively. The United Nations Environment Programme also reported in August 2010 that every day we witness the extinction of 150 to 200 species. This would thus be at least the eighth mass extinction event on Earth. The scientific literature finally acknowledged the ongoing mass extinction event on March 2, 2011 in Nature. Further research along these lines was published on June 19, 2015, in Science Advances by conservation biologist Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues entitled “Accelerated Human-Induced Losses of Modern Species: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction.”.Coinciding with the publication of this article, lead author Ceballos stated that “life would take many millions of years to recover and that our species would probably soon disappear.” This conclusion is supported by subsequent work indicating that terrestrial life did not recover from previous mass extinction events for millions of years. It is true, however, that indigenous perspectives can help us understand ongoing events. However, I am convinced that rationalism is key to a positive response to these events.