God is no Hope

God will not intervene to prevent humanity from wreaking disastrous damage to the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned. God would not guarantee a "happy ending", he warned
Oh , well , so much for the God of mercy , the sins of the fathers will indeed be passed on to future generations of innocents .

But the arch-bishop is right . The environmental destruction of the world cannot be stopped by supernatural interventions . But it will require more than simple moral platitudes to change matters. It will take political action and economic re-organisation for The World to avoid this impending ecological catastrophe .

We are up against a well-entrenched economic and social system based on class and property and governed by coercive economic laws. Reforms under capitalism, however well meaning can never solve the environmental crisis - the most they can do is to palliate some aspect of it on a temporary basis. They can certainly never turn capitalism into a democratic, ecological society.

The SPGB asserts very clearly that a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature that is in balance and with the capacity of the biosphere to renew itself will only be possible when socialism is established . If human society is to be able to organise its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.
The underlying principle is that the productive system as a whole should be sustainable for the rest of nature. In other words, what humans take from nature, the amount and the rhythm at which they do so, as well as the way they use these materials and dispose of them after use, should all be done in such a way as to leave nature in a position to go on supplying and reabsorbing the required materials for use.
In the long run this implies stable or only slowly rising consumption and production levels . A society in which production, consumption and population levels are stable has been called a "steady-state economy" where production would be geared simply to meeting needs and to replacing and repairing the equipment of the means of production .