Will Mutual Ruin Be Our Fate?

Capitalism’s rapacious growth and accelerated energy needs over the last generation—particularly fed by an economic system that demands increasing levels of consumption and inputs of natural resources—are fast driving planetary ecosystems towards their breaking point. 2014 marked 38th consecutive year of above-average global temperatures. 2014 was the Earth's warmest year since records began in 1880.

"This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades," stated Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. "While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases." 

Meteorologists Jeff Masters and Bob Henson wrote “Climate change is already causing significant impacts to people and ecosystems, and these impacts will grow much more severe in the coming years… and the cost of inaction is much higher than the cost of action.”

Marine wildlife at all levels of the food chain has been badly damaged by human activity, says a new report that urges immediate and "meaningful rehabilitation" if we are to avert mass extinction in the world's oceans. "We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event," Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the study, told the New York Times. 

Just as the Industrial Revolution during the 1800s decimated the huge tracts of forests, driving many terrestrial species to extinction, industrial use of the oceans threatens to destroy marine habitats and in turn damage the health of marine wildlife populations. Fish obtained from aquaculture (not caught fish from the wild) is an expanding resource. However, "the environmental cost of aquaculture is hotly debated ", mentions Dr. Seppelt.

Meanwhile a team of European scientists warn in the journalEcology and Society that out of 20 renewable resources (among them the maize, wheat, rice, soya, fish, meat, milk and eggs that feed the world) 18 have already passed their peak production. It’s essential to take action by using fertilizer and water more efficiently for example. 

Humans have always altered their environment but now the scale of the alteration is, in its rate and magnitude, without precedent and the primary purpose is not to satisfy people’s needs but to accumulated profit for capitalists and their corporations. Today, one billion humans have to walk a mile each day for water. Today, one billion humans are hungry and malnourished. Today, thousands die each year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Now, just imagine 30 years from now, when the Arctic ice is no longer and methane plumes are common occurrences, and there is a world of even more massive shortages in food, water, energy, minerals, climate, peace and prosperity.

Surprisingly for too many scientists they ignore real solutions, beginning with a very simple one - get rid of the rich oligarchs and the system that exists for only their benefit. Socialists do not lose sight of the fact that those who continue to take to the streets and non-violently call for respect for human dignity and togetherness with the planet should be applauded. It is too easy in this contemporary moment to buy into the dystopian realism now being found in research but people continue to show they will resist and stand up against what they find to be patently intolerable. They also refuse to be cast as some docile mass incapable of action. Socialists cite ample evidence that complex inter-connected issues are not incomprehensible to people. The 'elites' of profiteers is now globally organized, beyond and above nation-states. If we, the working class, do not succeed in wresting control of society and  creating“a revolutionary reconstitution of society”, we face “the common ruin of the contending classes”. 

We are at a critical moment, yet, just how many wake-up calls do people need before they rouse into action? Or will they wait until it is too late? The change starts now!