The self-serving theories of growthaholic economists peel away from this deep reality like cheap wallpaper. Since the days of Akenaten and Ceasar, overfed profiteers have insisted that their elite and esoteric genius creates wealth. When they salted the soils or decimated forests, they would march into the next watershed or “discover” another continent.

Those days are over. There are no more giant resource pools to plunder. The wealth of Pharaohs and stock hustlers arrived not from their genius, but from their facility with deception, fashioning loans with fantasy money, and trading bets on the changing value of paper promises, the modern “derivatives” market. But in the end, all this affluence relies on the real wealth: nature, her systems, her materials, and her energies.

Markets will rally and crash again, and paper pushers will stuff more cash into their safety deposit boxes, but in the end, money cannot replace soil and water. Gross domestic products provide no surrogate for authentic well-being.

As world stock markets collapsed this fall, several urgent environmental events rumbled below the superficial hand-wringing, like deep volcanoes awakening to announce, “Nature shall not be mocked.”

It’s the soil, folks

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote American ecologist Aldo Leopold five decades ago. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Economists ignored, even ridiculed, such warnings from ecologists, and the planet now faces a shortage of fertile soil, the result of erosion, salination, contamination, desertification, and a swelling population. U.N Agriculture head, Lennart Bage announced last summer, “Fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset.” It always has been, for everything that lives.

This year, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the U.S., something they have not done since 1980. Iran would not come begging to their avowed enemy if they had any other option. Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for grain. The United Arab Emirates buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea seeks land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. Libya leases farms in the Ukraine.

With the closing of Ukrainian shipments, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. However, these global producers rely entirely on fertilizers and fossil fuels. However, the production of phosphorus, principal component of fertilizer, is rare and in decline, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.

The big bonfire

Globalization is literally running out of gas. Geologists at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Conference in California, in September, confirmed that world oil production has stopped growing and will begin its inevitable decline during the next decade.

A U.S. Department of Energy study (The Hirsch Report) warned in 2005 – the year that global production plateaued – that society required a 20-year lead time to implement an optimal new energy plan. It is already too late for such a measured response, and this failure to act in time is the direct result of denial from lobbyists and economists, who chanted “eternal growth,” while obscuring or ignoring the evidence before them.

Conventional economic theory has claimed that resources are virtually infinite, that only capital and labour are required to create “wealth.” Oil depletion exposes this tragic conceit. Oil production declined last year in eight of the top twelve producing nations. Every major oil field on the planet is in decline, and global discoveries peaked forty years ago.

Meanwhile, economic growth promoters expect humanity to double its vehicle fleet over the next decade, from 1 billion to 2 billion vehicles, while building more roads across arable farmland.

Wind and solar power developments will help mitigate the coming energy crunch, but will not replace cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels will have certain localized value, if based on agricultural waste, but will prove insignificant on a globalized scale. Corn ethanol undermines food agriculture, and will not remotely replace cheap oil. Cellulose and algae biofuel projects cannot even produce net energy, so they are not economic at any price.

New oil discoveries and recovery technologies lag hopelessly behind the decline of conventional oil fields. Oil industry promoters recently proclaimed “90 billion barrels of oil” in the Arctic. However, these lobbyists failed to mention that this oil – even if it could be confirmed and recovered – represents three years of global supply.

The best and cheapest energy source is conservation. The only environmentally feasible solution to the end of cheap liquid fuels is to burn less. Randy Udall, who drafted Colorado’s Renewable Energy Mitigation Program, told the ASPO conference that energy companies have no use for conservation. Instead, they will burn more coal, make liquid fuel from coal, and melt bitumen at unearthly temperatures in low-efficiency tar sands and oil shale projects.

Udall called our era of history “the Big Bonfire.” We burn a million tons of fossil fuel every hour, releasing 80-million tons of CO2 each day. And here, we arrive at the third big crack in the growthaholics’ thin facade.

Ancient methane

According to the international Global Carbon Project, last year’s annual increase in carbon emissions, 2.9 percent, exceeded previous projections, “generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.” All the international gatherings, carbon-trading festivals, and Kyoto handshakes have failed to reduce carbon emissions or even stabilize the growth rate of these emissions.

Meanwhile, in September, Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University – with the International Siberian Shelf Study, sponsored by the Russian Science Academy and American Geophysical Union – announced evidence that millions of tons of a methane gas – 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – now escapes into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed. As the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned, the deep permafrost appears now to be thawing. 

Scientists on board Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi recorded methane bubbling to the sea surface, causing air-borne concentrations 100-times background levels. Ten previous expeditions since 2003 did not detect these levels of free methane. The new data describes releases so intense that the methane does not have time to dissolve in seawater but rises as bubbles to the ocean surface. Similar releases have been recorded in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas, amounting to millions of tons of methane from melting sub-sea permafrost.

The escaping methane represents a massive exhalation of ancient hydrocarbons likely captured in the Paleozoic warm era when amphibians crawled from the sea. The carbon escaped once before, during the Permian ecological collapse, 225 million years ago, leading to peak Mesozoic heat, and was recaptured as methane during the last 100-million years. Meteorologists warn that this significant store of ancient carbon could lead to run-away global warming, far beyond the influence of human technologies to sequester or forestall.

The methane represents an unaccounted cost of doing business in the era of the big bonfire. Market wizards may shave toxic assets from their balance sheets, but they cannot dictate nature’s accounting.

Resilience

Regardless of stopgap bailouts and more paper promises, economic collapse will continue in fits and starts until humanity achieves genuine ecological balance, adopts a steady state economy, and finally understands that ecology is the foundation of human enterprise. There are only two options for living cultures in a physical system: homeostasis or collapse.

Future generations will have every right to dismiss “the big bonfire” as an era of ignorance and  unconscionable excess. But I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We kept our eyes open, witnessed the truth, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic civilization.

I speak to young people, who are terrified and/or angry about the state of the world, the wasteful extravagance of society, and needless ecological destruction. I experienced similar reactions when I learned as a child that our world could be vaporized by nuclear weapons. When we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or ill-informed, the discovery of alarming truths about our world may create shock and outrage.

The best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.

Economic slight of hand won’t restore our place on this earth. Human survival strategies now will be as much about resilience during transformation as finding “solutions” to preserve untenable expectations. Our resilience will include a rediscovery of a richer life with simpler means, a genuine quality of life that cannot be purchased but only lived. Human society can change, and in fact has to change. Don’t get depressed. Get informed and get active.

See this and other essays at "Deep Green," on the Greenpeace International site.

As intelligent and technologically advanced as humanity appears, we remain animals living from and within a dynamic ecological system. The fundamental error that has led humanity to the brink of ecological collapse is the spurious notion that we exist independently, that we belong to some exclusive club that does not have to follow the laws of ecology, and that nature is here simply to supply us with "resources" for our galloping economies.

The ideas below incorporate ideas previously articulated by Arne Naess, Chellis Glendinning, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, David Abram, and other nature-centred ecologists including Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter. A summary of the values that we might associate with a non-human-centred, genuine ecological awareness include:

1. The inherent value of wildness, nature, diversity, symbiosis, and complexity, independent of humanity’s desires or existence.

2. Systems: Everything in nature exists in interlocking systems. No species operates independently. The survival unit of evolution is a “species-in-an-environment,” co-evolving with all other living systems.

3. An ecological-self: The human sense of “self” expanded to include these living systems. The popular economic notion that people act as “private” pursuers of “happiness” remains a tragic conceit, destined to fail.

4. Biocracy: extending the idea of “rights” to all things, but more importantly to the ecological system itself, and therefore, limiting human interference in nature.

5. Nature, not a “resource”: The elements of nature that we call “resources” also (1) provide resources for everything else that lives, and (2) possess value in themselves, in situ. A river is a living part of a system, not simply a “resource” for human purposes.

6. Ecological design: Our tools must mimic and work with the habits, laws, and designs of nature: 100% recycling, lowest possible energy use, integrated living systems, low impact, and so forth.

7. Addressing human trauma: The destruction of the supporting ecology has traumatized humanity and led not only to poverty and desolation among the poor, but to anxiety, addiction, and violence among the comfortable. Witness the “holiday” to a mountain, seaside, or forest, as self-medication for this trauma. As I write, I’m watching a pair of Wilson’s warblers, who have nested in the thicket behind my house. I cannot quantify how therapeutic this is. Every lost wild place reduces human well-being.

8. Social justice, gender equality, and international peace: War, sexism, racism, and injustice not only cause direct suffering, but also contribute to ecological catastrophes.

9. Decrease Human population: A human civilization that understands nature will limit its interference by reducing its numbers. A positive step would be a target (perhaps over two centuries) of reducing human population to, say, a billion people, roughly the 1800 population. Global women’s rights and contraception would contribute to achieving this. The population discussion invokes fear for human rights, cultural rights, racism, and immigration. Who has the right to tell other humans not to reproduce? The answer is that the living earth has the right and will impose that right if we don’t. Excessive human population reduces the quality of life for humanity and everything else.

10. Simplicity: learning to enhance the quality of life with the simplest means and least interference in nature. This requires a shift in expectations, to rediscover the joy of simplicity and a supportive environment – the joys of nature, peace, community, family, and creativity. Less stuff, more peace of mind.

11. Action: We won’t solve our dilemma with philosophy or slogans. The new environmental human society requires action at every level. Primarily, we need a massive protection of wilderness and relocalization of human survival. 

12. Worship the miracle: Since the advent of empires, agriculture, and urban living, humanity has searched for paradise in all the wrong places, in wealth, power, money, and invisible realms beyond time and space. Humans appear to possess an innate sense of mystery and the more-than-human sacredness of life, but we have failed to worship – to “ascribe worth” to – the one thing that sustains us, the living earth.

If ecologists claim to work for the earth or if presume to negotiate with governments or corporations on nature’s behalf, they owe ultimate allegiance to their client, the earth. We dare not sell her cheaply. If ecologists represent the earth’s voice at the table of human society, we must point out that nature has its own values and purposes. Rivers, trees, and hawks are going about affairs as noble and important as my own affairs feel to me. No matter how powerful and clever we appear, we are not in charge of how nature will evolve on earth.  

Ecologists must help prepare human society for the depth and breadth of the authentic shift at hand: Nature possesses values, laws, and limits beyond human purposes. Wise design is essential, but we won’t simply engineer ourselves out of our economic dilemma, without changing our habits of excessive consumption. We won’t consume ourselves to freedom by tacking “green” onto every enterprise like a postscript. Natures own laws will be our primary guidance.

Ecology remains the subversive subject as Paul Sears said four decades ago. Humanity may flourish in a long run with nature, but only by revisioning human society as a guest of the earth’s living systems.

(Excerpted from my Deep Green column at Greenpeace International)