Photo by Digfarenough/Wikimedia Commons

Let’s begin by recalling some recent climate events. Blazing fires tore through Los Angeles, consuming acres of land and reducing thousands of homes to ashes. In Valencia, Spain, floods swept through neighbourhoods, leaving mud-filled homes and vehicles piled atop one another. Closer to home, much of the lush, vibrant Jasper was reduced to smoldering ruins.

Putting these events in a larger perspective, we see that ecosystems around the world are collapsing. Every passing day leaves us less likely to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We are living through a mass extinction event with biodiversity declining at an alarming rate. AMOC, a major ocean current system foundational for human civilization, is inching closer to collapse.

These developments are not happening in a vacuum. Their severity is linked to our global system of production and consumption which demands constant growth of the economy (as measured by gross domestic product or GDP) to remain viable. Adverse environmental impacts have historically been tightly coupled with GDP growth, so a larger GDP invariably means treading more harshly on the planet. Scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries, six of which we have breached already in the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet.

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