We have collectively created a self-propelling destructive system that no-one is in charge of.

The 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough reminded us of how he has championed the wondrous world of living things on this lonely little planet. For a long time the message was implicit: we need to preserve these miracles, which are also our life-support system. The message should have been obvious.

In more recent years he has been politically explicit: coral reefs, and many other ecosystems, are in grave peril and we need action to save them. He has spelt out the obvious because our global industrial-economic system has simply continued relentlessly to destroy the living world, despite the vast majority of people wanting the destruction to stop.

Why have the warnings of Attenborough and countless others not been heeded? Most attempts to answer this question do not get past all of the many misconceptions about how our social-economic system actually works.

We have built a system, a machine, that is self-propelling. Its job is to devour Earth’s natural resources and turn them into consumer products. No one is driving the machine, so requesting politicians and trillionaires to stop it has no effect.

Nevertheless the global consumption machine is a human creation. This means we can un-create it. To do so, we need to properly understand it, to find the off-switch, or the key underlying process, and then to intervene and stop it.

The problem is not just human greed, though greed is part of the problem. The feudal lords were greedy, and they made the lives of serfs miserably poor, but they did not destroy the world.

Another part of the problem is the financialisation of our productive activity. A farmer selling produce at a local market........

© Pearls and Irritations