As Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” This paradox captures our modern era. On one hand, those of us in the industrialized North (Europe, North America, East Asia, and the urban elite in cities throughout the world) have never had it better, due to the innovations enabled by science, technology, and the global market economy. On the other, this entire complex adaptive system (which I label “Glomart” for short) is rooted in a delusion that dates back, not just to the industrial Revolution but far earlier, to the Agricultural Revolution. That is the delusion that humanity is “above” nature, which is nothing but a “resource” with no value at all until it is transformed into commodities for sale and profit. But in fact, what we call “nature” is actually Gaia—the biological support system which we depend on along with all other living beings: sunlight, water, oxygen, topsoil, and the biota that are sustained by all of the above (while simultaneously sustaining them). And we are inescapably a part of Gaia, not apart from her.
For this reason, our global market economy is doomed to inevitable collapse, since it depends entirely on the ideology of “growth”—that is, the infinite expansion of extraction, production, consumption, and pollution which is rapidly eroding and destroying our biological support system.