The global environment collapses as in the pursuit of short-term growth, humanity overruns natural ecosystems including the atmosphere that make Earth habitable.

Together we urgently address inequity, climate change, overpopulation and natural ecosystem loss or alone we each face the horrors of economic, social, and ecological collapse.

Newspapers are full of disastrous warnings if economic growth does not return to Greece, or if it drops a couple points in China. Rarely in human history have so many been so fundamentally wrong about a matter of such importance as the desirability, and even the possibility, of perpetual economic growth.

The real threat to human well-being is not that there is too little economic growth. Rather, it is that there is too much, and that we have overshot how much growth can occur without collapsing our shared environment.

The industrial growth economy is ravaging natural ecosystems. Stocks of natural capital – including water, soil, old-growth forests, wild fish – are being pillaged to artificially inflate short-term economic growth numbers.

Modern industrial capitalism’s narrow focus upon GDP growth as a measure of a society’s well-being utterly fails to account for the very real and detrimental costs of liquidating Earth’s natural life-support systems.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for disaster. Nothing grows forever and trying inevitably rips apart any system seeking to do so.

Continued ravaging of Earth’s natural ecosystems for short-term growth is the biggest economic bubble ever. Such a short-term, myopic focus upon economic growth can only end in social and ecological collapse.

The problem

The global ecological system is collapsing and dying. The biosphere – our one shared environment that makes Earth habitable – is having its constituent ecosystems liquidated for resources.

Inequitable overconsumption has achieved such momentum that key ecological planetary boundaries have been surpassed, raising the very real possibility of humanity pulling down the biosphere as we collapse.

Far more is at stake than abrupt climate change as natural ecosystem loss, ocean dead zones, freshwater scarcity, soil erosion, nitrogen deposition and many other aspects of ecological decline merge and worsen the others.

This sudden surge of human impact upon the naturally evolved biosphere – as human numbers went from 1 billion to 7 billion in just over a century – can fairly be characterized as willful ecocide.

Yet this relentless industrial growth continues to be falsely equated with ‘progress’. Many are unlikely to respond to warnings of imminent doom from specialists until they are much more uncomfortable and unhappy than they are now. By then it will be too late.

Progress to avoid global biosphere collapse has been impeded by numerous other maladies that plague the human condition including inequity, permawar, disease, abject poverty, and authoritarianism.

Horrendous inequity whereby a few hundred people possess half of Earth’s wealth as more than one billion live on less than $1.50 a day is evil incarnate and will kill us all.

The vision – long term sustainability

Exponential economic growth on a finite Earth can only end in collapse. Humanity must embrace a steady state economy – whereby the increment of natural capital harvested is replenished annually – or being ends.

The human family will only avert biosphere collapse if we choose to live more simply, share more with others, go back to the land, have fewer kids, protect and restore ecosystems, grow more of our own food, end fossil fuels, and embrace social justice and love.

Large and connected natural ecosystems must remain the context for human society. Human settlements must exist within the limits of their bioregions, linking human being with local ecological constraints.

Those that are smarter and work harder will still have more, but not grotesquely so. Basic needs of all of humanity, natural ecosystems, and kindred species will be met. The challenge of our time is to quickly embrace these necessities while remaining free, and extending the benefits of an economically secure and free existence to all of Earth’s inhabitants.

Failure in efforts to promote smaller families, end fossil fuels, and to restore natural ecosystems will mean worsening widespread ecological havoc, mass death and the bad sort of anarchy, before humanity and Earth drop into nothingness.

The transition we must urgently undertake

A better life than endless consumption of toxic crap that kills ourselves and others is possible. It requires returning to the life-giving envelope of natural ecosystems and valuing experience over stuff. Much is already known regarding proven techniques to live and work more sustainably, educate yourself and start transitioning your family to live more lightly upon Earth.

We each must seek to go back to the land. More of our subsistence will have to come from what we can produce from the land and soil and sun and hard labor. The future of work lies in permaculture, regenerative enterprises, and creative self-expression that nurture learning and human evolution.

The Jeffersonian vision of agrarian democracy requires living full healthy lives upon the land, from the fruit of our own hands and minds, while rejecting authoritarianism and its pernicious hate, bigotry, and scapegoating. We must join with others in our community to re-localize our existences, as we fully embrace the global family.

For capitalism to have any future as we mobilize to avoid biosphere collapse, a global carbon tax that seeks to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, and de-industrialization of all activities that negatively impact the biosphere, will prove essential. Otherwise industrial capitalism will have to swiftly be replaced at any cost.

In America and the world we are already witnessing the rise of authoritarian demagoguery in response to rising scarcity. The charlatan nature of such political thought must be outed as we commit to green liberty and transitioning to socially just ecological sustainability. Together let’s make it so.

Dr. Glen Barry has written Earth Meanders essays for over a decade. He intends to do so more frequently and seeks your support at Climate Ark.

This article was originally published on EcoInternet.

Jeremy Corbyn’s win today marks a revolutionary, seismic change in British politics. But it is also so much more than that.

It’s not just the fact that he won, but that he won so decisively in the first round, with almost 60% of the vote, victorious in each of the three Labour Party ‘chapters’ – party members, affiliated supporters, and £3 registered supporters.

With so clear and strong a mandate from the Party, trades unions and cooperatives, and wider society including supposedly ‘disengaged’ young people, even his strongest detractors among Labour MPs have little choice but to go along with the euphoric tide that swept him to the leadership – no matter how little they share in that euphoria themselves.

And it is testament to Corbyn’s political integrity that his first act as Labour Leader and Leader of the Opposition was to take to the streets in today’s ‘Solidarity with Refugees’ march in London, which begins at Park Lane and ends, symbolically, at Downing Street.

Corbyn’s campaign and its resounding success have destroyed the New Labour project for good. Tony Blair and his entire legacy are reduced to rubble in an democratic earthquake of overwhelming power.

Blair himself is looking more likely than ever to end up in a court of law charged with the ultimate war crime – that of unprovoked military aggression against another nation. Others that colluded in the lies that took Britain to war in Iraq must also be fearing for the future.

But it’s the Tories who will really be quaking at the knees

But the deeper angst is on the Government side. David Cameron has good reason to fear the coming of Corbyn. His Bullingdon Club arrogance and Oxford Union debating skills will cut little ice against Corbyn, who will provide the serious, penetrating, analytical, humane opposition we so desperately need.

Any attempt by Cameron to stick with the old ‘yah boo’ style of Prime Minister’s Questions will look trivial, inept, condescending and utterly inappropriate.

For many years now he and his party have faced a Labour opposition that essentially shares their world view, so the debate has been focused on small but symbolic issues of detail. Both parties have colluded, for example, in

• economic ‘austerity’ – the imposition of deep public sector spending cuts that overwhelmingly impact on the poor, while flooding banks with cheap money to maintain booms in asset values for the exclusive benefit of the rich;
• the dismantling and privatization of the National Health Service and other essential public services;
• the idea that unaccountable corporations acting in pursuit of profit are preferable to public service, cooperative, state and community provision;
• the broad neoliberal agenda of supporting the power of international capital against people and the environment, as manifest in ‘free trade’, ‘investor protection’ and other provisions of TTIP, CETA and so on;
• nuclear power – no matter how high the cost;
• maintaining a ‘two track’ approach on climate change – giving diplomatic support to strong international agreements, while supporting fossil fuel industries with friendly policies and tax breaks;
• the desire to maintain nuclear weapons, at enormous expense, whose exclusive purpose is the mass murder of millions of people;
• membership of NATO, the world’s most powerful and aggressive military alliance;
• Britain’s role as a lackey to US power, unfailingly lending military and diplomatic support to both covert and overt US aggression whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine or elsewhere;
• unquestioning support for key military allies of the US, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia, no matter how egregious their crimes and disregard for international law including the Geneva Conventions.

The remarkable thing about Corbyn is that he is not merely luke-warm on some of these issues in the manner of his predecessor Ed Miliband, but that he rejects the entire package outright.

That 90% of ‘common ground’ that once existed between the two parties has now entirely evaporated. From now on Labour’s opposition will be real, serious, profound and principled.

This political earthquake still has a long way to run …

Corbyn’s opposition role will of course have huge environmental implications. Uniquely among the candidates for the Labour leadership, he advanced a powerful ‘green’ manifesto which set out a series of important policies on everything from fracking and nuclear power (against) to community energy and renewables (for) and conserving the integrity of our ecosystems on land and in sea.

And now he and his shadow ministers will be vigorously advancing those policies which promise – in line with opinion polls of renewable energy and other issues – to be overwhelmingly popular.

He will also be vociferous in his opposition to the viciously anti-environmental policies of the Conservative government – for which they have so far escaped serious political consequences. No longer will Cameron, Rudd and others be allowed to get away with talking green while attacking the environment by every means available to them.

That opposition will, moreover, be reflected in the media. Often in the most unflattering terms of course – what else would you expect in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times, Star and Telegraph? But bit by bit, the truth will shine through.

Perhaps the biggest change will be reflected in the BBC, which is constitutionally required to maintain political ‘balance’ between government and opposition and which, moreover, is itself under attack from a Government determined to ‘cut it down to size’ by limiting its services and reducing its funding base.

We can therefore expect the entire ‘centre ground’ of British political thought to shift markedly to the left – in the process exposing the current government as the exteme right-wing ideologues they are.

A green and socialist alliance across the Atlantic?

But the repercussions will also be international. Corbyn’s success both reflects and will in turn inspire left wing, anti-austerity parties and movements like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.

And it will echo across the Atlantic where the polls show the avowedly socialist and environmentally committed Bernie Sanders looking ever more likely to defeat the neoconservative Hillary Clinton and become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

The story of Clinton’s decline from well above 50% to below 40% has been almost precisely mirrored by Sanders’s rise, from below 10% to above 30% today – and in my book he’s the clear favourite for the nomination for all the same reasons that Corbyn won today.

If Sanders goes so far as to win the Presidency in November 2016 – an entirely credible proposition given the weakness of the Republican candidates and the likelihood of a Donald Trump split-off right-wing candidature – that raises the prospect of what would until today have looked impossible: a trans-Atlantic green and socialist alliance of Jeremy Corbyn and President Sanders.

And of course that would hugely boost Corbyn’s chances of winning the 2020 UK general election. Forget Obama’s increasingly hollow promise of “Yes we can!” – the cry will be “Yes we bloody well will!”

Not a moment too soon.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Congratulations to Sadiq Khan. His selection adds another interesting candidate to the race to be London’s next Mayor.

The Green Party candidate Sian Berry has a worthy opponent in Khan, the man who infamously led Labour’s anti-Green ‘attack unit’ during the recent General Election campaign.

The selection of Sadiq Khan as Labour’s candidate is welcome in one particular respect: it helps to maintain the principle that no-one can be elected Mayor of London if they support the expansion of Heathrow airport.

Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson established that principle between them, but Tessa Jowell would have broken it – and would therefore have had a hard time against the likely Tory candidate, Zac Goldsmith, who is vociferously opposed to the airport’s expansion.

This may make a difference to the final result of the Mayoral election, because voters’ second preferences count. If the Greens come third then their voters’ substantial number of second preferences will be redistributed. Tessa Jowell would have had very little credibility for this part of the electorate.

Heathrow no, Gatwick yes – too bad about the climate

However the situation with Sadiq Khan is more complex. He opposes the expansion of Heathrow – but favours expanding London’s other big airport at Gatwick. According to an Evening Standard report, Khan says he has “thought long and hard” about what they describe as the “aviation capacity crisis”.

He stressed he was “not anti-aviation” and is in support of a new runway being built to expand Gatwick. Of course the Standard often misrepresents people and gets things wrong. But on the same date Khan himself wrote an article for City AM in which he said:

“I believe the answer to the airport capacity problem lies in expanding Gatwick and making Heathrow better, not bigger.”

Khan may have thought long and hard about airport capacity, but has he given any thought at all to dangerous human-triggered climate-change?

There are many reasons for opposing Heathrow expansion, including noise, air pollution, road traffic congestion, and the destruction of housing. Khan shows every sign of taking those arguments seriously.

But if he was also opposed to enabling more take-offs and landings at Heathrow because of the increasing contribution aircraft emissions are making to climate change, he would be opposing the expansion of Gatwick too.

The only intellectually consistent position from which to champion airport expansion is the systematic denial of climate science. There is no sign that Khan takes this view. Therefore, his opposition to Heathrow expansion runs the risk of being in the end nothing more than NIMBY-ism.

Who is the greenest of them all?

For the sake of building cross-party co-operation against the Tory Government, it would be good if Green voters felt they could give a Labour candidate their second preferences. But what will Sadiq Khan do to earn them?

Without standing firm against London airports expansion full stop, as Greens stand firm, it’s as yet hard to say. And, given that Khan is likely to be up against the renowned green-leaning Zac Goldsmith – a former editor of The Ecologist – he will have his work cut out.

However even Goldsmith – whose opposition to Heathrow expansion is a key platform of his campaign for the mayoralty – is curiously silent on the bigger issues.

In a thundering editorial in the Evening Standard last May, for example, he lambasted Heathrow expansion citing air pollution, traffic congestion and BAA’s monopolistic tendencies, but had nothing to say on either climate change or whether Gatwick expansion would be acceptable.

The reality is that, as we lean into this mayoral election race in London, the only thing that Greens can say with one clear voice is: vote Green. Vote for our superb candidate, Sian Berry.

If Corbyn can come from being a complete outsider to being the hot favourite to win the Labour leadership, then surely it can be time too for Londoners to get behind the only candidate who can be trusted to stand firm against any more crowding of our skies – and pollution of our atmosphere.

Let the Green momentum build …

Event: Sian Berry will be speaking on this issue in London today, Saturday 12th September. Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Ave, London WC2H 8EP starting 2pm.

With: Keith Taylor, Green Party MEP, Prof Alice Bows-Larkin, Tyndall Centre, Manchester University; Christine Taylor, Stop Heathrow Expansion; Brendon Sewill, Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign; Leo Murray, A Free Ride; Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace; Asad Rehman, Friends of the Earth; Sian Berry, Green London Mayoral Candidate; Cllr Jonathan Essex South East Greens; John Stewart HACAN.

Victor Anderson is a former Green Party Member of the London Assembly. Rupert Read is the Green Party’s national Transport Spokesperson. Both are core members of Green House.

Jeremy Corbyn’s win today marks a revolutionary, seismic change in British politics. But it is also so much more than that.

It’s not just the fact that he won, but that he won so decisively in the first round, with almost 60% of the vote, victorious in each of the three Labour Party ‘chapters’ – party members, affiliated supporters, and £3 registered supporters.

With so clear and strong a mandate from the Party, trades unions and cooperatives, and wider society including supposedly ‘disengaged’ young people, even his strongest detractors among Labour MPs have little choice but to go along with the euphoric tide that swept him to the leadership – no matter how little they share in that euphoria themselves.

And it is testament to Corbyn’s political integrity that his first act as Labour Leader and Leader of the Opposition was to take to the streets in today’s ‘Solidarity with Refugees’ march in London, which begins at Park Lane and ends, symbolically, at Downing Street.

Corbyn’s campaign and its resounding success have destroyed the New Labour project for good. Tony Blair and his entire legacy are reduced to rubble in an democratic earthquake of overwhelming power.

Blair himself is looking more likely than ever to end up in a court of law charged with the ultimate war crime – that of unprovoked military aggression against another nation. Others that colluded in the lies that took Britain to war in Iraq must also be fearing for the future.

But it’s the Tories who will really be quaking at the knees

But the deeper angst is on the Government side. David Cameron has good reason to fear the coming of Corbyn. His Bullingdon Club arrogance and Oxford Union debating skills will cut little ice against Corbyn, who will provide the serious, penetrating, analytical, humane opposition we so desperately need.

Any attempt by Cameron to stick with the old ‘yah boo’ style of Prime Minister’s Questions will look trivial, inept, condescending and utterly inappropriate.

For many years now he and his party have faced a Labour opposition that essentially shares their world view, so the debate has been focused on small but symbolic issues of detail. Both parties have colluded, for example, in

• economic ‘austerity’ – the imposition of deep public sector spending cuts that overwhelmingly impact on the poor, while flooding banks with cheap money to maintain booms in asset values for the exclusive benefit of the rich;
• the dismantling and privatization of the National Health Service and other essential public services;
• the idea that unaccountable corporations acting in pursuit of profit are preferable to public service, cooperative, state and community provision;
• the broad neoliberal agenda of supporting the power of international capital against people and the environment, as manifest in ‘free trade’, ‘investor protection’ and other provisions of TTIP, CETA and so on;
• nuclear power – no matter how high the cost;
• maintaining a ‘two track’ approach on climate change – giving diplomatic support to strong international agreements, while supporting fossil fuel industries with friendly policies and tax breaks;
• the desire to maintain nuclear weapons, at enormous expense, whose exclusive purpose is the mass murder of millions of people;
• membership of NATO, the world’s most powerful and aggressive military alliance;
• Britain’s role as a lackey to US power, unfailingly lending military and diplomatic support to both covert and overt US aggression whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine or elsewhere;
• unquestioning support for key military allies of the US, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia, no matter how egregious their crimes and disregard for international law including the Geneva Conventions.

The remarkable thing about Corbyn is that he is not merely luke-warm on some of these issues in the manner of his predecessor Ed Miliband, but that he rejects the entire package outright.

That 90% of ‘common ground’ that once existed between the two parties has now entirely evaporated. From now on Labour’s opposition will be real, serious, profound and principled.

This political earthquake still has a long way to run …

Corbyn’s opposition role will of course have huge environmental implications. Uniquely among the candidates for the Labour leadership, he advanced a powerful ‘green’ manifesto which set out a series of important policies on everything from fracking and nuclear power (against) to community energy and renewables (for) and conserving the integrity of our ecosystems on land and in sea.

And now he and his shadow ministers will be vigorously advancing those policies which promise – in line with opinion polls of renewable energy and other issues – to be overwhelmingly popular.

He will also be vociferous in his opposition to the viciously anti-environmental policies of the Conservative government – for which they have so far escaped serious political consequences. No longer will Cameron, Rudd and others be allowed to get away with talking green while attacking the environment by every means available to them.

That opposition will, moreover, be reflected in the media. Often in the most unflattering terms of course – what else would you expect in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times, Star and Telegraph? But bit by bit, the truth will shine through.

Perhaps the biggest change will be reflected in the BBC, which is constitutionally required to maintain political ‘balance’ between government and opposition and which, moreover, is itself under attack from a Government determined to ‘cut it down to size’ by limiting its services and reducing its funding base.

We can therefore expect the entire ‘centre ground’ of British political thought to shift markedly to the left – in the process exposing the current government as the exteme right-wing ideologues they are.

A green and socialist alliance across the Atlantic?

But the repercussions will also be international. Corbyn’s success both reflects and will in turn inspire left wing, anti-austerity parties and movements like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.

And it will echo across the Atlantic where the polls show the avowedly socialist and environmentally committed Bernie Sanders looking ever more likely to defeat the neoconservative Hillary Clinton and become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

The story of Clinton’s decline from well above 50% to below 40% has been almost precisely mirrored by Sanders’s rise, from below 10% to above 30% today – and in my book he’s the clear favourite for the nomination for all the same reasons that Corbyn won today.

If Sanders goes so far as to win the Presidency in November 2016 – an entirely credible proposition given the weakness of the Republican candidates and the likelihood of a Donald Trump split-off right-wing candidature – that raises the prospect of what would until today have looked impossible: a trans-Atlantic green and socialist alliance of Jeremy Corbyn and President Sanders.

And of course that would hugely boost Corbyn’s chances of winning the 2020 UK general election. Forget Obama’s increasingly hollow promise of “Yes we can!” – the cry will be “Yes we bloody well will!”

Not a moment too soon.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Congratulations to Sadiq Khan. His selection adds another interesting candidate to the race to be London’s next Mayor.

The Green Party candidate Sian Berry has a worthy opponent in Khan, the man who infamously led Labour’s anti-Green ‘attack unit’ during the recent General Election campaign.

The selection of Sadiq Khan as Labour’s candidate is welcome in one particular respect: it helps to maintain the principle that no-one can be elected Mayor of London if they support the expansion of Heathrow airport.

Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson established that principle between them, but Tessa Jowell would have broken it – and would therefore have had a hard time against the likely Tory candidate, Zac Goldsmith, who is vociferously opposed to the airport’s expansion.

This may make a difference to the final result of the Mayoral election, because voters’ second preferences count. If the Greens come third then their voters’ substantial number of second preferences will be redistributed. Tessa Jowell would have had very little credibility for this part of the electorate.

Heathrow no, Gatwick yes – too bad about the climate

However the situation with Sadiq Khan is more complex. He opposes the expansion of Heathrow – but favours expanding London’s other big airport at Gatwick. According to an Evening Standard report, Khan says he has “thought long and hard” about what they describe as the “aviation capacity crisis”.

He stressed he was “not anti-aviation” and is in support of a new runway being built to expand Gatwick. Of course the Standard often misrepresents people and gets things wrong. But on the same date Khan himself wrote an article for City AM in which he said:

“I believe the answer to the airport capacity problem lies in expanding Gatwick and making Heathrow better, not bigger.”

Khan may have thought long and hard about airport capacity, but has he given any thought at all to dangerous human-triggered climate-change?

There are many reasons for opposing Heathrow expansion, including noise, air pollution, road traffic congestion, and the destruction of housing. Khan shows every sign of taking those arguments seriously.

But if he was also opposed to enabling more take-offs and landings at Heathrow because of the increasing contribution aircraft emissions are making to climate change, he would be opposing the expansion of Gatwick too.

The only intellectually consistent position from which to champion airport expansion is the systematic denial of climate science. There is no sign that Khan takes this view. Therefore, his opposition to Heathrow expansion runs the risk of being in the end nothing more than NIMBY-ism.

Who is the greenest of them all?

For the sake of building cross-party co-operation against the Tory Government, it would be good if Green voters felt they could give a Labour candidate their second preferences. But what will Sadiq Khan do to earn them?

Without standing firm against London airports expansion full stop, as Greens stand firm, it’s as yet hard to say. And, given that Khan is likely to be up against the renowned green-leaning Zac Goldsmith – a former editor of The Ecologist – he will have his work cut out.

However even Goldsmith – whose opposition to Heathrow expansion is a key platform of his campaign for the mayoralty – is curiously silent on the bigger issues.

In a thundering editorial in the Evening Standard last May, for example, he lambasted Heathrow expansion citing air pollution, traffic congestion and BAA’s monopolistic tendencies, but had nothing to say on either climate change or whether Gatwick expansion would be acceptable.

The reality is that, as we lean into this mayoral election race in London, the only thing that Greens can say with one clear voice is: vote Green. Vote for our superb candidate, Sian Berry.

If Corbyn can come from being a complete outsider to being the hot favourite to win the Labour leadership, then surely it can be time too for Londoners to get behind the only candidate who can be trusted to stand firm against any more crowding of our skies – and pollution of our atmosphere.

Let the Green momentum build …

Event: Sian Berry will be speaking on this issue in London today, Saturday 12th September. Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Ave, London WC2H 8EP starting 2pm.

With: Keith Taylor, Green Party MEP, Prof Alice Bows-Larkin, Tyndall Centre, Manchester University; Christine Taylor, Stop Heathrow Expansion; Brendon Sewill, Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign; Leo Murray, A Free Ride; Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace; Asad Rehman, Friends of the Earth; Sian Berry, Green London Mayoral Candidate; Cllr Jonathan Essex South East Greens; John Stewart HACAN.

Victor Anderson is a former Green Party Member of the London Assembly. Rupert Read is the Green Party’s national Transport Spokesperson. Both are core members of Green House.