By DANIEL TANURO*
Is the situation very serious? Yes! Is there a threat of collapse? Yes. But this outcome is not at all “inevitable”. It risks becoming inevitable if we do not impose anti-capitalist responses.
“Collapsology” and ecosocialism have some things in common, but also important differences. It is hoped that the debate will help to soften them or, if not, to clarify them. It is in this spirit that this contribution is written. We agree on one important point: this is not a crisis, in the sense that we are talking about an economic crisis or a liver crisis, that is, temporary phenomena. What we are facing is infinitely more serious. But the future remains open, despite everything. It is the struggle that is on the agenda, not mournful resignation.
According to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, the sustainability of human civilization depends on nine ecological parameters. For each one, a threshold of danger has been defined that must not be exceeded. The only positive point is the ongoing recovery of the ozone layer. The threshold is unknown for two parameters. But it has been crossed for three of the other six: the decline in biodiversity, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle and the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
Let’s settle for one indication of climate change: scientists place the tipping point at +1°C to +4°C (compared to the pre-industrial era) beyond which the Greenland ice sheet will break off, leading to a seven-metre rise in sea level. Since 2016, warming has been above 1°C, so we are in the danger zone. In any case, without drastic measures, it is very likely that there will be a rise of 60 to 80 cm in sea level in the coming decades. Several hundred million people will be forced to move.
We would not be in this tragic situation if serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions had been decided after the Rio Conference in 1992. But emissions have increased faster than ever before. A record was broken in 2017: an increase of 3,7%! At the current rate, the carbon budget that offers a two in three chance of not exceeding 1,5°C of warming will be exhausted by 2030; that of 2°C will be exhausted by 2050.
“Collapsologists” conclude that a collapse is inevitable and has already begun.[2] They adopt Jared Diamond's analysis: society prunes the environmental branch on which it sits. Therefore, it will collapse, as other human societies have collapsed in the past (Easter Island, the Maya, etc.)[3]. What does this mean? It is not just the collapse of a political-state structure, as was the case with the fall of the Roman Empire, but an “ecocide”, causing the “carrying capacity” to be exceeded, leading to the disappearance of a large part of the population, perhaps the majority.
The success of this thesis was assured by the metaphor of Easter Island. According to Jared Diamond, the inhabitants of the island multiplied to 30.000 and destroyed the ecosystem by cutting down large palm trees to move their statues, so that 4/5 of the population would have disappeared. Today's planet would be in the same situation. A global collapse is about to occur.
This is the view adopted by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens. However, things did not happen that way on Easter Island. It is now well established that its inhabitants never numbered more than 3.500. The large palm trees would have disappeared after the proliferation of rodents imported by the Polynesians. The mystery of the cessation of the production of statues can be explained by social factors. The fatal blow to the island's civilization was dealt by an external cause: the slave raids, which decimated the population.
Experts from the various cases cited by Jared Diamond have come together to produce a very remarkable collective book: Questioning Collapse.[4] This is a scientific work, not a book for the general public; therefore, it did not have the impact of Collapse. But why do scientists like Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens continue to cite Jared Diamond? Why don't they mention the Questioning Collapse, which concludes that the thesis of the environmental collapse of past societies is unfounded? They could do so because, when it comes to the present, the “collapsologists” are absolutely right: environmental destruction poses a real threat of collapse. Ecosocialists fully share this concern. On the other hand, we totally disagree with the resigned way of considering collapse as an event to be accepted because it would be inevitable.
Pablo Servigne states in an interview that this inevitability is based on a “body of scientific evidence”.[5] This claim is extremely questionable. In fact, when environmental threat experts leave the strict account of the facts, two main directions emerge.
The first is that of researchers for whom growth is a sacred cow. They believe that miracle technologies will prevent disaster without altering the economic system. This view is clearly in the majority. In the 5th IPCC report (which summarizes the existing work), more than 90% of the scenarios aimed at staying below 2°C of warming are based on the assumption of a massive deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (a form of geoengineering fraught with ecological and social risks).
The second, very minority, approach comes from researchers who believe that growth is a calamity, but who attribute the responsibility for the disaster to the human race. They say that technology and social production are productivist by definition. The idea that today’s society is running up against a wall because it seeks profit for capitalists fighting for market share doesn’t even touch them. Suddenly, reducing the population is the only solution for these people. Some say bluntly that the Earth is sick because of humanity. The disappearance of the human race seems easier to them to imagine than that of capitalism, which has only existed for two hundred years…
In general, these two orientations have in common that they act as if the social relations of capitalist society were subject to natural laws. Instead of criticizing “science” on this point, “collapsologists” imitate it.
In the interview cited, Pablo Servigne explains that collapse is inevitable because “our society is based on both fossil fuels and the debt system”: “in order to function, we need more and more growth”, or “without fossil fuels, there is no more growth”, “therefore, the debt will never be paid”; “therefore, our entire socioeconomic model will collapse”, he says. The same analysis is developed in the work written with Stevens.
However, we cannot mix the apples of fossil fuels with the pears of debt! Fossil fuel companies and their shareholders do not want to stop exploiting fossil fuel reserves because that would burst a financial bubble, OK. But this bubble is made up of fictitious capital. It is the product of speculation. It has nothing to do with the physical world. No natural law says that the bill for the bursting of the carbon bubble must be paid by the rest of society. No natural law says, therefore, that this explosion must collapse the world's population. Nor does any natural law say that the only way to escape this threat is to resign and retreat to the countryside to found small resilient communities (interesting experiments, by the way, but that is not the debate). Let the shareholders pay the costs of their waste and the debt problem will be solved…
More than half of greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to the richest ten percent of the world’s population. In other words, more than half of the energy consumed is used to meet the needs of the rich. Add in the energy wasted to manufacture weapons (to defend the interests of the rich) and products of planned obsolescence (to increase the profits of the rich), as well as the waste of almost half of the world’s food production (mainly due to the profit drive instituted by the rich) and the analysis changes completely.
Is the situation very serious? Yes! Is there a threat of collapse? Yes. But this outcome is not at all “inevitable”. It risks becoming inevitable if we do not impose anti-capitalist responses. Nuance! Alternative community practices must therefore be articulated with a social strategy and anti-capitalist struggles, especially to block fossil capital expansion projects.
By refusing to draw this simple conclusion, the collapseologists are entering a very slippery terrain: that of fatalistic resignation in the face of the risk of seeing hundreds of millions of human beings pay with their lives for the destruction of the environment by the madness of capital growth. In their work, Servigne and Stevens evoke, without critical distance, the predictions of collapse of more than half of the world’s population. Their fatalistic call to “accept grief” could therefore take on a sinister meaning.
This risk of slippage derives precisely from the fact that “collapsology” naturalizes social relations in the same way as researchers who favor the second orientation mentioned above, some of whom (Jared Diamond, for example) are neo-Malthusians. Pablo Servigne’s hesitant responses to the subject of Malthus are also significant: his “collapsological” reading framework prevents him from seeing that the author of Principle of population He is not a cutting-edge ecologist, but a cynical ideologue of the elimination of the poor in favor of accumulation by the rich.[6]
In a second work (written with Gauthier Chapelle), Pablo Servigne continues Kropotkin's reflection on mutual aid in the world of the living.[7] This is an important point. In particular, cooperation is a characteristic of Homo sapiens as a social animal. Capitalism, which is based on the struggle of all against all, is therefore a denatured mode of production. It is hoped that this observation will allow the “collapsologists” to abandon their mournful resignation.
But it is not enough to call on biology to come to the rescue. Because human nature only exists concretely through its historical forms. True mutual aid, which manifests itself spontaneously but fleetingly in disasters, can only solidify in the self-organization of the struggle against capitalist destruction. Ultimately, to prevail, it will be necessary to lay the foundations of another society, based on the satisfaction of real human needs, democratically and prudently determined with respect to ecosystems. It is this struggle and this historical form that we call ecosocialism.
*Daniel Tanuro is an ecosocialist activist. Author of, among other books, Delusion of Green Capitalism (The Merlin Press).
Translation: Joana Benario.
Originally published in the newspaper Less!.
Notes
[1] Daniel Tanuro, ESSF (article 35111), Socio-ecological crisis: Pablo Servigne et Rafaël Stevens, ou l'effondrement dans la joie.
[2] Comment tout peut s'effondrer. Little collapsologie manual, Pablo Servigne et Raphaël Stevens, Seuil, 2015.
[3] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How societies decide whether to disappear or survive, Folio essays 2009.
[4] Questioning Collapse. Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, Patricia A. McAnany et al., Cambridge University Press, 2010.
[5] Reporterre, May 7 2015
[6] Interview with setback, March 7, 2018. Collapseologists say that poor people in the Global South will be the least affected by the collapse, because their existence is the least artificial. It is, unfortunately (but not surprisingly) the opposite that is likely to happen – and that it is already happening before our eyes.
[7] L'entraide. L'autre loi de la jungle, Pablo Servigne et Gauthier Chapelle, Les liens qui libèrent, 2017.
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