![]() Read: Architecture "lagging behind all other sectors" in climate change fight says IPCC report author The energy required to turn these increasingly scarce materials into products to sell for profit almost always generates carbon dioxide. We are using 1.5 times the natural resources Earth can regenerate every year, and according to the authors of Waste to Wealth, Peter Lacy and Jakob Rutqvist, that figure is set to double in the next decade. It doesn't take a mathematician to work out that infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't stack up. ![]() Today it is poured into expanding production capacity and increasing profit, resulting in a feedback loop that requires more and more extraction, energy and labour. In proto-capitalist models, profit was invested into non-productive ventures such as cathedrals or pyramids. When you understand that, today, Indigenous peoples comprise less than 5 per cent of the global population and yet protect 80 per cent of what's left of Earth's biodiversity, you start to see the enormity of tearing them away from the environments they nurtured for millennia.Ĭapitalism relies not only on surplus, but also on growth. More efficient farms and plantations with less "wasted" land reduced biodiversity. Infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't stack upĮnclosure and colonialism caused a shift away from stewardship of natural resources towards control for profit. Across the Global South, land and bodies were "enclosed" at a much greater scale.Īs Hickel explains, "the rise of capitalism in Europe… hinged on commodities that were produced by enslaved workers, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories by European peasants who had been dispossessed by enclosure… bodies were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation". In a process called "enclosure", common lands across Europe were seized, crops burned, and millions of peasants forced away from their livelihoods. Read: "We're not going to profiteer our way out of climate change"
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