The Guardian: Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

[jfz9580m]

3. I know

And I do think degrowth - both in terms of smaller population sizes (sorry J D Vance!) and slower and smaller economies -is the long term solution.

Our societies are so poorly and chaotically managed and run as is that runaway, deregulated growth is a liability in the long run. And as you rightly pointed out, so many of our political struggles are about bread and circuses i.e. performative stuff, but nothing very real..

I feel a holistic (not hippie holistic, but scientifically holistic) understanding of the planet would help scientists identify those planetary stresses which work most to undermine and threaten planetary stability.

I also suspect that eschewing a strictly Anthropocentric standpoint from time to time would probably be better for the vast majority of humans, but it is hard for our scientifically incurious* society to get that. Not even most shopaholics would like to live in a polluted, noisy parking lot denuded of all green cover if the connection was clear to them. But because :a) their ecological footprint represents damage to the ecosystem that is out of sight; b) no one bothers to point out the connection and c) people get defensive when that is pointed out, here we are…

It is one part dominion theology and many parts an incurious and crass way of thinking. Who cares how many species go extinct? Who cares if my meat comes from factory farms? Who cares if my shopping sprees or multiple cars are a strain on the planet and so on..

(*: I said incurious because I don’t think some of the wealthy people in tech for instance are scientifically illiterate - they are just entirely incurious about the planet except as a backdrop for shopping malls/parking lots/pubs and so on. They have no understanding of ecological sciences and not much curiosity either as far as I can tell. My own curiousity about the natural world is always blunted by the misery of getting fond of more and more new species and life forms only to know in more detail how threatened or exploited they are by humans.)