Ending the extractive economy before it brings an end to us
As climate catastrophe accelerates, we need to be clear - the problem lies with our current economic system, and the excesses of wealth and power
Every day brings more evidence that ecological catastrophe is not some future hypothetical event but is already upon us. Sea temperatures are rising, reaching record highs. We are enduring a massive spike in land temperatures, with fires raging in North America and across Southern Europe, while elsewhere extreme weather events such as increasing floods and other adverse climatic events are increasing. Species extinction is accelerating, with two-thirds of vertebrates gone already—a Sixth Mass Extinction era. And whilst change is always unpredictable, we can be one hundred percent certain that the hellscapes of the past few weeks are only the beginning. Things are going to get much, much worse—for the life-sustaining ecosystems of the planet such as the deep ocean currents, for the biosphere as a whole, and for humanity - as an organized global community.
As it stands there remains far too much chatter about ‘tackling the climate crisis’ without there being enough wholescale system change action. Ideas such as a ‘wellbeing economy’, a ‘just transition’ or ‘net zero’ are offered, but to date they remain largely ideas not yet put into wholescale practice at intensity required. We need to stop the timidity and name the culprit here: it is our current economic system, with its excesses of wealth and power that drive ongoing financial and fossil fuel extraction, that is the problem.
The prevailing economic model is the disaster, extracting resources, concentrating wealth and failing to effectively deploy resources and human ingenuity towards a sustainable future. Greed and selfishness have been allowed to run riot, intentionally funneling more and more wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands—at immense human, capital, and carbon costs.
In order to dismantle our carbon economy on the essential timetable required, we need to end practices which see corporations and shareholders overly reliant upon fossil fuels dump the costs onto society and the environment. It is the profit imperative of the market and the dominance of the profit-maximizing shareholder-driven limited liability corporation that has allowed a cadre of super rich to enjoy the lion’s share of planetary resources whilst being responsible for most of the carbon use. Meanwhile, the rest of us see an ever-increasing degradation of our health and public services and in turn bear most of the collective brunt of accelerating climate change impacts.
Indeed without unprecedented change, the wealthy elite, backed by compliant political power, will continue to make temporary adjustments to insulate themselves from the ravages of a destabilizing climate. In this, the poorest will suffer new and accelerating levels of horrors, and many of our ecosystems and vital human production systems such as global agriculture are in serious peril.
The continuing inadequate response to this calamitous state of affairs is often delusional. As we wrote last month, on the one hand there are signs of some limited progress, but on the other, there is a collective wish-fulfillment exercise in which policy makers, national and international government officials, and the public at large fool ourselves into believing that small change is making a real difference. It isn’t. For us, the generalized warm words that call for much-needed big change are not the same as the strategic interventions and approaches capable of actually delivering it.
What is to be done? The challenge is unprecedented, and so far the pathway to a new economy has more divertors, opposers, and diluters than it has active supporters. We can be sure that the self-centered trimming of progressive policy by the wealthy and powerful will grow as demands for change intensify, and as prevarication ramps up there will be new anger, new activism, and yet louder calls for change. In all of this, we must be unforgiving in our pursuit of a new economy that is genuinely democratic, one in which we all have a genuine stake whilst working within the hard ecological limits of the planet.
Even at this late date, real change is not beyond our reach. As a new and anti-extractive economic model, Community Wealth Building (CWB) offers a series of real-life, practical remedies that can strike a blow at the heart of fossil capitalism, while advancing our ongoing national struggle for genuine environmental, social, and racial justice. The glimmers of hope that CWB has lighted up show us the way.
Community Wealth Building directly challenges how wealth is presently conceptualized and used under our prevailing capitalist economic system. It doesn’t shy away from the hard truths, because instead of extraction and exploitation, CWB works to create a democratic economy that produces equity as its everyday, natural function—and in so doing, shifts the behavior and attitudes of people, communities, cities, regions—and, hopefully, ultimately nations as a whole. Such an economy will have fundamentally different values and goals than our current form of hyper-extractive top heavy capitalism.
Community Wealth Building is not the end goal, it is merely the means. But at this moment in history, it is an essential foundation upon which to build a truly democratic economy—one that is just and honors the natural boundaries and regenerative capacity of our planet.
We must be clear: without such a fundamental transformation at the very heart of our economic system, without a shift from an extractive to a re-circulatory and democratized economy built upon broad-based and distributed ownership, there will be no change. There is no silver bullet solution that will permit capitalism to continue as before by just ending carbon emissions. The deeper source of our climate and our economic ills are one and the same; fossil fuel and financial extraction are two sides of the same coin, and to strike down one requires us to strike at the other.
Amid all the floods and fires and species extinctions and deep and dangerous tremors in the life-giving systems of our planet, the full magnitude of the challenge is heaving into view. We must either make systematized greed and concentrated wealth extraction extinct, or much of planetary life will be. Simply put, we can no longer afford capitalist plutocracy in the era of the Anthropocene—it is now them or us, and there’s a whole world to win.
Neil McInroy is Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative
Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash
