The sheer magnitude of the biodiversity crisis is laid bare in the biannual Living Planet Index compiled by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. Their latest report from 2022 showed there was a 69 per cent collapse in monitored wildlife populations since 1970.
In 2018, when the decline was “only” 60 per cent, their report lambasted “exploding human consumption” as “the driving force behind the unprecedented planetary change we are witnessing, through the increased demand for energy, land and water”.
However, these reports do not delve into why consumption of land and resources has exploded in this time. In an article for the Conversation website, Anna Pigott, who is a lecturer in human geography at Swansea University in Wales, criticised WWF/ZSL for failing to identify capitalism as the “crucial (and often causal) link” between the destruction of nature and galloping levels of consumption.
“By naming capitalism as a root cause,” wrote Pigott, “we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human” and that “if we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it”.
Capitalism, according to Jason Hickel, academic and author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), has three main defining characteristics: enclosure and artificial scarcity, perpetual expansion, and a lack of democracy, insisting “democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital”. The result is that capital is directed not towards meeting the needs of people and nature, but into promoting consumption.
In an interview available on YouTube, Hickel expands on his ideas, noting that “the overriding objective of all production is to maximise and accumulate profit ... not to meet human needs, or to achieve ecological goals or to advance social progress”. The conclusion is that “we are hostage to this insane logic”: while we have the technological capacity to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and protect ecosystems, “capital chooses to invest in fossil fuels and high-emitting activities” such as production of SUVs, cruise ships and private jets.
There is a conflation of capitalism with reality, that this is the only way things operate. There are other ways of organising our relationships with nature and each other
— Patrick Bresnihan, associate professor in geography at Maynooth University
If capitalism is the overriding driver of runaway consumption of resources, and so the collapse of biological systems, it is remarkable how it has been nearly absent in debates around the ecological crisis.
Our current economic doctrine, what many refer to as “neoliberal” capitalism (as it dates from the Reagan-Thatcher period of deregulation in the 1980s) has delivered immense wealth, not only to the 1 per cent but to a burgeoning global middle class (including here in Ireland) who are drawn by the allure of owning cars, taking foreign holidays and shopping at the weekend.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) remarks that “without sufficient consumption, which creates more demands for production, the production cycle would be paralysed”. It adds that “mass consumption – or consumerism – is not merely a cultural phenomenon. It is embedded in the core tenets of capitalism as an economic system”. However, the lure of endless growth in production and consumption is now butting up against the very finite limits of our one and only planet.
That it has come to this was foretold, most notably in 1972 with the publication of the Limits to Growth, which was scorned at the time but whose model scenarios for societal collapse are worryingly on track.
While the unleashing of the profit motive has brought wealth, comfort and luxury to many, it has also led to widening inequality in the rich world, while two billion people, a quarter of humanity, remain mired in poverty. All the while, accelerating deterioration of ecosystems, climate and water bodies may render the capitalist experiment little more than a blip in the human story. The WEF points out that there is no mechanism in the capitalist system to control its excesses, so do we need to “smash capitalism”, as some demonstrators call for, or can it be reined in, and if so, how?
Patrick Bresnihan, associate professor in geography at Maynooth University, says “there is a conflation of capitalism with reality, that this is the only way things operate. There are other ways of organising our relationships with nature and each other.” He says that today there is hardly anywhere on Earth that is not touched by the “voracious need to reduce costs, to find more resources, to exploit more labour in order to increase profits”.
Resources such as forests, fish or minerals mined from the Earth, as well as the waste products of production – pollution of air and water, loss of habitats for species – are made to be artificially cheap, if they are paid for at all. “So that commodity that is produced and is generating profit has all sorts of invisible costs that are not in the price [that is paid]”.
One response to making those costs visible is the production of so-called “natural capital accounts”, effectively a mechanism of confronting economic sectors with the true costs of their services or products. Ireland’s fourth National Biodiversity Action Plan, published earlier this year, makes natural capital accounting official government policy, and by 2027 it is expected that the first assessment of ecosystem accounts will be published and that the concept will be “mainstreamed” across all sectors.
Bresnihan was on the steering committee of Natural Capital Ireland when it was first established, but he feels that there is an inherent naivety to the approach. The impact to nature, he contends, “has not been discounted or undervalued due to a lack of knowledge”, but “because it is a necessary element to capitalism”. The idea that you can challenge the forces behind capitalism by putting figures on its impact to nature “misunderstands how capital and power work”, he says.
While there is a clear need to draw private finance into nature restoration, Bresnihan contends natural capital frameworks, despite being around since the early 1990s, simply have not worked. Instead, he wants to channel the “spirit and political will” of the early days of the Irish State when there was planned investment in social projects so that certain aspects of the economy (he mentions housing, nature conservation and renewable energy) are “decommodified”.
So where does that leave the role of private companies? Lucy Gaffney is the director of the Business for Biodiversity platform, an initiative funded by the National Parks & Wildlife Service and Department of Agriculture, which aims to get every Irish business to incorporate nature into their decision-making. “For a lot of organisations, their impact will be in their value chain, and you now have a responsibility to know where that impact is and where it’s happening,” she says, referring to the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) introduced last year (although she notes this affects only a very small number of companies in Ireland).
“Being nature positive is about eliminating, or reducing as much as possible, the negative impacts to nature. We want to get into a place where we’re operating within planetary boundaries and we’re giving the natural world an opportunity to regenerate,” says Gaffney. This goes far beyond tree-planting and bee hotels, she says. Gaffney believes natural capital is a useful tool but remains in its infancy, and “we still have a way to go before it becomes mainstream”.
Nevertheless, she adds “businesses won’t act unless they have to. Things like CSRD will trigger businesses into action because they have to and because there are penalties if they don’t comply”.
The time for voluntary measures from businesses has passed, in her estimation. “We are extracting and harvesting all our natural capital assets through our primary sectors. It’s being transformed into this stuff that we consume, then it goes into finance, where it sits in banks. How do we get that wealth back into nature restoration, so we can operate in a circular way? The only way to do that is through taxation. Imagine if we added half a per cent on to corporation tax, for nature? Taxation is the way to go.”
Curtailing consumption is the conversation nobody wants to have. Talk of how we can transition to a post-capitalist society has not yet made it into mainstream debate. Yet, there is no escaping these issues if there is to be a safe and equitable future for everyone on this planet.
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