What are we doing, people? We have to challenge vested interests much more vigorously
My inbox is overflowing (again!) with invitations to submit to predatory journals, or attend bogus scientific events. The fact that a scientist with my academic background is asked to board an airplane to a conference dealing with “Ecosystems and Climate Change” in China, tells you a lot about the absurdity of our world today. The only positive value I find in such mails: they illuminate our current predicaments by warping economic incentives to such an extent that it becomes easier to see how “economic holy cows” (such as continuous growth, reflected in ever increasing gross national products) led us to our current impasse.
The (alas, still ongoing) pandemic brought enormous suffering. Officially, almost 5 million people died so far (and most experts agree that the figures derived from excess mortality will be much more saddening). The broader societal impact has also been devastating. The one silver lining was a wake-up call with regard to the detrimental effects of our extractive relation to the natural world (making pandemics ever more likely), and the possibilities of less harmful alternatives. Here, I would not only include less consumption but also the ideas to start redressing the extreme inequality in w/health distribution (which of course came to nothing up till now). However, I am baffled to hear colleagues discussing plans to visit “genuine” scientific conferences in the best places on offer while all the grand climate initiatives are either just talk or stalled. Thus, on the micro- and macrolevels we are “getting back to normal.”
The big problem, however: there is no “normal” to go back to. Let me briefly enumerate the interlinked challenges we are directly confronted with, though most readers are already acutely aware of them: climate change, massive species extinction, rampant ever-growing wealth inequality, the rise in fake news and paranoid conspiracy thinking, as well as the assault on democracy and human rights. It also is worthwhile to confront the fact that the “normal” state of capitalism always inherently linked exploiting both nature as well as people; see e.g., ref.[1] As biologists, we are well aware that unlimited growth is impossible and that complex systems are linked in often unpredictable ways. That means that further technological solutions have been (and mostly will turn out to be) only temporary or even worse than the problem we are trying to solve. To give us some breathing space to come up with stable solutions we have to have less people, each consuming less (especially in the richer nations).
Speijer D. 2021: What are we doing, people? We have to challenge vested interests much more vigorously. BioEssays (in press). DOI: 10.1002/bies.202100251
