How to become Earth Citizens
We are now living amid the greatest emergency in humanity’s million-year tenure of the Earth.
This is a compounding catastrophe created by our relentless exploitation of the planet’s finite resources, natural systems and resilience - and the terminal overpressure of our exploding numbers. Collapse, according to Bill Rees, may prove inevitable.
Yet no government or global organisation has a systematic plan to address it – or any way to arrest the compounding damage.
World science has been warning us for over half a century that we are hurtling towards disaster, driven by ten catastrophic risks. However, these risks, described below, are rarely discussed together or even seen as part of the same process.
All ten threats are propelled by four main forces: overpopulation, overconsumption, overpollution and money.
Because they are so deeply interlinked, they cannot be resolved one at a time – but must be solved together - and by integrated solutions that make none of them worse.
1. Extinction
Our civilisation is switching off the Earth’s life support system.
Three quarters of large wild animals are already gone, in just a few decades. So are most birds, fish, reptiles and frogs.
Humans and our livestock now make up 96% vertebrate life on land.
We are transforming forests into deserts and oceans into dead zones.
We are poisoning the biosphere, which threatens our own existence too.
2. Resource scarcity
Every year, in just seven months, human consumption surpasses what the Earth can renew.
Together, we use 105 billion tonnes of materials annually - 12.8 tonnes each - destroying soils, water and wildlife along the way. Our resource consumption has quadrupled since 1970. It is projected to soar to 160 billion tonnes by 2050.
Acute freshwater scarcity now affects over half the world’s people. Under humanity’s dominion, the forests are falling and the oceans are dying.
3. Global Poisoning
We are poisoning every living thing, every day. Especially our children, whom we fill with plastic microparticles and other toxins even before they are born.
Human chemical emissions exceed 220 billion tonnes a year, five times larger than our climate emissions.
They kill 14 million people annually (WHO). This is the largest mass homicide in history. Nobody cares.
Neurotoxins are increasingly linked by science to a 13 point loss in human intelligence since 1975, guaranteeing a dumber race.
4. WMD
The world spends $2.7 trillion a year on new weapons.
12,000 nuclear warheads menace all life on our planet. Even a small nuclear war could kill 2-3 billion people, mostly by starvation.
The Doomsday Clock now sits at 89 seconds to midnight – the closest humans have ever come to absolute annihilation.
5. Hothouse Earth
Despite all the promises and good intentions, emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise sharply. The world is on track for +2°C by 2050 and +3-4°C by 2100. Beyond that, scientists are warning, it could reach a point of no-return, becoming totally uninhabitable to large animals, including humans.
So far, climate predictions have seriously underestimated actual temperature increases.
Under such hostile conditions many food and water supplies will fail, causing nations and societies to collapse and refugees to flood worldwide.
Methane from melting permafrost, the ocean floor and tropical wetlands is already venting. This means the Earth is now heating itself - and there is nothing humans can do to stop it.
6. Food scarcity
Our modern food system wastes over a billion tonnes of food a year. At the same time, it destroys the soils, water, ecology and the very climate it depends on. It is engineered for its own destruction.
The stable climate on which our food supply depends is already extinct. The new one is hostile to farming. Water and soil to grow food are running out. Just feeding a single person for one day costs the Earth the loss of 8.2 kilos of topsoil. In 2024, 295 million people faced acute hunger.
We must urgently replace our present system with renewable food that recycles all its nutrients and water, uses far fewer resources and is climate-proof.
7. Uncontrolled technologies
We are unleashing a swarm of dangerous new technologies — AI, global surveillance, robot killers, nanopollution, man-made viruses, geoengineering.
These have no regulation, ethical or public oversight or means of control. Nor do the greedy billionaires who promote them and tout their benefits while ignoring their downsides.
Like fossil fuels before them, these tools can each inflict vast global harm if misused or unregulated by society.
8. Pandemics
Since 2000, we’ve had nine pandemics. Several are still running. More are on the way.
All pandemics are man-made: they mainly result from overpopulation, overcrowding, environmental destruction, global travel, misinformation and bad science.
Rogue scientists continue to create deadly new viruses.
WHO warns the next pandemic may be worse than COVID.
9. Overpopulation
The human population has tripled in a single person’s lifetime.
Each year, we add 70 million more people to a planet already strained to breaking point.
An animal is reckoned by science to be overpopulated when its demands begin to destroy the environment it inhabits and basic needs for its survival. Humans are now considered by many authorities to be well past that point, and thus overpopulated.
Mass migration could run into the billions as climate, conflicts, resource and food scarcities and sea level rise displace entire regions.
10. Misinformation
To add to our confusion, lies have become a https://cribb.substack.com/p/the-black-work-of-big-oil.
The fossil fuel sector pioneered paid disinformation. Politicians, media and other corporates have seized on it.
Mis/disinformation now poisons public discourse, disables democracy, kills individuals and prevents society from taking actions urgently needed for our own safety.
The Human Emergency
All these megathreats are connected and must be solved together, not one at a time. That way lies only disaster. The Council for the Human Future describes this constellation of threats as ‘the human emergency’.
Global action by a united humanity is not only necessary – but possible. The internet enables global discussion, rational decision and positive action. (As well as lies and nonsense).
Beneficial solutions to the main threats already exist and some (such as abandoning fossil fuels) are well-known – but, as yet, there is no global plan to implement them.
A plan
If we want to survive, humans must first agree to survive. Without a strong global consensus on how to secure our future, there is no safe way forward.
We must agree to tackle all ten catastrophic threats to our future, together - and as a matter of absolute urgency.
That is why the Council for the Human Future considers we need an Earth System Treaty – a single, binding, legal agreement to act on ALL the threats that surround us.
An umbrella agreement that any individual, as well as any group, company or nation can sign and pledge themselves to.
This would be the first truly global act of democracy, open to all members of our species, an agreement to secure our children’s future.
The Treaty
An Earth System Treaty is an agreement among rational, concerned citizens to work together to prosper on a habitable planet.
It seeks to safely abate each of the ten massive risks which confront us – and commits us to taking safe action to remedy them all.
Especially, it binds us to lowering human numbers and moderating our consumption of resources by re-use.
It commits us to living within the safe boundaries of the Earth, as defined by the Stockholm and Potsdam institutes and many others.
Its aim is to ensure our grandchildren can survive on a habitable planet - instead of a ruined one.
It is among the most important, inspiring and noble causes ever undertaken by humans.
Earth Citizens
The Council for the Human Future also considers that now is the time for a new kind of human to emerge – the Earth Citizen.
An Earth Citizen is one who believes in preserving a green, habitable Earth, rich in plants, animals and other diverse species, for our grandchildren.
Not the charred, desecrated cinder we are presently creating for them.
An Earth Citizen supports positive action against all major threats to human survival and the Earth system that sustains life.
An Earth Citizen has a personal commitment to do something positive, every day, to help build and secure a sustainable Earth in future.
An Earth Citizen is loyal to our common humanity and the planet that gives us life, rather than the competing nations, religions, businesses and cultures that would destroy it.
Let us all strive to become Earth Citizens – and uphold these simple values.
Unless we first agree together to survive, we probably won’t.
Funny, I was digging into similar aligned sources just this week. Many by William Ophuls and thinkers like him. Some ideas that got my attention in no particular order, merely grist for the mill. May parts be helpful to someone.
I wish there were a solution but there isn’t. Solutions are for problems not predicaments. Art Berman
“Civilizations are unnatural accumulations of wealth and power that cannot be sustained over the long term. Insuperable biophysical limits combine with innate human fallibility to precipitate eventual collapse.”
The author’s solution to a civilization’s collapse — absent moderation — is to 1) recognize that the “deep structural problems” have no solutions and 2) preserve as much as possible to avoid losing knowledge, tools, etc. to history.
“Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” — Niccolò Machiavelli
“One way of restating the Second Law, often called the entropy law, is to say that matter-energy transformations cannot be reversed; time’s arrow flies in only one direction… In short, over time energy moves inexorably downhill from a more useful or concentrated state to one that is less useful or concentrated. This movement is called entropy.”
Immoderate Greatness = hubris. Civilizations rise and fall because human nature — hubris — fails to let them see the flaws in their own system. One of the greatest traps of all is fanaticism: refusing to reconsider the values and goals of the system, even though they have now become perverse or even disastrous.
The core failure everyone is skating around is this: climate mitigation treats a living, historical, relational Earth as if it were a controllable machine — and mistakes abstractions for reality.
Carbon budgets are not the villain. They are symptoms of a deeper refusal: to accept irreversibility, to accept inheritance, to accept that the scale and power of civilization itself are the problem. That’s why techno-fixes proliferate, limits are endlessly deferred, and language becomes euphemistic and circular.
All the debate about energy requirements, efficiencies, or LULUCF ratios is still operating inside the machine metaphor: inputs, outputs, efficiencies, substitutions. As Whitehead would say, they are mistaking abstractions for concrete reality.
To put it sharply: you cannot budget the future of a system whose governing dynamics change as a function of its past. That is the dagger cutting through all these circular debates.
My analysis suggests that there is very little that we can do. Most of the trends I identify are inexorable, and complex adaptive systems are ultimately unmanageable. The city is an ecological parasite.
In short, because energy is the sine qua non of complexity, anything that diminishes the quantity, quality, or efficiency of energy threatens a complex civilization’s survival.
In short, limited, fallible human beings are bound to bungle the job of managing complex systems. What they can neither understand nor predict, they cannot expect to control, so failure is inevitable at some point.
This appeal to prudence will not be readily accepted. For the hubris of every civilization is that it is, like the Titanic, unsinkable. Hence the motivation to plan for shipwreck is lacking.
Modern civilization is therefore bound for a worse fate than the Titanic. When it sinks, the lifeboats, if any, will be ill provisioned, and no one will come to its rescue. Humanity will undoubtedly survive. Civilization as we know it will not.
Paradoxically, therefore, those who are accustomed to a simple life without modern conveniences and who win their subsistence locally and directly from the Earth may be better positioned not only to survive the crisis but also to reconstruct their societies along the lines envisioned by Schumacher and Illich.
The Six Nations Confederacy had it all sussed out long before Pocahontas' days. But then Britain, France and America happened. So their very civilized and sustainable world longer exists and is no longer possible. Their ecological life sustaining rich domain has been destroyed.
I hope that cheers you up.
Shouting hopeyim unyo the void again, Julian?
I thought for awhile you were coming over to the dark side like William Rees has lately, but I think you are just more congenitally sunny- minded about humanity.
Earth Citoyens are good-hearted people with collapse awareness, but they fail to have basic sociological awareness.
The corporations own everything, as I seem tediously say all the time, with no pundits willing to face that brute truth. Corporations are predatory ultrasocial powers that organize to protect and promote their interests above all else,
Statistics and warnings about ecocide leading to extinction mean nothing to them.