We Need to Change the Course of Human History This Decade — Or Else
Our Challenge This Century is Giving Back the Planet We Stole
umair haque
Dec 19 

There’s a question that needs to be asked in the 21st century, and you’re not going to like it. It goes like this. Who does the world belong to?

The answers — there are three — go like this.

Answer one. The world’s richest 2000 people have more wealth than 50% of humanity combined. Don’t yawn, I know too many tend not to care about things like this, but that’s only a measure of ignorance.

Answer two. The world is 20% white, and 80% everything else, and its rich countries are all…in the 20%. The world’s poor are all not white, while the world’s rich are almost entirely white. Does that sting a bit? It should.

Answer three. Human beings are annihilating life on planet earth with breathtaking speed. We’re in the middle of the first anthropogenic mass extinction — the first man-made great annihilation.

So. Who does the world belong to?

Wait — first, let me discuss why the question matters.

You can see that as things stand, the way they’re going, the poor excuse for a civilization we call one probably isn’t going to make it. Something as small as a minor-league pandemic was enough to bring our way of life to its knees — and reduce the world’s most powerful countries, like America, to catastrophe and mass death.

Covid was just a tiny taste of what’s to come. We face three to five solid decades of catastrophe heading our way now. The 2030s will be the decadeof the Climate Catastrophe, as megafires and megafloods and megatyphoons become the new normal. Think that’s not a big deal? Then imagine what happens to economies and financial systems when entire states and regions become unlivable — like much of California already is. Imagine what happens to societies as the costs of migration and insurance swamp any new investment in schools or hospitals or retirement. Think of how Covid’s economic fallout — and multiply it by orders of magnitude.

The 2040s will be the decade of the Great Annihilation — when mass extinction begins to hit home. Think that’s not a big deal, either? Good luck going to the store and buying fresh food like you do all the time without a second thought — when the planet’s beginning to twist in pain. This harvest will fail, that species will die, this population will be finished. Prices will go through the roof, financial crashes will ensue, unemployment will prevail and shortages and rationing will be everyday events of necessity. Think of the economic damage that will do — Americans, for example, already die in debt. What happens when prices for basics skyrocket even higher? Even more poverty does, which destabilizes societies, and breeds fascisms and authoritarianisms all over again.

The 2050s will be the decade of the Long Goodbye. That’s when the planet’s ecologies will finally begin to keel over, dying for good. We humans, we walking apes, think we’re very very smart. We know how to build bridges and microprocessors. So what? Do you know how to build a rainforest? An ocean? A prairie? I didn’t think so. Do you know how to resuscitate a dead species on a dying ember of a gasping planet? Nobody does. We are destroying things far, far beyond our capacity to create.

As the Long Goodbye proceeds, our civilization’s systems will finish failing. Fresh air. Drinkable water. Basic medicine. Our societies will no longer be able to produce these things. At least not enough of them to go around. Money will destabilize as a result, and depressions will erupt. Only they will be permanent depressions — because the planet’s ecologies aren’t coming back, and so neither is the lifestyle of false prosperity we take for granted now.

And as our civilization’s systems fail, so will our societies. What happens when people can’t get the basics of life anymore? Bang. Social collapse does. Societies turn on each other and destroy each other — or destroy themselves from inside out.

Air, water, medicine, energy. Who makes all these things? We don’t. We think we do, but…we don’t.

Nature does. “Nature,” of course, is an abstraction. For a set of phenomena so complex they remain well beyond our reach. Who produces our air? The trees do. But who produces the soil the trees grow in? The light they utilize? Who produces our water? The rivers do. But the fish clean the water in the rivers. Who sustains the fish? You see how quickly the complexity of it spirals out of our ability to control or even comprehend.

We don’t produce any of the things that we depend on as a civilization and as human beings do. A set of complex systems we call ecologies do. But do we understand that?

So. What does have to do with who owns the planet? Everything.

The reason this is an age of such vivid, brutal, stupid, self-destructive instability — witness Trumpism, Brexit, and so forth — is that the rich are hoarding all the resources. In America, for example, the average person dies in debt — debt owned by a tiny, tiny number of ultra-rich.

But that pattern is a kind of fractal — it goes all the way down. The poor countries of the world are indebted to rich ones, so they never really outgrow their poverty, and that pattern reflects centuries of enslavement and racial hatred and domination of one kind of human by another — remember how the world is 80% poor and not white, and 20% rich and white.

And human beings as a whole treat the planet like they “own” it. That is the root of this problem.

Who owns the world? The fact is that if we want our civilization to survive, radical and transformational changes need to be made. Right about now, there are three answers: the world’s ultra-rich own it. The world’s white people own it. And human beings own it.

None of those answers is good enough for our civilization to endure. They are all different forms of the same old pattern of resource hoarding, of exploitation, of abusiveness. The very behaviors that now threaten the survival of our civilization with decades of massive existential threats.

Who should own the world? Well, the answer — to any sane or thinking person — should go something like this. The fish should own the rivers. The trees should own the forests. The animals should own the prairies and plains.

Why? Because they live there. And if they don’t keep on living there, we die.

That might all sound elementary — or idealistic. It is. But let’s see how deep the changes we’d need to make would go to really make all that a reality.

If we were to say, for example, that the fish and marine life owned the oceans, or the animals owned the prairies, or the polar life owned the tundra, what would change? Everything would have to. They’d have to be recognized as persons — nobody else, after all, can “own” anything. They’d have the rights then that persons do — the foremost of which would be voting.

So all that life would have a seat in our democracy. How would animals “vote” — or rivers, reefs, and oceans? The answer’s very simple: we know what they’d vote for if they could. For their self-preservation — not destruction. Our parliaments and houses would have Speakers for the Oceans, Animals, Insects, Forests. Maybe even a Speaker for the Earth.

What would they ask for? They’d ask for what the rest of us do. Not just abstractions like dignity and freedom — but the things which make it real and concrete. That means money. They do all the work of making our basics, and we don’t recognize it or take it for granted. That’s a form of enslavement. We’d have to pay them. And while they couldn’t spend the money at some dumb mall, they could use it to preserve their own habitats, to live well, too.

They’d also probably ask for freedom. The right to determine their destinies — instead of being yoked to ours. We give nature certain rights, but that’s all. We don’t give it true freedom. We don’t say that you are equal to us, and you can live here too, the way that is right and true and natural for you. We don’t, for example, say that the oceans are for the fish, the forests for the trees, and so forth. They are just blank spaces we go and enjoy ourselves, maybe.

These places don’t belong to us.

I’ve put all the above to you in a very Western way — spoken of notions like “ownership” and “money” and “capital.” But really I’m talking about an ancient set of ideas. This world does not belong to us. I don’t mean that in some kind of religious devotional way. I mean it in a simple, humble, grounded way. Every indigenous culture has long understood this and celebrated it. The idea of “ownership” is itself a Western fallacy. You can own jeans, maybe, a home. But a world? The beings on it? Enough money to control all of it? With violence and terror — which is what we do to each other and every living thing on this planet? That, my friends, is the fatal flaw in our civilization. It is why everything is falling apart now.

Our idea of ownership is badly, badly mistaken. A tiny number of billionaires effectively own the entire world — but they should not. A tiny number of countries own the rest of the world — but they shouldn’t. That is all because human beings think they are the only ones who can own anything at all — and that is where the mistake begins, because the most predatory and abusive and violent rise to the top of such a system of thought, society, politics, the ones willing to do the most harm to dominate the rest.

We don’t own the world. Who owns the world? Nobody does, and everybody does. The fish own the rivers and oceans. The animals own the plains and prairies. The trees own the soil and the forests. Every living thing deserves its own place, habitat, space. It deserves to live in freedom and life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just like we hope to.

All this leads me to a certain conclusion, which you will probably find difficult. Maybe even if you are American, you will get angry with me for it.

We stole the world, my friends. In three ways. Those who are in rich countries stole from poor ones, and from those who were here before us in ours. All of us who are human beings stole the world from the rest of life on it. And those of who are part of systems which help a tiny number grow even richer and wealthier, who already have far, far too much have to begin questioning our role in them, too — what’s the point, really, of such things anymore, except to fuel accelerating levels of self-destruction?

We have to give back the world that we stole.

That is what the 21st century must be about. Finding ways to give the world back. To the animals, insects, forests, rivers, trees, reefs. Giving every living being on this planet freedom, income, dignity, personhood, and a place to live their lives out with all those — whether it’s you or me or a tiny baby animal. All of them.

Because if they can’t live here, we can’t either. This planet, this century is about all of us, in that noble and beautiful and difficult and tragic way. We will learn how fragile and evanescent this thing called life is — not just yours or mine, but from the tiniest to the tallest.

How far do we have to go? Half of our own species lives without the very things we have to give back to all of life and the whole planet — an income, freedom, dignity. They live without, for example, decent water, food, sanitation, not to mention democracy.

Half of our own species lives like “animals.” And animals live much worse than that. The things beneath even animals, to us? Soil, water, air? It doesn’t register at all. Is it any wonder we’re running out of it? They make it. We don’t. We abuse it. We abuse them. We don’t own any of it. Half of our own species is still exploited and abused by a tiny number at the very top of the other half. We have to give back the world we stole.

That is how far we have to go. The very first time in history that what we call a “civilization” really will be such a thing will be the very first day that we begin to really live all that. That we are a group of persons who regard one another with true equality. Who don’t claim to own each other anymore. Where the greediest and most selfish and most violent and brutal don’t own the most — but each owns themselves, and enough for a decent, gentle, peaceful, long life.

The idea that we are here to hoard the world’s resources — “own” them — must now come to an end. All that has done is concentrate the world’s resources in the hands of its most violent and greedy and stupid — Trumps and oligarchs and hedge-fund “managers” and tycoons and swindlers and so forth.

They don’t deserve it. That system doesn’t work. We all know that.

What we don’t know, what we don’t consider, often enough, is that the whole idea doesn’t work. You can’t steal a whole world — and then expect anything but the most stupid and brutal and violent to claim most of it, to hoard as much of it as they can for themselves, while everyone and everything else begins to wither and starve.

That is just what has happened to us.

Our challenge in the 21st century is giving back the world we stole. Until then, what we call civilization is really just a fiction — and it will go on dying, faster and faster, in a kind of terrible retribution for all it has killed, stolen, taken, and called its “own.”

Umair
December 2021