Articles

We must confront two stark realities about the end of our era. First, the collapse of our industrial civilization is already underway, manifesting as a slow, agonizing process of structural decay, economic exhaustion, and ecological overshoot. Second, this descent is terminal. We have permanently exhausted the physical prerequisites for any future technological reboot.

Olivier De Schutter says new economic agenda needed to tackle crises of rising inequality and ecological collapse

The UK has announced much harsher rules for asylum seekers including the prospect of more deportations for those whose applications fail. The US is trebling the size of its deportation force. The EU is doubling its border budgets. And in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people might be displaced by ecological changes.

Le 25 mai 1970, un mois à peine après le premier Jour de la Terre qui vit des millions d’Américains manifester pour la défense de l’environnement, le New York Times évoquait déjà l’hypothèse d’un ecological backlash, d’un retour de bâton contre l’écologie. La menace n’était pas prise au sérieux. La vague environnementaliste semblait portée par la démocratie américaine elle‑même.

Climate change is driving rising global temperatures, ecological degradation, and widespread human suffering. Yet, as a collective, humanity has failed to implement sufficient changes to mitigate these threats. This paper introduces the concept of “global narcissism” as a speculative lens to analyze the psychological barriers to climate action. By examining different levels of narcissism and their manifestations in human responses to climate change, this framework highlights key obstacles to meaningful action. While humanity is diverse, and lived experiences vary greatly, this perspective offers a way to discuss patterns of response and resistance. A central challenge lies in humanity’s difficulty in recognizing its symbiotic relationship with the non-human world. Through the metaphor of “global narcissism” this paper explores how humanity’s response to ecological crisis mirrors narcissistic defense mechanisms and suggests a collapse is taking place. This framework provides insights into how psychological int

Climate change will set the parameters of our post-Princeton lives. The fires that devastated the Palisades earlier this month were, as our nation’s exasperated and exhausted climate scientists continue to remind us, only harbingers of the floods, tornados, and heatwaves to come. Global warming is surpassing the climate models that scientists built in the 2010s and early 2020s that already forecasted a borderline-apocalyptic future. Undoubtedly, by the time current Princeton students reach middle age, they will have witnessed a slew of societal structures sag — or collapse entirely — under the weight of extreme weather events and ever-worsening ecological decline.

In the lead-up to COP29, Fausto Corvino emphasized the need for a paradigm shift within the international climate negotiations to ensure that the global rich bear a greater responsibility for climate finance. In this follow-up article, he explains why COP29 has failed in its historic mission to lay the foundations for a rapid and equitable global transition to low-carbon energy....

Catastrophic climate change and the collapse of human societies By Josep Peñuelas, Sandra Nogué National Science Review, Volume 10, Issue 6, June 2023 The scientific community has focused the agend…

In the past two years Les Soulèvements de la Terre, a network of ecological activists and groups, has used direct confrontations with polluters and developers to threaten industrial agriculture’s monopoly on the French countryside.

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more

Around the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded "regime shifts" like these in more than 20 different types of ecosystem where tipping points have been passed. Around the world, more than 20% of ecosystems are in danger of shifting or collapsing into something different.

We ran computer programs that simulate ecosystems 70,000 times and the results are very worrying.

Amazon rainforest and other ecosystems could collapse ‘very soon’, researchers warn

Over the past week, police have taken brutal steps to suppress ecological movements in Europe and the United States. In Germany, police evicted and destroyed the long-occupied village of Lützerath in a massive operation in order to expand an ecologically devastating open pit coal mine.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about this week’s summit on biodiversity, where delegates will consider ambitious new conservation targets—even though the old ones have yet to be achieved.

It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

Like humanity, wildlife knows no boundaries. Stopping people moving also carves up habitats, driving species to extinction

The UK is one of the world's most nature-depleted countries - in the bottom 10% globally and last among the G7 group of nations, new data shows. It has an average of about half its biodiversity left, far below the global average of 75%, a study has found.

Campaign group Extinction Rebellion has begun what it describes as two weeks of climate protests in London. It says its "Impossible Rebellion" will "target the root cause of the climate and ecological crisis".

The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.