We Live In an Ecosystem
Earth is a beautiful accident, by far the most unlikely and amazing thing in the known universe, and it is our life support system. In 2009, a group of scientists put together a framework to categorize and quantitatively analyze the various planetary ecological boundaries required for humans to live comfortably on this planet, ultimately coming up with nine boundary categories (see below).
The novel entities category refers to human-created substances introduced into the environment, like pesticides, industrial chemicals, and plastics. A new study has taken up the task of quantifying this boundary for the first time and, unsurprisingly, concluded that it is being seriously exceeded. From the lowest depths of the ocean to the highest mountain peaks and almost everywhere in between, Earth is now awash in various forms of these novel entities—and their production is only set to accelerate.
As you can see, this is not the only planetary boundary in dangerous territory right now. The others are land-system change (e.g., deforestation), biogeochemical flows (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), biosphere integrity (i.e., biodiversity), and climate change. Biosphere integrity and climate change are considered the two core planetary boundaries because of their fundamental importance. While this quantitative framework has limitations and is not the only way to think about the various ecological crises we face, it is useful for highlighting the severity and breadth of the problems.
Of these nine boundaries, climate change gets by far the most attention, which is understandable because it is a catastrophic and urgent threat to humanity and most life on this planet (and it is already causing significant harm to marginalized communities around the world). Climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and degrading ecological carbon sinks like forests. Hence, there is an increasing focus on decarbonizing the world’s economies in order to mitigate this crisis.
However, a narrow focus on decarbonization allows for serious blind spots, mistakes, and exploitation by profit-seeking entities. For example, the other core planetary boundary, biosphere integrity, is in serious crisis with rapidly rising extinction rates and rapidly declining biodiversity but does not get nearly as much attention. Reducing environmental harm entirely to carbon emissions not only facilitates the persistence of non-climate ecological crises, degradation, and injustice, it actually makes stopping the climate crisis more difficult.
Take electric cars, which are arguably the centerpiece of US climate action at this point. Replacing all of the over 200 million gasoline-powered cars in the US with electric ones powered by a renewable energy grid would eliminate the serious problem of tailpipe emissions—both carbon and harmful particulates—and slash urban noise pollution, but dangerous pollution from tires and brakes would remain unchanged. Powering those cars would still require significant energy and materials for solar panels, wind turbines, etc. that could be used for other things. And producing (and regularly replacing) that many electric cars has serious energy and material requirements (aluminum, lithium, plastic, glass, etc.), particularly if replicating the monstrous size of modern US cars and particularly as we work towards global justice where everyone has access to similar goods and services.
Additionally, in order for a car to be useful it requires infrastructure like roads and parking lots. Maintaining a car-centric society, even an electric one, has real costs in energy and materials for that infrastructure but also in making cities more hostile to humans (and other animals) in the form of injuries and deaths along with separating and spreading out where we live, work, play, and congregate. Personal cars are an inefficient means of regular transportation on a societal level that also fundamentally impede more efficient and human-centric forms of transportation—public transit, walking, and cycling.
This does not mean electric cars are bad or unnecessary; it means that incentivizing personal electric car ownership and entrenching car-centric urban planning has significant costs and should not form the basis of environmental policy. Neither should carbon offsets, carbon markets, net zero emissions pledges, or carbon neutral militaries.
Carbon reductionism can pave the way for bad policy, but I think it also makes it more difficult to build the movements that can force good policy into being. Carbon emissions are kind of abstract, and their effects on the climate are delayed and dispersed. Immediate and acute sources of harm from pollution and environmental degradation are more tangible and, as frontline environmental justice struggles demonstrate, that type of harm can be galvanizing. The air pollution that comes along with carbon emissions kills over 10 million people per year and afflicts countless others with debilitating damage to their brains, hearts, or lungs. Polluted drinking water, contaminated soil, workplace exposure to hazardous chemicals and pesticides, toxic algal blooms, microplastics in our bodies, and many more forms of ecological degradation cause daily harm to human and nonhuman nature alike. Nobody wants to be poisoned, and that is an opening that can create ecological interests in building a working class for itself.
Moreover, carbon reductionism puts the focus on how carbon emissions occur rather than why, which means the root causes remain unaddressed. Political ecological analysis can show us the systems, structures, and forces underlying why a section of rainforest in Indigenous territory is burned, why a peasant farmer is dispossessed of their land, why a wetland is drained and paved over, or why fossil fuels are extracted and burned. The vastly unequal power relations that produce exploitation and environmental degradation are not natural or inevitable, and avoiding confrontation with them will be ineffective in stopping the climate crisis and will further exacerbate the other planetary boundaries.
The way our society is structured is unjust and unsustainable in ways that are totalizing and dire. Carbon reductionism protects the powerful and obscures the scale and scope of the damage being done; there is no such thing as apolitical carbon emissions divorced from any larger systems of exploitation or other ecological crises. We need to operate with a holistic, socio-ecological understanding of the world in order to understand how and why climate and environmental degradation occurs and to produce just and sustainable relationships with each other and the rest of nature. All of our planetary crises and all of our struggles against various forms of injustice are fundamentally, inescapably intertwined.