Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Over a decade of research on global warming, ecosystem degradation, international agreements, and growing institutional disorder forced this author to certain difficult conclusions. First, a New Great Transformation is ending the industrial era, and is far more complex than the industrial revolution Karl Polanyi described as The Great Transformation. Second, societal collapse is inevitable unless we “shrink the technosphere,” to constrain climate chaos and ecological collapse. Third, business-as-usual framed “sustainable development” goals are unattainable. The global neoliberal corporate-growth economy is the problem. The New Great Transformation propels humanity into an increasingly unstable Anthropocene. Policy discourse holds to endless economic growth as human progress. Yet globalized growth drives species extinction, climate chaos, and ecological destruction, inevitably leading to human depopulation and societal collapse. Conventional “climate policy” sets aspirational limits to Earth heating, without considering how to achieve rapid and extreme carbon-emissions reductions. Why? Because that goal is impossible within the global industrial-consumer political economy. This existential predicament requires an entirely new political-economic regime. Current national climate policies and international agreements fail sociologically. They ignore the hard question of how to reduce carbon emissions severely without causing economic collapse. Only unprecedented ecologically sustainable societal reorganization can restore territories humans occupy and befoul. Such comprehensive societal transformation requires a new form of “creative destruction.” Given failures of national and international vision, only globally networked local-regional movements can transform communities for ecosystem restoration. Creative transdisciplinary-oriented indigenous and local-regional socio-political movements can reorganize communities, deploying appropriate technologies to restore ecosystems to form ecologically sustainable economies.