[Editors Note: While GST finds much to agree with in this article, we disagree with the author's assertion that "curbing growth within environmental limits is central to the idea of a Green New Deal." On the contrary, the Green New Deals of the US Congress and the Green Party would increase growth.]

It may seem nonsense that humans are unable to make important changes to the system they have built. But just how free are we? Rather than being masters of our own destiny, we may be very constrained in how we can act.

If you jump in your car to get to a particular destination, you can’t travel in a straight line “as the crow flies”. You will use roads that in some instances are older than your car, you, or even your nation. A significant fraction of human effort and endeavour is devoted to maintaining this fabric of the technosphere: fixing roads, railways, and buildings, for example.

The appetite is global. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use.

But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.

Kollibri makes a convincing argument against farming and agriculture (and for wildtending). Kollibri effectively debunks myths about what he calls gatherer-hunters (he explains the reason for the reversal of the name). He points to not only their technical knowledge of plants, but argues that the all-knowing Western subject simply cannot grasp the feeling of what it was like to live in that time—either mentally or materially. A remarkably humble Western scholar Kollibri must be! He also brings into question whether our lives now—which have above all just expanded the field of work and the distancing from nature—really make us happier.

Eighty percent of U.S. antibiotics are used to promote livestock and poultry growth and protect the animals from the bacterial consequences of the manure-laden environments in which they are grown. That’s 34 million pounds a year of antibiotics as of 2015.

Fungicide and pesticide production at Sapec Crop Protection, Portugal

The agricultural applications help generate drug resistance across multiple human bacterial infections, killing 23,000-100,000 Americans a year and, with an increasing amount of antibiotics applied abroad, 700,000 people worldwide.

World Wars I and II destroyed cities in huge urban areas, yet many of these cities were rebuilt within 20 years. The difference between these catastrophes is due to the fact that while the environmental landscape in cities destroyed by conventional warfare stayed relatively healthy, cities which were impacted by nuclear radiation will remain partly or completely uninhabitable for centuries. Within the “controlled” environment of a nuclear plant facility, spent fuel rods should be kept in a safe place for 100,000 years, and the 250,000 tons of radioactive waste produced worldwide will remain dangerous to all life for thousands of years. I have never thought of such a long time-span which could well extend beyond humanity’s existence on Earth.  This new discovery is what I and many of my readers share. 

More than half of imported shrimp is “farmed”—grown in huge industrial tanks or shallow, manmade ponds that can stretch for acres. At least 150 shrimp can be crowded into a single square meter, where they’re fed commercial pellets, sometimes laced with antibiotics to ward off disease. What isn’t eaten can sink to the bottom and rot, creating a putrid soup of feed and fecal matter.