But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.ĭeforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado: ‘If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse.’ Photograph: Reuters It can absorb stress up to a certain point. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the planet’s webs of life. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that it isn’t happening. When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. It’s that we always put our survival first.
T here is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence.
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