No Population Can Survive A Global Economy

Anybody not neck-deep in denail must by now understand that the global economy is utterly incompatible with life. . . . But why is that the case? . . . A global economy effectively creates infinite demand. . . . That's a problem becasue no natural community --not even one as fecund as the salmon used to be, or passenger pigeons, or cod, and so on ad absurdium -- can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back.

All natural cmmunities survive and thrive on reciprocity and cycles: salmon give to forests who give to salmon who give to oceans who give to salmon. A global economy is extractive. It doesn't give back, but follows the pattern of the machines that characterize it, converting raw materials to power. Combine an extractive (machine) economy with infinite demand and you've got the death of pretty much everything it touches.

Duh. I first gained this understanding from an email someone sent me. She lives in Canada and wrote that until a few years previous her valley had been full of grizzly and black bears. She used to see maybe a dozen bears on a average spring, summer, or fall day. Now she was lucky to see one a week, and it was usually the same bear. The difference, she said, was that hunters had discovered the Chinese market for bear gall bladders. The market would consume as many gll bladders as the hunters could take. So they took them all.

It was immediately clear to me that the local human community could have killed basically as many bears as they wanted for gall bladders, because I'm sure the market is pretty small there. And besides if they kill all the brears how will they get more gall bladders tomorrow? But as soon as you open up the market to the entier world, not only do you lose the face ot face feedback of seeing your future supplies dwindle on the altar of today's profits, but the demand for something even as esoterica as gall bladders becomes more or less infinite. No population can support that.

This is exactly what happened to great auks, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, cold, salmon, sperm whatles, right whales, blue whales, humpbakc whales, roughy, sharks, white pine, redwoo. Everything. No population can support infinite demand. No population can survive a global economy. The problem is inherent, not soluble by any amount of tinkering.

~Derrick Jensen Endgame I: The Problem of Civilization

I agree with pretty much everything that Jensen says here. I'll note that many "natural communities" were willing to hunt the plants and/or animals upon which they depended into extinctions, see, e.g., trees on Easter Island. (Yes, there was a small amount of trade, but certainly not a global economy.) And, I'm a wee bit less pesimistic than Jenses that the problem is completely insoluble. IF, and it's a huge if for which there's little empirical evidence, but if humans could control their population on a global level, and if, and it's a huge if for which there's also little empirical evidence, we had strict rules in place concerning, for example, the number of bears that could be killed in given season, I think that global trade could continue. But given the situation as it exists today, Jensen's right. No population -- including the human population -- can survive a global economy.