We seem to be caught between parallel universes. You may have caught a glimpse of the first last week, when GDP was announced to have grown by 3.2% in the first quarter of 2019, a “blockbuster” result that the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC is “absolutely” sustainable in the coming months and years. With unemployment at its lowest levels since 1969, Democrats eyeing the 2020 elections are starting to worry the economy might even be too good, making it more difficult to beat Trump next year.

The other universe made itself known on Monday, with the publication of a new report on global biodiversity from the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service (IPBES). Nature, researchers found, is in its worst shape in human history. As one scientist put it: “We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

The IPBES chair, Sir Robert Watson, urged that it’s “not too late to make a difference” but said it would require “transformative change”.

“By transformative change,” he added, “we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

Preventing runaway catastrophe means throwing the logic of endless accumulation out the window

In one world, the US economy should proceed full speed ahead to gobble up as many resources as possible as soon as possible. In the other, reckless resource use is wrecking the planet. The trouble is that these two universes aren’t separate at all: the world in which GDP growth is valued above all else is the same one making life on Earth increasingly difficult, for humans and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Treating the economy and ecology as separate worlds didn’t happen by accident. “Nature” has for centuries been seen as little more than an input to fuel economic growth, whether through digging up and burning coal or planting gargantuan stretches of monoculture for industrial agriculture. That quest for more inputs led the west’s captains of industry to extract from people as they did from the Earth, whether through brutal, genocidal colonial expansions snapping up gold, rubber, tobacco and more, or by disciplining women to have more children to throw into factories.

The trouble is that we humans are part of nature too, a fact that those more likely to be on the losing end of this unhinged expansion – indigenous communities, in particular – have sounded alarm bells about for generations, pushing for more stringent protections of biodiversity. The logic of extraction, of valuing certain lives more than others, has been a moral horror for as long as it has existed. As this new UN report and our mounting climate crisis each echo, it’s an ecological one too. Preventing runaway catastrophe on either of these interconnected fronts means throwing that logic of endless accumulation out the window, pursuing the kind of transformative reorganization scientists are calling for.

It’s here where the Trump boom offers an unlikely opportunity. However “sustainable” it might be in strictly short-term economic terms, it’s plainly suicidal in the long run. What’s made this boom remarkable, though, is that continued spending and dwindling unemployment haven’t triggered inflation in the way economists might expect. The idea that the economy needs to maintain some “natural” level of unemployment to avoid rising prices doesn’t seem to hold much weight any more, although has been a belief held to by policymakers across the political spectrum. The Trump White House is an odd candidate to show that old, bipartisan neoliberal economic dogmas are bunk, but that’s exactly what it’s (inadvertently) doing.

Those interested in heading off mass extinction should see this as a once-in-a-species opportunity to throw out those old rules altogether. The kinds of societal shifts IPBES outlines won’t come cheaply, and demand a scale and speed of public sector investment that deficit hawks on both sides of the aisle have been allergic to for decades. Trump didn’t bat an eye before pouring $2tn of stimulus into the economy via tax cuts for the wealthy. Why should Democrats hold hopes for a habitable planet hostage to arcane dogmas the GOP never really believed in the first place – and certainly don’t now?

Properly designed, a Green New Deal could go a long way toward righting humanity’s relationship with the non-human nature around us. Beyond decarbonizing our economy, a federal job guarantee could put people to work through a federal job guarantee to restore wetlands and other endangered ecosystems, rewild our surroundings and care for the land, not unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps of the original New Deal. Investments in public transit, housing and leisure could create the conditions for not only a lower-carbon society but a less resource-intensive one, where people have more time to enjoy the outdoors instead of working 60-hour weeks just to pay rent and fill up their gas tanks.

This new burst of activity is likely to grow the economy in the short term – what sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen has called The Last Stimulus – but in the long term it’ll set us up to value real measures of human and ecological wellbeing over arbitrary metrics like GDP.

Critics have smeared the Green New Deal as a colossal waste of money, involving a level of spending sure to crater the economy and pass an unnecessarily cruel financial burden down to future generations. They seem to be confusing it with business as usual.