Ecological Collapse, COVID-19 and the Death of Consumer Capitalism

Fiddling while Rome burned is an often overused phrase. In Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero and his nobles host a lavish masquerade while the world around them disintegrates. "It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade." A virus was ravaging the land yet, in Poe's tale, the prince was sagacious and grand, utterly confident in his ability to ward off the Red Death. He hid away in a palace with all of his nobility while the society around him died. Like Prospero, we have not sat idly by during the destruction of our world but celebrated it. The world's ecosystems, forests, and climate have been collapsing around us for decades, and yet we continue as if nothing has happened.

A profound shift has occurred both in society and what Jungian collective unconscious. Since the end of the Second World War, we have built a vast economic engine designed to blunt the most brutal aspects of life. For the past 80 years, we have lived in a collective unreality in which resource constraints, ecological constraints, and endemic diseases have receded to the all-powerful and ever-advancing institution of globalized consumer capitalism. Many imagined this engine could continue forever, a juggernaut unimpeded by reality or moral constraint. COVID-19 has shattered our collective illusion and shown in the most intimate way possible just how vulnerable we still are.

In a matter of weeks, a large percentage of the world's economic engine has completely shut down. Vast swaths of the economy are shuttered from Washington D.C. to Mumbai. While the only force preventing the U.S. stock market from continuing its unprecedented free fall is 6 trillion dollars being pumped into the United States economy by the Federal Reserve and Federal Government. These emergency measures may work; they may not, but that is entirely beside the point. We have now experienced a great cataclysm, a paradigm shift that will birth a new reality. In the same way, we divide the world into Pre-9/11 and Post-9/11; we will also divide the world into Pre-COVID and Post-COVID.

Consumer Capitalism is built on the supposition that infinite growth is possible and desirable. Think about society for a moment. Every year we expect the stock market to go up, investment to increase, and more resources to be extracted and sold as consumer goods. At what point did we collectively decide that this was not only possible but a good idea? At what point did we buy into the mania that you build an infinite economic engine on a finite planet? There is only so much oil that can be extracted, so many minerals that can be mined and so much plastic that can be made. But more than that, what have sacrificed in the process?

You don't need to be a scientist to witness the collapse. How many Monarch butterflies have you seen recently? How many forests and groves have you seen cut down and turned into housing developments or parking lots? We know statistically that ecosystems around the world are collapsing. The Monarch Butterfly population has collapsed by over half in 12 months. The bumblebee population doesn't seem to far behind. Brazil has elected a man who has promised to tear down ever-larger portions of the largest rainforest in the world while the U.S. continues to cut environmental regulations at a rapid pace, even during a pandemic. The UN estimates that 150 species go extinct every 24 hours. Like Prospero, we are partying while the world around us disintegrates, willfully ignorant of the suffering around us.

The Earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate, and before COVID-19, emissions continued to increase at an annual rate and likely will again after. Scientists believe it is likely that we will see 1.5 Celsius of warming by 2050 with another 1 to 2 celsius in the half-century following. This amount alone would be catastrophic since pre-industrial times the Earth has warmed by roughly 1C. We can already see the effects, in the megadrought that is affecting the Western United States, in the melting of the polar ice caps and in the Australian bushfires. Unlike COVID-19, Climate Change cannot be vaccinated against and will continue to increase in severity and impact year after year.

Unfortunately, these estimates fail to account for positive feedback loops, because scientists simply have no idea when we might reach these tipping points or how much they might impact climate. Billions of tuns of Frozen Methane (A greenhouse gas 32 times more potent than C02) sit frozen in the Siberian tundra and arctic.) As the Earth warms, these deposits melt, releasing vast amounts of Greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere. Hitting a tipping point carries the risk that we could see a dramatic change within years, not decades, which could cause further unforeseeable changes in the world's climate and ecosystems.

Arthur Schopenhauer coined the term hedonic treadmill, claiming that all people are continually acting to make themselves happy while never attaining it. I would say we are heading for a hedonic cliff, consuming more each year at the cost of both our survival and other life on Earth, chasing happiness that does not exist. In 1990 the U.S. spent 3.6 trillion dollars on personal consumption; in 2019, that number was 14.68 Trillion. Yet the satisfaction of the U.S. population is significantly down from 1990. In modern America it is anathema to suggest, but what if more money, more goods, and more spending don't improve our lives. What if the happiness of our population depends far more on experiencing the wonder of nature and having time for community, rather than buying a new car and a new watch.

We are facing a series of cascading crises. Ecosystem collapse, runaway climate change, and resource depletion each carry with them the seeds of the demise of our economic system and perhaps our species. COVID-19 has shown us that our system is not immune to disruption and is far more fragile than many would have imagined. We have become hubristic in our folly, convinced that we can attain infinite growth on a finite planet. At some point, we will have a collective moment of reckoning. At the very least, at the moment of his death, Prince Prospero could say he enjoyed his party.

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all "