The ecological crisis can be likened to Rubik's cube, where the globe is the game, the blocks are the countries and each turn of the cube is a national decision, for the most part making the problem harder to solve.
To understand how the ecological crisis turned from a local, to a global problem we need to understand a brief history of civilisation.
Beginning as Tribes typically around 150 people (Dunbar 2010) we had little need for hierarchy, as everyone would do what was needed for the community, and given the extent of the knowledge pertaining to storing of foods, there was little need to hunt or gather in excess as food would quickly spoil or rot.
The knowledge of growing one's own food, rather than gathering what they could from their environment, led to an increase in community size (Bocquet-Appel 2011). Given the maximum amount of social connections that could be maintained, still remains at 150 (Dunbar 2010), hierarchies were needed to ensure social cohesion amongst an increasing population. The introduction of Hierarchies led to social classes, for delegation of duties and responsibilities; those who produced, those who created, those who traded, those who maintained order, and those who ruled (Khan Academy 2017).
These hierarchies eventually co-opted ideals of wealth, rather than mere responsibility, such that those who ruled were also those with the greatest wealth. This rule of wealth and power has been maintained as city states like Athens and Rome became Empires, and as the Empires fell to become Nations, and will continue as Nations begin to fall to make way for Globalisation. Wars are typically not fought because the serfs willed it, but due to the petty quarrels of the rulers and their greed laden desires for more land, for more gold, for more spice, and more recently for oil.
Over time as knowledge increased, with philosophers and scientists exploring Nature through deeper modes of investigation, opportunistic individuals; rulers, aristocrats and nobles found ways to use this knowledge to increase their wealth. These opportunistic individuals created systems and frameworks that allowed them to 'extract' the materials needed from an environment to 'produce' a product or offer a service that would be useful and desirable. These systems evolved into what Steven Bunker refers to as 'Extract Economies' and 'Productive Economies' (Bunker 1988). Where an entire nation and their productive output has been labelled based on either; their abundance of renewable/non-renewable natural resources (extractive) or their ability to produce objects efficiently and inexpensively (productive).
Where typically throughout history, wars would be waged based on the desire to control certain resources or key geographic locations, and slaves would be taken to provide the manpower to produce that which the citizen required for daily life. The world and its new rulers have developed a system that uses economics as a means of bypassing national borders and subverting legal requirements of democracies and communist authorities alike (Gare 2020). Neo-Liberalism, or new freedom, focused on free market systems, reducing tariffs, encouraging trade, and exacerbating the problem of extractive and productive economies under the guise of economies of scale.
The Neo-Liberals and their globalisation process has benefited the Core Regions, the dominant capitalist countries that exploit peripheral countries for labour and raw materials (USA, Europe, United Kingdom). With the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions, which lack the capital and have underdeveloped industry, happy to oblige to the Core Regions demands (Wallerstein 1995), being analogous to a family dog being happy to receive any scraps from their owners plate at dinner time.
Given the success of this Neo-Liberal system, nations now merely operate as the police and law makers for the trans-national corporations. We have begun to see the rise of new institutions, and with these new institutions come new 'global' problems that we are led to believe will unite the world. Giving us more to consume, ensuring that these extractive and productive economies remain reliant and indebted to the system to such an extent that nations no longer have the capacity, nor will to represent their people. The ‘Global Warming Problem’ is this unifying global problem, no country can escape it.
It is now every nations responsibility to reduce their Carbon Dioxide emissions at any cost. For those "Periphery nations" (South East Asian and African nations), they must endure further debt to purchase the wind and solar technology, that was created in the "Semi-periphery nations" (China, Mexico, India), with minerals sourced from their own countries in order to provide 'clean' power to whoever in their nation can afford it. For the sake of the environment we’re told that the world needs to consume an ever increasing amount of resources, countries need to enter into more debt agreements, corporations need unlimited access to every nation's economy, all the productive land, all the resources, as only corporations have the capacity and ability to manage the world's land and resources efficiently and productively for the benefit of the globe.
It should be noted, the ecological crisis is far greater than a Global Warming problem, that the current defined problem solving CO2, is contributing further to the exploitation of land, minerals and resources, creating a by-product of waste and pollution that will have far greater immediate ramifications than the predictive models of the 'scientists' Global Warming Disaster scenarios. The problem is 2 fold, there is the problem shown in the above essay, with the ruling class finding different ways to increase their share of the economic pie, to sell their new inventions, ideas, products and services that play into humanities consumptive behaviours. Then the second part of the problem, we, humanity, allow ourselves to enter into unconscious states of consumption, where we seldom take responsibility for our desires, for our actions, for our spending habits, or conduct the research required to educate ourselves about the devilish corporations selling us our food and drugs. The ecological crisis is like a Rubik's cube, we are being told by the same people who have been on the supply side of the problem, that they have the answer, if only we consume more. Whereas we, humanity, have an opportunity to solve the problem ourselves, by taking greater responsibility over our consumption.
Gare, A 2020, ‘After Neoliberalism: From Eco-Marxism to Ecological Civilization, Part 1’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, pp. 1–18.
Social, political, and environmental characteristics of early civilizations 2017, Social, political, and environmental characteristics of early civilizations, Khan Academy.
Wallerstein, I 1995, ‘The Modern World-System and Evolution’, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 512–522.
Arran Gare 2018, The philosophical foundations of ecological civilization : a manifesto for the future, Routledge, London ; New York, N.Y.