OVER THE MONTHS THAT I have been finishing this book the COVID-19 pandemic has killed two million people and rav- aged the world’s economies. It has also demonstrated the importance of good governance. Western countries—some with elected leaders scornful of administrative expertise—quickly became the center of the global pandemic, while East Asia’s states have been far more successful in quashing it. This is not a coincidence. East Asia’s political systems draw on a shared tradition that emphasizes centralized bureaucratic governance and have not been strongly influenced by the liberal “phobia of the state.” The different results provide us with a useful lesson for the future, because the pandemic is unfortunately a relatively minor problem compared to the potential consequences of the human impact on the climate and the biosphere. While strong states are not guaranteed to be able to solve our problems, weakened ones are certainly incapable of solving them. This book has shown that states have played important roles in developing and maintaining the complex societies that have created our environmental problems, but there should be no doubt that they are also essential for making a transition toward more sustainable ones.1
Agrarian states ran on the energy provided by photosynthesis, so they had a fundamental incentive to replace biodiverse natural ecosystems with agricultural ones. This has also been true of industrial states. Fossil and nuclear power have vastly increased the energy available to us, but photosynthesis still feeds us and provides us with most of our raw materials. Just as agrarian states had a fundamental drive to expand agriculture, industrial states encourage every productive activity that they can tax, from farming to fracking. Environmentalists often lament that the world’s leaders lack the will, or the knowledge, to solve environmental problems. But it is a mistake to blame individuals: the problem is structural. The economic activities that lie at the heart of our environmental problems are the very basis of political power. Our planet’s resources are finite, but economic growth is based on increased resource use. At some point we must reduce, or at least stabilize, economic production. But reducing production means reduced income for the state. And who would choose a leader who promised to reduce production? Neither the ruling classes nor the voting masses.
The lesson of China’s Warring States period, and many other times of intense inter-state competition, is that the government that most successfully mobilizes resources has an advantage over its rivals. Geopolitics are always environmental politics. While states without rivals can afford to emphasize stability rather than growth, those with competitors must prioritize economic growth over long-term sustainability because economic power can be converted to military power. The current division of the world into armed rival states is therefore a major impediment to building sustainable economies. Strengthening global institutions that reduce competition between states is a necessary step toward building political systems that use resources sustainably.2
The most seductive environmental fantasy is that technological innovation will one day allow our economies to grow without using more resources, a fiction encapsulated by the slogan “sustainable development.” This is impossible. Economic growth always entails increased resource use. And since never-ending growth seems to be a core feature of capitalism, our current system, it stands to reason that capitalism itself is fundamentally unsustainable. But the history of twentieth-century communism makes clear that noncapitalist systems can be equally dedicated to growth, even if they are not as good at achieving it. This is not surprising since, as this book has shown, all states have incentives to increase productivity. Nonetheless, American-led capitalism arguably defeated Soviet-style communism precisely because it was more effective at mobilizing resources. Capitalism is a highly innovative system. Not only does it constantly improve its techniques for exploiting the earth’s people and resources; it also tends toward increasingly efficient resource use, though it usually makes up for increased efficiencies through growth in total production. A centrally planned economy could easily exploit resources more sustainably than capitalism by simply not allowing anyone to accumulate far more than they need (no more private yachts). But it could never outcompete capitalist states in economic productivity and thus could not afford to rival them militarily. This is a main reason China’s Communist Party chose to turn toward capitalism. Because of this logic, it is hard to imagine one state building a sustainable system while its rivals did not. International cooperation is required.3
The tragedy of international politics is that it incentivizes states to increase productivity for increased military power. This problem is closely related to the question of who wields political power within states. History books are full of thuggish men who seem to lust for power for its own sake, not because they are burning to do administrative work. These kinds of leaders are still with us. Humans have utterly failed to build political systems that reliably place competent and responsible people in positions of power. Building a sustainable system would require finding ways of ensuring that those in high office have demonstrated administrative skills. It must also limit the ability of the rich and powerful to use the political order to enrich themselves, which would work only by placing limits on the private accumulation of wealth. Male dominance may also be a core part of the problem because, as suggested in chapter 1, it is closely related to militarism. Unfortunately, it is quite possible that humans are incapable of building the global feminist ecotopia that I am describing, so we should consider what our future will look like if we fail to improve our political systems.
Catastrophism is so common in environmental discourse that one might be forgiven for believing that everyone will suddenly die when the world’s average temperature increases by two degrees Celsius. But only nuclear war could kill us all at once. The most likely future of human societies on earth is suggested by China’s environmental history, which Mark Elvin described as “three thousand years of unsustainable growth.” People in China once lived at relatively low densities in diverse ecosystems that allowed them to eat healthy diets and forage for wild resources if their crops failed. Over time, the growth of agricultural populations turned much of the landscape into farms, leaving fewer opportunities for foraging. This forced people to work harder to stay alive and reduced the quality of their diets. It also left them vulnerable to starvation since these simplified agricultural ecosystems left little else to eat in times of droughts, pests, and floods. Nonetheless, people are resourceful. They repeatedly adapted to degraded environments and became accustomed to living in conditions that their ancestors would have found unbearable. This cycle of repeated adaptation to degradation is already happening in many other parts of the world and represents a very plausible future for humans on earth. But it should be emphasized that we are not all in this together. Our planet will always have places that are perfectly hospitable to humans, and up to now the rich and powerful have tended to escape the effects of environmental destruction. Business as usual will not benefit the majority of the human population, but elites may well be right to suppose that they will not have to suffer the consequences.4
The question, then, is not about saving the planet or about saving our species but rather about whether humans are capable of creating political systems that can avert such a miserable future. Ideally, such systems would distribute resources equitably and leave significant areas of the earth for natural ecosystems. Minimally they would prevent our societies from destroying the biological and climatic systems that our societies depend on. I cannot offer a clear picture of how we can build such systems. But a historical look at how humans transform their environments makes clear that our environmental problems are also political problems and that any hope of solving them requires transforming our political systems. Luckily, this is something that younger generations seem to appreciate, so there is hope for the future.