Earth cannot sustain current levels of human production.

(Peter D. Burdon is Associate Professor at Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide, Australia. James Martel is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, USA. “THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LAW AND THE ANTHROPOCENE.” Routledge. 2023)//PWD

Humans are currently expanding our ecological niche with extraordinary efectivity, out-competing all other charismatic life for access to metabolic resources. And it’s going terribly.The current global warming of 1.2˚C above pre-industrial levels already produces catastrophes the world over, catastrophes that will be manyfold worse within a short space of time. Even in rich countries! As an exceptional late 2021 Guardian article has it,“The Climate Disaster Is Here” and though we are “tumbling down a painful, worsening rocky slope rather than about to suddenly hit a sheer clif edge … the world’s governments are currently failing to avert a grim fate” (Milman,Witherspoon, Liu, and Chang 2021). Meanwhile,a leaked early draft of IPCC working group III’s 6th assessment report explained in matter-of-fact tones:“Global emissions in 2030 as projected on a continuation of current policies exceed current national pledges” (Leaked 2021, 11–24).8 In other words, most of our public narratives about global heating – which are structured as though national pledges were on track to being achieved – are nonsense at their core.This is no surprise. At no point have any of the major carbon-emitting countries implemented policies that would result in the 1.5˚C hotter-than-pre-industrial world imagined in the Paris climate agreement, nor even in the 2˚C hotter world grudgingly assumed by that agreement. Matters are still worse, however: “Current pledges are not consistent with long-term emission pathways that would likely limit global warming to 2˚C during the 21st century” (Leaked 2021, 11–25).We are not on track to stay within the bounds of our worst best-case scenario, itself nearly twice as bad 83 Ira Allen as emissions-driven current global heating.To get on the worst best-case track, global carbon emissions would need to somehow peak by 2025, shortly after this essay appears in print.The very notion seems fanciful. Moreover, to report on “what is” is to say little of signifcant further global heating feedback loops.Associated with albedo loss from glacial and sea-ice melt, the release of methane trapped in permafrost, or changes in earth’s core climate gradients, such as the polar jet stream and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Caesar et al. 2021), these blow our rosier dark projections out of the water. Nor does this speak to the related but distinct global biodiversity loss that Elizabeth Kolbert chillingly termed The Sixth Extinction. In Kolbert’s most recent work, Under a White Sky, she notes in passing that “extinction rates are now hundreds – perhaps thousands – of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geologic time” (Kolbert 2021, 74). And it’s not just vertebrates.“Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging. Whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves” (74). We did that, and not just the “we” of the wealthy countries. And we did it before even starting to cook ourselves and our nonhuman kin in a carbon-saturated atmosphere and ocean system. Most of the great making-die to date isn’t even about heating due to human carbon spend: it’s about the land- and sea-use patterns our emissions enable, fruits of an extraordinary and ever-expanding capacity for resource metabolization. All of this should be understood as a broadly human construction of a global species-niche, though of course, an expansion accomplished at extraordinary cost to most of humanity itself. By dint of interactions between historically very particular forms of human activity and extrahuman physical regularities, between 1970 and 2016 the population of human animals doubled and managed to force an average 68% drop across the populations of all nonhuman vertebrates: killing mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fsh by indiscriminate billions upon billions upon billions (WWF 2020, 6). Our mechanism of action for this wholesale devastation was primarily environmental use patterns, not carbon emissions. From clear-cutting rainforests to deep-sea trawling, capitalism’s requirement of infnite expansion has led us toward both brute-force and cleveringenuity methods for reconstructing the partial ecological niches our species occupied somewhat more placidly for millennia. Climate change due to our “release” of carbon by burning fossil fuels has certainly contributed to our casual massacre of most of the earth’s non-domesticated biomass, but the unsurvivable heating, sea-level rise and acidifcation, and destructive weather intensifcation of anthropogenic climate change have barely even come into play yet.