Imagine climate change is a Venus flytrap and the earth is a fly attracted to the sweet nectar of consumerism. 

Six tiny trigger hairs stick up from the inner petals. If any hair is touched, it can cause the trap to snap shut in a fraction of a second, trapping civilization and the earth’s ecosystems in a poison filled vault. 

The hairs can be easily imagined as global shocks. The first hair could be nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock is monitoring this one. 

The second hair could be the next global pandemic. Since biodiversity is the earth’s immune system, it’s only a matter of time. 

The third hair could be the combination of overpopulation, crop failure, water shortage, air pollution, and the resulting mass starvation. 

The fourth hair could be income inequality and the social instability it engenders. Geopolitical and civic dangers multiply exponentially with increased inequality. 

The fifth hair could be a sudden environmental collapse and mass species extinction. 

The sixth hair could be climatic instability: even more powerful hurricanes, floods, heat waves, ice storms, fires, desertification, and ocean acidification. 

You could also think of each hair as a tipping point, causing rapid irreversible disruption of the Holocene’s climatic equilibrium: a shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation; Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet collapse; permafrost melting; Indian and West African monsoon shifts; boreal and rainforest dieback. 

Since growth capitalism is the seed from which our imagined Venus flytrap has sprouted, undermining our global life support system’s stability, large structural political and economic changes are obviously needed. 

Any ideas how to manage this? Imagine urgent degrowth.

Jens Abrahamsen
WHIDBEY ISLAND