Crisis or collapse? Overshoot and degrowth

The Energy Agency estimates that the green transition will require a seven-fold increase in rare earths, a 19-fold increase in nickel, a 21-fold increase in cobalt and a 42-fold increase in lithium mining over two decades
 

Asier Arias

The delicate juncture of the Earth system has been described as a crisis or a set of crises: ‘ecological crisis’, ‘climate crisis’, ‘biodiversity crisis’. Our ecosocial situation has also been described as a crisis.

I will, therefore, return to these notions - crisis, collapse - after devoting a few lines to trying to explain and help us understand. I will outline an overview of our ecological situation - shall we avoid the ambiguity between ‘ecological’ and ‘ecosocial’ (Riechmann, 2023) - by focusing on three of its central elements: the climatic symptom of our ecological overshoot, that of the sixth mass extinction and, finally, the main material source of each of the symptoms, namely the fossil potlatch that is now coming to an end (Santiago Muíño, 2018: 64). I will try to avoid the usual ‘carbon tunnel vision’ (Escrivá, 2021; 2023) that equates ‘ecological crisis’ with ‘climate change’.

The answer to the dilemma between crisis and collapse could, in the end, consist in the conjunction between the incontrovertible diagnosis of severe ecological overshoot and the urgent need for degrowth - to avoid, hopefully, that it is the consequences of overshoot that forces traumatic degrowth.


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