hen the Spanish pirate, freebooters and adventurist Cortes took on the Aztec civilisation of the Americas in 1519 and was able to subdue and conquer it with Eurasian supremacy in warfare that the indigenous Americans lacked, his men plundered as much gold and silver as possible. Aztecs, the indigenous Americans, became curious about why these aliens were so interested in this metal. On their asking, Cortez replied, “Because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.“

This disease of the heart, the insatiable pursuit for surplus and consumption, that Cortez mentioned could not have been imagined or foreseen at the level that it has now reached. The Industrial Revolution gave it a fillip of immense proportions that rendered the planet incurably diseased.

The American journalist and author, Chris Hedges, warns that “carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and drought may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t.”

We, the homo sapiens, have proved the greediest species. The first great leap in this regard was the agricultural revolution. The more or less simultaneous and far-reaching developments of domestication of plants, animals and the idea of settlement of humans were part of it. The second major jump was the Industrial Revolution. The accumulation of surplus that we are accustomed to now is the result of the latter revolution.

On the one hand, according to irrefutable scientific evidence, human population will decline to only a billion around the year 2100 AD. This decrease will be brought about by massive environmental catastrophes and inundation. On the other hand, every major economy of the world is trying to provide its citizens with American living standards. The problem is that even if one China’s population is enabled to elevate itself to the American standard of living, the limited resources of the Earth may be exhausted.

The natural resources are limited while the greed for surplus is unlimited. The total carrying capacity of the planet is about 50 billion tonnes a year of renewable resources. At present, human civilisation consumes nearly 70 billion tonnes a year.

According to National Geographic, the scientists estimated in 2012 that the Arctic ice could disappear by 2090. However, in 2020, the speed of the ice melt, and temperature rise in the Arctic led scientists to revise their projections to 2035. A recent BBC report says that the world is likely to warm beyond the key limit of 1.5 C by 2027, although this was earlier expected to be crossed over by the end of the ongoing century.

The Global North was at the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution, incessant increase in consumerism and insatiable obsession with surplus. It destabilised the vital chemical, biological and thermal processes essential for sustaining life on Earth. The colonial appropriation and exploitation aside, even at the present standard of arguably rules-based trading system, the Global North extracts an annual surplus of nearly $2.3 trillion from the South. While environmental awareness in the Global North has risen dramatically since the year 2000, few people of colour and fewer voices from the Global South are actually getting through, says Ilhan Niaz.

Niaz has written a much-needed and commendable book, Downfall: Lessons for Our Final Century (2022). It is a well-argued response from Pakistan, part of the Global South, on the existential crisis of environmental degradation.

Niaz says that Pakistan, although only contributing 0.9 percent to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is one of the most vulnerable countries to ongoing and impending environmental catastrophes. These calamities may take the form of intense flooding, drastic and eventful changes in rainfall patterns, melting Himalayan glaciers, increasing spells of vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever and an overall high frequency and intensity of natural disasters.

Having articulated and established the case against human intervention causing environmental disasters, loss of biodiversity and self-annihilation through the historical lens and philosophical argumentation by Ibn Khaldun, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, Niaz sets forth his lessons for our final century. To cope with the unprecedented challenge of environmental doomsday, humans must learn to think in historical terms and abandon their absurd fascination with economic growth, i.e. the absurd practice of converting natural assets into material ones.

The world needs to move towards a stationary state or some version of de-growth, as advised by John Stuart Mill and others. Moreover, the people need to be told the truth by their governments regarding the state of affairs with regard to environmental degradation. The governments should not sell false hope and promise of endless material development and capitalistic appropriation to get votes.

Truth be told, the Earth is dying, and human activity is killing it.

To avoid xenophobic responses to scarcities, global trade and international travel should be reduced. Indigenous solutions to the problems should be encouraged by the communities and the governments.

The world has already reached the precipice. What is needed the most is the management of an orderly decline of its present high-level equilibrium and a transition towards regenerative frameworks.

The human experience may have witnessed the golden age of capital from 1975 to 2025 – the highest population growth, life expectancy, consumerism and acquisition of levels of surplus not even imagined by the monarchs of the past. Given the volume and momentum of the environmental crises, in the ensuing years and decades, political orders and governance structures will be severely tested.

The writer has PhD in history from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. He heads the History Department at the University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com. He tweets @AbrarZahoor