Day by day, species by species, landscape by landscape, the world in which humanity arose is being deleted. Eventually, what remains will be unfit for the survival of either humans or large animals.
The abolition of a habitable Earth is the most profoundly irrational of all human actions. It is akin to torching our own home. Yet every person contributes to it, and (almost) every government and business supports it.
Consider the following scientifically-measured facts:
- Since 1970, 73% of all wildlife on the planet has been destroyed, according to the WWF.
- World forest area has shrunk by one third — two billion hectares — since humans took over. Most of the decline has happened in the past half-century.
- Every day, up to 150 species of living animals become extinct,
- The year 2024 was the first when global temperatures averaged more than +1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
- On any given day between 5000 and 25,000 wildfires are raging round the world.
- A total of 44% of reef-building corals, which support one third of ocean species, are facing extinction.
- Arctic sea ice levels are the lowest ever recorded, threatening a “blue ocean” event that will accelerate global warming.
- The world’s land-based glaciers have lost 9 trillion tonnes of ice since 1975, threatening many regions with dire shortages of fresh water.
- Atmospheric carbon levels hit 429ppm in March 2025, the highest in human history.
- Global warming is on track to hit +3.5 – +4.5 degrees by 2100, which is too hot for most humans to survive and far too high for our current food system to survive.
- The world already faces an acute fresh water crisis. By 2030, water demand will outrun supply by 40%.
- Humans are turning healthy land to desert at a rate of 100 million hectares a year.
- The oceans are losing oxygen, turning more acidic, toxic and dead zones are spreading, threatening a collapse in sea life
- A total of 14 million people now die every year from chemical poisons in their environment.
- A total of 36 billion tonnes of soil are being lost annually, striking at the world food supply.
Taken together, these indicators point to a largely uninhabitable Earth in less than a century. Yet what are the world’s governments doing about it? Very little, is the plain answer.
If climate action is a yardstick, then current commitments of the world’s government are sufficient only to keep the planet to +3.5 degrees – a level that will eliminate food and water supplies and most human life. However, the world’s leading climate destroyer, the US, has already reversed its commitment to act, and others, especially fossil-fuel producers, are following its lead. At the same time the Trump administration is attempting to blind its citizens to their peril by suppressing the science and public information on climate change.
Whether through ignorance, stupidity or plain greed, the outcome of the Trump administration’s actions will be the elimination of human civilisation. Others, such as the Putin regime and Al Saud regime, are equally committed to universal destruction – while deluding themselves they can survive.
Countries such as Australia and Britain posture as green, but actually pursue policies that will hasten the end of a habitable planet and destroy future generations. Australia, for example, has recently approved 10 new coal mines yielding 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions
Coupled with these attempts to wreck the climate, many governments are retreating from their environmental commitments, felling more forests, releasing more poisons, exacerbating extinctions, ruining water supplies and generally making the world less habitable for our children.
It is this vast gap between the “alternate reality” of today’s political leaders and what is actually occurring on the ground, worldwide, that will seal the fate of humanity. It is down to our collective inability to comprehend the world in which we live, and to believe instead in a fantasy version of it. One without a happy ending.
The proximal explanation for the reality gap is that most political leaders do not wish to admit their failures and prefer that the public remain in ignorance, so they may be reappointed as leaders and continue to enjoy the riches and privileges of power today at the expense of future generations. This is behind the global disinformation campaign by politicians, corporations, billionaires and the fossil fuels industry, designed to deceive the population.
At a deeper level, it is the existence of 200 independent nation states that will wreck the human future. So deeply ingrained is our custom of tribal competition and discrimination, that it is easy to divert attention from the genuine global crisis by starting a dispute between countries, such as the threat to annex others’ territory, block their trade or start a war. Conflicts such as Ukraine and Gaza are the result of local ultra-nationalism. Their capacity to spiral into nuclear holocaust adds a fresh dimension to the threat.
Very few ordinary people want war. War is the product of male-dominated governments, indulging in pointless masculine displays of aggression. Countries are highly adapted to earth-destroying forms of action such as war, economic growth, pollution and territorial acquisition. Most countries are incapable of placing human survival ahead of their own limited selfish interests – a factor that has continually sabotaged the efforts of the United Nations to build a more peaceful, safe and healthy world. If nation states continue to be our main mode of governance, the only possible outcome is the deletion of a habitable Earth for our descendants.
One way that humanity can avoid this is through a universal agreement that addresses all the combined catastrophic threats created by our present nation states and their economies. This is the Earth System Treaty, described in previous articles.
Without a worldwide agreement to survive on a habitable Earth, it is highly doubtful that humans will.
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of six books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is “How to Fix a Broken Planet” (Cambridge University Press, 2023)