The future planetary ecological collapse

Yesterday I published a piece about China. Enormous processes are unfolding there right now. In short:

1. For decades, the world itself built up China's industrial power: Western and multinational corporations moved factories, technologies, capital, and entire production chains there because it was cheaper, faster, and more profitable.

2. China accepted this bargain and paid a monstrous price for its rise — it burned through its own natural environment, destroyed habitats, polluted its air and water, depleted resources, and in return built industrial and technological power on a planetary scale.

3. When the new race for the technologies of the future began, the world realized with horror that key raw materials, processing capacity, and critical supply chains were already concentrated largely in China, which meant that dependence on China had become a strategic trap.

4. After that, countries began frantically trying to catch up with China and, in the name of “resource sovereignty,” launched an assault on their own natural environment: weakening protections, opening up the subsoil, targeting protected lands, and sacrificing ecosystems to a new industrial war.

5. But the great historical reversal is that China, having already accumulated its power through the destruction of nature, is now turning toward protecting it, strengthening environmental legislation, studying the remaining natural refuges, and at the same time preparing the country for a large-scale war, while the rest of the world fights over what China has already managed to secure.

China has just adopted an “Environmental Code,” introduced “ecological red lines,” and also passed a law on mobilizing the country and its human resources in preparation for war. At the same time, it is spending billions on studying wildlife refuges in neighboring countries, focusing on what may become the truly most valuable resources of the future: the last living areas of wild nature — biological refuges — and clean freshwater.

For our headquarters, I would like to say this:

Look at what is happening in China: it is already moving ahead of developments that the rest of the world is only beginning to confront. This happened because China's accelerated development was financed by the world itself, which poured enormous amounts of money into the country in pursuit of production without having to bear the environmental costs at home. China sacrificed the natural environment of its own territory.

And now countries around the world have rushed to “fight for sovereignty” and reduce their dependence on China, but to do so they will have to follow almost the same development trajectory: destroy their own protected areas in order to extract rare earth elements on an industrial scale and establish domestic processing capacity.

We already know what happened in China after that. The same thing can happen across the world. What follows is a rapid, uncontrolled collapse of the planet's biological systems — a real ecological collapse triggering a chain reaction of species extinctions. And after that, the entire world will rush to find a way out of the crisis — exactly what China is doing now. Except that by then, China may already control key refuges and sources of freshwater. That is what it is preparing for.

There is another point: the systems governing states are old. They will create chaos, destroy protected areas, and then leave the next generation to deal with the consequences. Our children.

That is why our work together is critically important: we are literally building the infrastructure for the future struggle to protect nature, developing a mechanism for overcoming a planetary crisis, and bringing people together in an attempt to prevent catastrophe before it happens.

Perhaps we will succeed.