Homo Sapiens: You have exceeded your credit card limit!

Imagine yourself in possession of a credit card without any spending limit. Before your jaw drops to the floor, read further. Another surprise awaits you, bigger than the first one: you do not owe anything to the bank. No collaterals. No asterisks. Nothing. You are in possession of a blank cheque. Sounds as good as heaven on Earth?

Ican imagine a big grin growing larger on your face, but just hold on. Before you do that, spare a thought for the bank. What will happen to it? Likely it will limit issuing new capital. The value of the bank’s assets will continue to fall, while the market value of its liabilities increase. The bank will find it difficult to honor its obligations to creditors and depositors.

And, sooner or later, a day will arrive when the bank will collapse.

What will happen then? All the depositors money will be gone. The blank cheque/credit card the bank issued to you will become a piece of trash. What next? As history tells, there will be a risk of the crisis spreading and contaminating the whole system. Likely, the government will come to the bank’s rescue, and try to ensure security of depositors money. What happens after? Business-as-usual to resume. Would you favour the bank to again issue no limit credit cards? I guess not. Why? Because it is not sustainable. The whole thing will eventually collapse.

This credit card analogy shows the state of affairs of humanity — as it stands today. In real life, the bank is our Earth. We, the homo sapiens, are those creditors who have issued ourselves a limitless credit card extracting resources unchecked. Millions of species of flora and fauna represent the debtors and creditors whose contribution has ensured that the bank, Earth, works smoothly, its balance maintained. Humanity, too, belonged to the list of debtors, once but now clearly have shed their responsibilities.

So, what will happen once the bank-Earth starts to collapse? Can governments rescue it? Scientists who study complex systems worry that planetary boundaries once breached, the Earth will enter into a tipping phase and from there on it will be a downward spiral journey. Like Black Monday and Tuesday, we will have Black Centuries or Black Millennia.

If you are finding it difficult to imagine the Earth as one big bank, then think of it as many small and big banks that make up the whole banking system. A failure of one bank could pose risk to the entire banking sector. So, in 1985, when SAGE 2 detected a hole in the ozone layer, in just 18 months nations (including arch rivals) decided to plug the hole in the ozone bank, which, since then, has been put on the recovery phase, which is expected to take several decades.

Fast forward more than three decades, the big banks of the Earth (water, soil, air, biodiversity and others) are stressed way beyond their limits and are collapsing. Instead of a swift, decisive response, humanity remains muted and passive. Except for a handful, everyone including governments, companies and Earthlings are living life business-as-usual: still crediting instead of depositing resources back into Earth.

There will be no Pandora (Avatar movie) for humans to mine. Even if there were, it would be shameful for humans to have first destroyed their own Pandora (Earth) and then do the same to other peaceful worlds. Whom did you wanted to win? The Earthians or the inhabitants of Pandora. I wanted Pandora to win for they had cared about nature and were living happily. I disliked the greedy Earthians.

In the real world, we are those Earthians.

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Homo Unus: Successor to Homo Sapiens. A book that shows common problems of the world through an uncommon lens.