I started noticing this trend 30 years ago.

By Paul Kingsworth, Unherd

The Green movement will become an all-consuming empire.

The numbers were in, and everybody could see what was coming: at least ten billion human souls by the end of the century. All of us clamouring for food, water, space and the triumphant benefits of the all-conquering “global economy”, which the Western powers had been cajoling, threatening or enticing the rest of the world into since the dawn of the age of empires. Now this economy encompassed everything, everywhere and everyone on Earth. There was no escape, even on the highest peaks or in the deepest forests, from its products, its worldview or its 15G connectivity. The entire planet, from mahogany trees to office workers, was now a “resource”, to be eyed and totted up for the necessary and beneficial growth of the global machine.

That growth, of course, came with a few side-effects: a changing climate, collapsing ice sheets, mass destruction of ecosystems, the razing of forests and the highest extinction rate in sixty million years; not to mention growing social polarisation and massive economic inequality. Everybody had known about this since the late twentieth century, but they had all presumed, or hoped, that somebody else would sort it out. The World Economic Forum was on the case, after all, and Bono and that Swedish girl, and those weirdos who dressed up as dinosaurs or whatever and chained themselves to bridges. This sort of thing had been part of the furniture for so long that people barely noticed it anymore.

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