The mess we make

The current extreme inequality between rich and poor isn’t a bug in the syystem – it’s a feature of capitalism. It’s not just inevitable, it’s desirable for those who benefit from it. The structure is built to concentrate wealth and power for the #nastyfew at the top, while extracting labour and resources from the grassroots at the bottom. A contemptible disregard for those less fortunate is the design, not some unfortunate side effect our #NGO’s tell us about.

Take a walk through any city, and you’ll see it in the gleaming skyscrapers rising above sprawling slums. In places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, or Cape Town, the inequality is visible at a glance. But even in the Global North, it’s masked behind fences, zoning laws, and digital walls. Capitalism excels at keeping suffering hidden or aestheticized so the few who grow fat don’t have to think about it.

With #climatechaos as the planet continues to heat up, these divisions are only becoming more grotesque. Climate change, driven by the lifestyles and consumption habits of the Global North, will over the next 20 years be felt much more in the Global South. Rich countries, like ourselves in the UK, will continue to talk about carbon neutrality and green energy transitions, while still pushing our use of pollution-heavy industries and extracting rare earth minerals into poor nations, leaving growing environmental and human devastation in their wake.

Examples are everywhere:

• Electronic waste, of our shiny new gadgets which we replaced every year or two, but where do the old ones go? Places like Agbogbloshie in Ghana, one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps, for children to pick through toxic waste for scraps of metal, breathing in fumes and dying young.
  
• Fast fashion, cheap clothes from brands like H&M or Zara, are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh or Cambodia, where workers earn a few dollars a day, labouring in unsafe conditions that led to tragedies like the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013.
  
• Climate displacement, sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events are forcing millions to migrate. Communities in the Pacific Islands are disappearing beneath the sea, while African farmers face collapsed food systems. Yet, it should be obvious that they’re the ones who contributed least to the crisis. And when they try to migrate for survival, they’re met with growing border walls and dehumanization.

This isn’t an accident, it’s how this nasty unthinking path works – externalize the damage, push it as far away as possible, and then build walls, digital and physical, to keep the consequences out of sight. Whether it’s the child labour behind our smartphones, the communities poisoned by oil pipelines, or the forests razed for palm oil, these are the visible costs of our convenience. That is if we look at all. In this mess of a path, capitalism is a system of organized forgetting. It turns ecosystems into commodities, people into data points, and suffering into an acceptable byproduct. The #nastyfew, and in this context this is meany of us, get to live in curated bubbles of comfort, while the damage is made invisible – outsourced, decontextualized, and sanitized.

Best not to keep being a prat about this.

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And let’s be clear, climate change isn’t a technical problem in need of genius innovation. We already know what causes it – our addiction to fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial agriculture – and we’ve had the solutions for decades: political change and challenge to reduce emissions, transition to renewables, protect ecosystems, and radically change consumption patterns. So when people talk about “putting our brightest minds on solving climate change,” they’re both deluded and deflecting. This isn’t about a lack of intelligence or ideas; it’s about wilful political paralysis and #nastyfew vested interests. Those in power cant think outside of private escape bunkers in New Zealand. It’s not a knowledge gap – it’s a power and values gap. And that’s the much harder issue that we need to compost.