Wealth inequality is a primary culprit behind the ecological and environmental collapse of societies over the past 12,000 years, which have come to be dominated by a small circle of elites hoarding resources like land, research shows. Today, instead of an isolated collapse, we face a global one, says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

On this episode of Mongabay’s Newscast, Kemp explains how wealth inequality is not just tied to, but may be the very cause of the ecological destruction we are witnessing today, and how tackling that is key to how we solve all these challenges, as he recently told The Guardian.

“Imperial overexpansion, depleting the natural environment, having elite competition and popular immiseration, all [are] just simply the natural effect of inequality. All is driven by growing concentrations of power and wealth inequality,” he says.

Humans are not naturally like this, Kemp explains. Rather, for the vast majority of their existence, they have coexisted in nomadic, interconnected societies, functioning in a largely egalitarian fashion. Until the discovery that grain could be harvested — and therefore also stolen and hoarded with violence — humans did not dominate one another, as we do today.

As mentioned in the episode, you can read a recent opinion piece on what listeners and readers can do overcome despair in the face of existential threats such as climate change and biodiversity loss. 

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: Statue of Queen Hatshepsut, Egypt. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Why humans are egalitarian

(08:06)  Why authoritarianism is so pervasive

(14:12) How and why societies fall

(20:58) Our global society is at risk

(24:22) How we solve it

(30:25) Capping wealth at 10m

(37:54) Citizen juries and how they work

(45:11) Could a ‘ministry for the future’ work?

(46:54) Lessons from the Khoisan Peoples

(51:00) Democracy isn’t just a ‘left-wing’ idea