consumerism and the environment

The Ideology of Disconnection

The Ideology of Disconnection: How Human Cognitive Capacity Built the Machinery of Extinction

The Ideology of Disconnection: How Human Cognitive Capacity Built the Machinery of Extinction

Our species did not run out of information. We ran out of the capacity to be moved by it. The reason lives in the same cognitive architecture that let us coordinate, moralise, and build civilisation in the first place — and that architecture did not come with a safety clause. On the 8 October 2026 release of the WWF‘s sixteenth Living Planet Report, the average size of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations stood 73% below its 1970 baseline. The figures were not new to anyone. What was new, three weeks ago, was the reminder that knowing has never been our problem.

Our cognitive capacity is the single most consequential fact about this planet — and it cuts both ways. The same faculties that let us coordinate, teach, and moralise let us build ideologies that sever us from the living world, justify its destruction as progress, and corrode the compassion that once made us care. The result is measured in dead species, dead people, and deadened hearts.

1. The Contradiction at the Centre of the Human Story

There is a version of human exceptionalism that runs like this: we are the only animals who understand the world as a whole, who can hold a future in the mind, who can formulate an abstract principle and bind strangers to it across generations. It is true, and it is why we dominate. It is also — this is the uncomfortable part — why we are capable of the particular kind of damage now unfolding.

The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2026, subtitled The Science of Hope, covers 1970 to 2022 using 35,803 population trends across 5,790 vertebrate species. The headline number is unchanged from the previous edition and remains almost unbearable: a 73% average decline in monitored wildlife populations.[1] Latin America and the Caribbean is down 95%. Freshwater populations — where the damage is most concentrated — are down 85%, terrestrial 69%, marine 59%.[2]

And yet the same report leads with recovery. Green turtles, Atlantic bluefin tuna, tigers in parts of Asia, southern African elephants. Around half of monitored populations are stable or increasing.[3] The Amazon Soy Moratorium, a collective supply-chain commitment, cut deforestation linked to soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon from nearly 30% to roughly 2%.[3]

This is not a story about a species too stupid to notice. A species that has sequenced the genomes of thousands of species, monitored the world’s fisheries stock by stock, mapped the ocean floor, and built a global real-time financial system has known about this for decades. The environmental sciences have produced a body of knowledge more precise than anything in the previous 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. The IPCC, IPBES, FAO, UNCCD, ZSL, WWF — the knowledge exists, it is peer-reviewed, it is public, it is free.

So the standard diagnosis fails. It is not ignorance. It is not even greed, exactly. Greed is a motive; motive explains intensity but not direction, and it certainly does not explain why the better-motivated half of humanity — the people who read the reports, who love rivers and birds, who would weep at a dead seal — vote for the systems that produce the collapse.

The problem is upstream of motive. It is in the machinery by which a group agrees on what is real, what is good, and what is worth sacrificing. That machinery is cognitive, and it was built by our species, and it is the thing that is failing.

2. What Cognitive Capacity Actually Is — and Why It Is Not Neutral

A. Shared intentionality: the “we” that made us

Michael Tomasello’s shared intentionality hypothesis is the standard account of what separates us from the other great apes. We can participate in collaborative activities with shared goals and joint action plans; we can represent a collaborator’s point of view from a “bird’s-eye view”; we can learn culturally and pass that learning down.[16] From joint intentionality in a dyad, this scales up to collective intentionality — the capacity to think as a member of a group, to take the group’s perspective as an impersonal, normative authority.[17]

This is a magnificent capacity. It is also the technical prerequisite for everything that follows in this article. Ideology is what happens when collective intentionality acquires an object. Shared intentions become shared worldviews; group-mindedness becomes group-ideology; the “we” that cooperates becomes the “we” that believes.

B. The argumentative machine

Here is the part that should worry us most. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s argumentative theory holds that reasoning did not evolve to find truth. It evolved to persuade.[18] Their summary of the evidence is uncomfortable for the folk view of rational deliberation: reasoning reliably produces epistemic distortions and poor decisions, but people become skilled arguers once they are placed in an argumentative context — and skilled arguers are “not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”

Confirmation bias, myopia, and motivated reasoning are not bugs in this architecture. They are what a truth-seeking device would not do.

Follow the implication. A mind optimised for justification is a mind that can justify anything — including the destruction of the living world — provided the justification is good enough to survive among the people who must live with it. The extractive economy does not require anyone to believe that destroying a riverbank is good. It requires only that enough people believe it is necessary, efficient, inevitable, or someone else’s problem.

C. Moral reasoning as post-hoc legislation

Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist account took this further. When we make moral judgements, the judgement arrives first — rapidly, intuitively, affectively — and reasoning follows, constructing reasons after the fact.[21] His signature demonstration, “moral dumbfounding,” showed participants who condemned harmless acts and, when their stated justifications were shown to fail, responded: “I don’t know why it’s wrong, it just is.”

This finding is genuinely contested, and a good argument should say so. Scott Barry, Joshua Knobe and David Loss have proposed that moral dumbfounding in the taboos tested is better explained by participants’ assessment of the likelihood of harm than by a purely affective process.[22] The debate turns on whether post-hoc reasoning can be causally efficacious at all.

But note what survives the contest. Nobody in this literature argues that moral reasoning reliably tracks truth. The live options are “reasoning rationalises” and “reasoning is post-hoc but does real work in shaping verdicts.” Both undercut the idea that a rational person, reasoning carefully about the facts, will arrive at the right conclusion about a forest. Careful reasoning is what we deploy after the verdict, in service of the verdict.

3. Ideology as Cognitive Technology

Teun van Dijk’s Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach is the key text, and it is worth being precise about what it claims. Van Dijk defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group — not a set of beliefs but a cognitive framework that organises attention, memory, and inference.[19] Ideology does two things. It maintains group cohesion and solidarity. And it legitimises power: “ideologies may be used to legitimate or obscure power abuse.”

Crucially, van Dijk insists ideology is not inherently negative — it also organises resistance and opposition. This matters for honesty. The problem is not ideology as such; any group able to act together needs one. The problem is what a particular ideology does when it is totalised and when it is the only frame available.

Van Dijk also makes a point that undercuts the comfortable assumption that ideas come before actions and merely dress them up. Ideologies do not just legitimate systems of domination after the fact; they “monitor and organize group knowledge and attitudes and hence the beliefs that members need in order to construct the models controlling the actions that implement domination.” Ideology is upstream of the machinery. It is the operating manual.

A. Moral disengagement: how a civilisation disowns its conscience

Albert Bandura’s account of moral disengagement gives us the mechanism by which ordinary, decent people participate in inhumane systems without psychological collapse.[20] He identifies a family of psychosocial manoeuvres:

Moral justification — investing harmful conduct with high moral purpose. Not “we are destroying the Amazon for profit” but “we are feeding the world,” “we are feeding the world.”
Euphemistic labelling — sanitising language. Bandura cites experimental evidence that people behave more cruelly when detrimental acts are verbally sanitised than when they are called aggression. Soldiers “waste” people rather than kill them; bombing missions “service the target.” Livestock become “units”; the killing becomes “processing”; a forest becomes a “resource.”
Advantageous comparison — the manoeuvre that normalised empire, and which now runs through every supply chain. Our forest loss is small. Our emissions are necessary. Someone else is worse.
Displacement and diffusion of responsibility — the agentless passive voice; the faceless collectivity as agent. Where everyone is responsible, no one is.
Disregard or distortion of consequences — the starving, the smoke, the runoff, the silent spring.
Dehumanisation and blaming the victim — the final move.

Bandura’s own summary of the last two is the crux of this article. “To perceive another as human activates empathetic reactions through a sense of common humanity. It is difficult to mistreat humanised persons without self-condemnation.” And: “Combining diffused responsibility with dehumanization greatly escalates the level of punitiveness.”

That is the architecture of disconnection. Ideology supplies the justification; euphemism supplies the vocabulary; diffusion supplies the plausible deniability; dehumanisation removes the emotional brake.

B. The final reduction: from beast to machine

And here the reduction reaches all the way down. The Western philosophical tradition that culminates in industrial animal agriculture descends from a specific move: the Cartesian reclassification of animals as res extensa — mindless mechanism, the beast-machine. Frans de Waal has a name for the cognitive reflex this installs: anthropodenial, the refusal to acknowledge human-like traits in other animals and animal-like traits in ourselves.[48] Once a living being is defined as a mechanism without interiority, suffering becomes a malfunction rather than a harm, and killing becomes maintenance rather than murder.[27]

The parallel to Bandura’s human outgroups is exact and structural. Dehumanise, and the self-sanctions do not fire. Whether the victim is a person from a named ethnic group or a pig in a shed, the psychological architecture is the same, which is precisely why the speciesist frame has proved so durable. The neural evidence is consistent: when research participants perceive less cognitive capacity in an interlocutor, they show reduced neural mirroring, reduced empathic accuracy, and less successful cooperation.[24]

The empirical literature here is stronger than for most claims in the social sciences, and it has been sharpened by genuine scholarly disagreement. Over (2021) has raised seven serious challenges to the dehumanisation hypothesis — including the point that outgroup members are often denied some human qualities while retaining others, and that some non-human organisms are treated with great care while some human groups are harmed precisely because of their uniquely human qualities.[23] Lang (2020) argues that in collective violence, dehumanisation may matter less than the strengthening of justifications.[25] A 2025 meta-analysis of dehumanisation and aggression is the appropriate place to look for the current state of the evidence.[26]

This is a more careful position than the one usually taken in polemics, and it strengthens rather than weakens the argument. If dehumanisation is not the single master switch, then we should not expect a single de-humanisation fix. The whole apparatus matters: justification, euphemism, comparison, diffusion, and the slow loss of daily contact with living things. Which is to say that the problem is systemic, and therefore also potentially systemic in its repair.

4. The Operating System of the Anthropocene

A. Dominion, and the human–nature divide

Every one of the mechanisms above requires a prior frame: the assumption that the human is outside the natural order rather than a member of it. This is the “human–nature divide,” and it is not a natural fact. It is a theoretical framework, and it has a history.

It runs through the Judeo-Christian account of dominion. It runs through Descartes. It runs through the Enlightenment framing of wilderness as something to be mastered, and through the twentieth-century technocratic framing of the living world as a stock of capital assets. It runs through the phrase “natural resources” itself — a phrase that encodes the conclusion in a noun, and that Robin Wall Kimmerer has specifically proposed we retire: “It’s not a natural resource. To me, it’s a gift from the natural world.”[31]

And it runs through the most powerful ideology of all: the market itself, which requires that living systems be priced rather than related to. A tree with a price can be felled; a tree with a relationship cannot. Kimmerer’s diagnosis is precise: “The language of natural resources suggests that we own them, that we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift.”

B. The Anthropocene as diagnosis — and as alibi

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the term “Anthropocene” in the IGBP Global Change Newsletter in May 2000, dating its onset to the late eighteenth century and James Watt’s steam engine.[36] The name has done extraordinary work as a description: it locates human agency in the geology.

But a description can be conscripted into an ideology, and this one has been conscripted in both directions. One use names the damage and demands accountability. The other uses the word’s terminal aura — epoch, geological, irreversible — to convert responsibility into fatality. If we are merely a species passing through a geological phase, then nothing we do is a moral act; there is no one to blame and nothing to forgive. This is the Anthropocene becomes the perfect alibi for the very conduct it names.

This is ideology at its most characteristic: taking a true fact and attaching to it a conclusion that immunises the actor. And it is worth noticing that the terminal-epoch framing is itself doing cognitive work — the same trick Mercier and Sperber describe, except here the reasoning is not post-hoc but pre-emptive: the conclusion is chosen first (“there is nothing to be done”) and the reasoning is recruited to support it.

5. The Ledger

The frame has a price. This is what it has cost, as measured by the institutions we built to measure it.

Indicator	Latest figure	Source
Monitored vertebrate wildlife populations, 1970–2022	−73% average; Latin America & Caribbean −95%; freshwater −85%	WWF/ZSL, Living Planet Report 2026[1][2]
Species threatened with extinction	~1 million of ~8.1 million estimated animal and plant species	IPBES Global Assessment, 2019[4][5]
Vertebrate extinction rate vs. background rate	up to 100× higher than the 2 E/MSY background rate	Ceballos et al., 2015[6]
Terrestrial insect abundance	~−9% per decade (166 long-term surveys, 1,676 sites)	van Klink et al., Science, 2020[7][8]
Marine fish stocks fished beyond sustainable limits	37.7%, up from 35.4% two years earlier	FAO, SOFIA 2024[9]
Ice-free land degraded	up to 40%, directly affecting half of humanity	UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2[10][11]
Agrifood systems’ share of global GHG emissions	~32% (16.5 Gt CO₂e, 2023); livestock alone 4.3 Gt	FAO[12]
Capital flowing to nature-destructive activity, 2023	~US$7.3 trillion vs. only ~US$220 billion to nature-based solutions (30:1)	UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026[49]
Public environmentally harmful subsidies, 2023	~US$2.4 trillion (fossil fuels, agriculture, water, transport, construction)	UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026[49]
Premature deaths from air pollution	~6.7–7 million per year; ambient 4.2M, household 2.9M	WHO[13][14]
Global population living in cities	45% of 8.2 billion, more than double 1950	UN DESA, WUP 2025[15]

Two of those numbers deserve a moment longer.

The extinction-rate figure — up to 100 times the background rate — was computed by Ceballos, Ehrlich, Barnosky and colleagues using deliberately conservative assumptions, adopting a background rate twice as high as the conventional estimate in order to minimise the case for a mass extinction. Under those self-limiting assumptions, the vertebrates lost in the last century would have taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear at background rates.[6] They concluded that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.

The capital figure is the one I would put on a billboard. UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 found that in 2023 roughly US$7.3 trillion flowed into activities that damage the natural world, against roughly US$220 billion directed toward nature-based solutions — a ratio of 30 to 1 against nature.[49] That is not an ecological imbalance that will correct itself through individual virtue. It is a system working exactly as designed.

And the composition of that figure is the part that should stop people in their tracks. Of the $7.3 trillion, US$4.9 trillion came from private capital concentrated in utilities, industrials, energy and basic materials — and US$2.4 trillion came from public environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, agriculture, water, transport and construction.[49] In other words, more than a third of the money destroying the living world is not greedy individuals in the private sector. It is public policy, written by governments, defended by lobbies, and paid for by everyone. The ideology is not merely a corporate preference. It is embedded in the state’s budget, which means it can be unembedded by it.

Meanwhile, close to 90% of the $220 billion spent on protecting nature came from public funds; private investment was just $23.4 billion, about 10% of the total.[49] Nearly nine in every ten dollars protecting the world are public, at a time when public balance sheets are under acute strain. The imbalance is not a temporary condition of a transition. It is the permanent shape of the system.

6. The Death Toll Runs Both Ways

The argument should be precise here: ecological destruction is not merely an assault on other species. It is also an assault on humans, running through several distinct channels.

Immediately and directly, through ideology itself. The ideologies discussed here — dominion, racial hierarchy, national supremacism, market fundamentalism, revolutionary purification — have killed humans at industrial scale for two centuries. Each deployed Bandura’s full apparatus: moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparison, diffusion of responsibility, dehumanisation of the victim. The killing was not a failure of these ideologies. It was their purpose.

And then, deferred, through the ecosystems they destroyed. Air pollution alone, generated substantially by the energy systems our extractive ideologies built, is responsible for an estimated 6.7 to 7 million premature deaths a year — more than one in ten of all deaths globally, with roughly 90% of ambient-air-pollution deaths falling in low- and middle-income countries.[13][14] When we say that an ideology “works,” we should ask what it works on.

The air-pollution statistic is also where the ecological and human ledgers fuse completely. The same combustion that drives the climate system that drives the habitat loss that drives the extinction rate drives the cardiovascular disease that kills the grandchild of the farmer whose soil was poisoned. There is no separate “environmental” ledger and “human” ledger. There is one ledger, and the extractive frame is in default on all of it.

7. The Extinction of Experience

Now the compounding cost, and the one most rarely named.

Ecologists have a term for what happens when a species loses not just its members but its encounters. J. R. Miller called it the “extinction of experience” in 2005 — the progressive loss of direct human interactions with nature.[37] Soga and Gaston developed it into a research programme, defining it as the loss of human–nature interactions themselves;[46] later work has documented its intergenerational character, showing how diminished “personalised ecologies” erode emotional ties to nature, weaken pro-conservation attitudes, and reduce engagement in the actions conservation requires.[38]

The mechanism is now well mapped. Loss of contact produces avoidance; avoidance produces further loss; the result is a self-reinforcing cycle, which the literature describes with a pointed name of its own: biophobia.[40] And the empirical correlate of “societal extinction of species” is that as the encounter with living things disappears, so does the sense that there is anything to lose.[39]

This is where the loss of compassion stops being a metaphor and becomes a measurable mechanism. Compassion is not a general-purpose feeling that happens to be triggered by suffering. It is a response to perceived suffering, and perception requires contact. Bandura was right that dehumanisation disables the empathetic response — but the reverse is also true: the more the encounter is engineered away, the less there is to empathise with, and the less the machinery has to be switched off. The disconnection is self-completing.

And note the demographics. 45% of humanity now lives in cities, more than double the 1950 figure, with two-thirds of projected population growth to 2050 occurring in urban areas.[15] The single largest demographic shift in human history is, in ecological terms, a mass migration away from contact with the living world. We have not merely failed to teach our children the natural world. We have built the built environment, the road network, the warehouse, the algorithmic feed, and the zoning code that keeps them from it.

8. The Counter-Tradition

None of this is new, and the point would be lost if it were. There is a long tradition of people who looked at the same cognitive machinery and used it differently.

Aldo Leopold supplied the ethic in 1949, in A Sand County Almanac: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” — extending moral standing to soils, waters, plants and animals, and making the watershed move from a human-centred to a biotic-centred frame.[43] Albert Schweitzer gave the same insight its most quoted form, “reverence for life,” arguing that the will to live is not a human monopoly but a universal property of the natural world, and that our failure to recognise this is a deeper root of the cruelty we inflict.[47] Rachel Carson stood at the hinge. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) did not merely document ecological damage; it demonstrated that the damage was produced by ideology and defended by the apparatus — the chemical industry mobilising Bandura’s full battery of moral justification and euphemism against a public health case.[44]

Arne Naess named the fault line in 1973, in “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement.” His first principle was the “rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image” — organisms as knots in the biospherical net. His second was biospherical egalitarianism, and he was careful about its implications: the equal right to live and blossom, restricted to humans, “is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves.”[29] Note that he did not argue this from sentiment. He argued it from cognitive scope — the shallow framework fails because it cannot see the system it is operating in.

Paul Taylor gave the position its philosophical form in “The Ethics of Respect for Nature” (Environmental Ethics, 1981), later developed into the book Respect for Nature (1986), grounding it in a “life principle” and in biocentric equality — the view that no being has more inherent value than another.[45] E. O. Wilson turned it into a spatial programme — Half-Earth (2016), dedicating half the planet’s land and sea to nature — which rests on the empirical observation that habitat area and species richness are related closely enough to make the target defensible.[35]

Peter Singer supplied the secular ethic. Animal Liberation (1975) introduced “equal consideration of interests” and popularised the term “speciesism,” coined by Richard Ryder, defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”[32][33] Sentience, not intelligence, not usefulness, not species membership, is the criterion. And Elizabeth Kolbert demonstrated in The Sixth Extinction (2015) that the sixth extinction is not a future event but a present condition with a documented cause.[34]

Frans de Waal dismantled the psychological alibi. Mama’s Last Hug (2019) documents the emotional and cognitive continuity between humans and other primates in detail that leaves no room for the beast-machine: empathy expressed as consolation, reconciliation after conflict, fairness preferences, yawn contagion, the embrace between a dying chimpanzee and the biologist who had known her for forty years.[27][28] Compassion, on this account, is not a uniquely human virtue that we extended outward as a favour. It is a trait we inherited, and our species has been systematically suppressing it.

Robin Wall Kimmerer supplied the economic alternative. Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) does not argue for austerity; it argues for a different unit of account — reciprocity, gratitude, and the gift economy, against a system whose “currency of an economy is not money” but the quality of our relationships.[30][31] The Three Sisters planting — corn, beans, squash, each fixing what the others need — is not a metaphor for a better economy. It is a better economy.

And the empirical side of the ledger is not uniformly bleak. The wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 restored a tritrophic cascade: willow and aspen regeneration, beaver return, a richer and more balanced system — with the caveat, well stated in the synthesis literature, that the exact attribution of these dynamics remains debated.[41] European bison, extinct in the wild since 1927, are back in Białowieża and the Southern Carpathians. Giant tortoises reintroduced to Indian Ocean islands have increased germination for endangered plants.[42] Around half of monitored wildlife populations are stable or increasing, and the Amazon Soy Moratorium cut soy-linked deforestation from nearly 30% to about 2%.[3]

9. Rebuilding the Frame

If the diagnosis is cognitive, the remedy must be cognitive too. WWF’s 2026 report is useful here precisely because it is not a plea — it is a description of system dynamics. Its central concept is the positive tipping point: a threshold beyond which change becomes self-reinforcing, so that change accelerates, costs fall, and reversal becomes harder.[1][3]

The energy system has already crossed it. Solar power went from niche to dominant new capacity in a generation, and the transition is now reinforced by economics, technology and market demand rather than by environmental ambition alone. The food system is at the “enabling” stage — the point where conditions for a tipping point are being created but the shift has not yet self-reinforced. The finance system is earlier still, and faces a concrete obstacle: a global biodiversity financing gap of roughly US$1.317 trillion a year, nearly double the $711 billion estimated in 2020, set to be debated at the CBD COP17 in Yerevan this month.[50] The remedy is also quantified. UNEP calculates that nature-based-solutions investment must grow 2.5-fold to US$571 billion a year by 2030 to meet the commitments of the CBD, UNFCCC and UNCCD — and that this is equivalent to roughly 0.5% of global GDP.[49] Half a percent. That is the entire size of the ask, set against a $7.3 trillion flow in the opposite direction.

That is a far more actionable diagnosis than “we need to care more.”

Change the language, because language is the load-bearing wall. Euphemistic labelling is not a matter of politeness; Bandura cites experimental evidence that it measurably enables cruelty.[20] Retire “natural resources” for “living systems” and “relatives.” Retire “units” for animals whose names and faces are known. The vocabulary of the extractive frame is the frame.
Make the encounter structural, not aspirational. The extinction of experience is a design problem, and therefore a design opportunity.[37][38] Contact with living systems — school grounds, urban habitat corridors, restored rivers, community-owned woodland — is infrastructure in the same sense that our analysis of ecological connectivity and urban environments argues green space is infrastructure. If children encounter the natural world daily, the incentive to destroy it becomes incoherent.
Treat the food system as the primary lever. WWF’s analysis is unambiguous: the food system is the leading cause of habitat loss, the energy system the leading cause of climate change, and finance the mechanism that bankrolls both.[2] The food system is therefore where the next positive tipping point must be triggered — through national food strategies, the overhaul of agricultural subsidies, nature-positive production, sustainable trade and consumption, and the reduction of food loss and waste.
Move money, not just sentiment. WWF’s five key actions include requiring credible climate and nature transition plans from major businesses, removing deforestation-linked products from supply chains, and redirecting investment toward restoration rather than decline.[3] The finance system is the earliest stage of its tipping point, which means it is the cheapest place to intervene and the most expensive to leave.
Restore the moral vocabulary, including the ugly parts of it. Compassion is a capacity, and capacities atrophy. This is an argument for practice rather than for a better argument: the more the encounter is engineered away, the less there is to feel for, and the less anyone will want to act.[40][27]
Treat the Anthropocene as a diagnosis, never as an alibi. “Geological” is not “irrelevant.” A species responsible for a geological transition is responsible for it.[36]

10. Conclusion: Reason in the Service of Kinship

We are not, as the standard story has it, a species that failed to learn. We are a species that learned too well — that we can model, coordinate, justify, and consequently exclude. The same faculty that lets a human being understand that a river is a living system also lets that person file it under “natural resources.” The same machinery that lets us organise a rescue also lets us organise a clearcut. Nothing in human cognitive architecture contains a stop that says: and this is a living thing, so the argument must end here.

But it does not need one, because the counter-tradition has always been a cognitive tradition, not a sentimental one. Naess got there from systems theory. Singer got there from epistemology. Taylor got there from first principles about what is owed to life. Kimmerer got there from botany and Potawatomi law. Wilson got there from species–area relationships. de Waal got there from the data. Each of them used the faculty in question against itself.

The evidence from the 2026 Living Planet Report is that this works. The same report that documents a 73% decline documents a recovering bluefin tuna, a recovering tiger, a recovering elephant, and a supply chain that moved deforestation from 30% to 2%. Around half of monitored populations are stable or rising. Nature can recover, and the conditions for recovery are not mysterious — they are financial, agricultural and political, which means they are, in the fullest sense, cognitive.

What is required is not that we become more intelligent. It is that we aim the intelligence we have at a different object. We already know what is happening. The missing ingredient is not a fact but a frame: the conviction, sustained by daily encounter and defended by argument, that the living world is not the backdrop to human history but its subject — and that every other creature is a neighbour rather than raw material.

The WWF report is subtitled The Science of Hope for a reason. Hope is not optimism, and it is certainly not a feeling. It is the name of a threshold.

A Livable Earth Is a Compassionate Earth

Key message: Our problem is not a lack of intelligence. It is a surplus of the wrong kind of intelligence — reason deployed in the service of justification rather than truth. Ideology is what reason becomes when it stops asking whether it should be used. Because the cause is cognitive, the remedy can be too: a new frame, in which the living world is not the backdrop to human history but its subject.

Further Reading & Tools

All links open in a new tab.

WWF Living Planet Report 2026 — The Science of Hope (full report and summaries)
WWF Living Planet Report 2026: What the Food Sector Needs to Know (briefing PDF)
UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026 — Nature in the Red (the $7.3tn / $220bn finance flows)
Paulson Institute, TNC & WWF, Financing Nature: A Mid-Decade Update (2026) — the US$1.317 trillion biodiversity financing gap, ahead of CBD COP17
IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019) — full report and Summary for Policymakers
FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2024 (SOFIA)
UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2 (2022)
UN DESA, World Urbanization Prospects 2025 — Summary of Results
WHO Air Quality fact sheets — ambient and household air pollution
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug — publisher page and interviews
Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (1954) — the ethic of “reverence for life”
The Guardian: “Human exceptionalism” (2025) — on de Waal’s “anthropodenial”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac — the Aldo Leopold Foundation archive
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring — the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass — publisher page and e360 interview
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction — publisher page
Rewilding Europe — European bison, Konik horses and Tauros reintroductions
Half-Earth Project — E. O. Wilson’s spatial proposal in practice

References

[1] WWF and Zoological Society of London, Living Planet Report 2026: The Science of Hope (8 October 2026). https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/living-planet-report-2026

[2] WWF International, “Living Planet Report 2026: Amid an average 73% decline in wildlife population sizes, scientists reveal grounds for hope” (8 October 2026). https://www.wwfca.org/en/?401797/Informe-Planeta-Vivo-de-WWF-2026

[3] WWF UK, “Living Planet Report 2026: What the Food Sector Needs to Know” (October 2026). https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2026-10/living-planet-report-2026-food-sector-briefing.pdf

[4] IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019). https://www.ipbes.net/global-assessment

[5] IPBES Secretariat, “How did IPBES estimate ‘1 million species at risk of extinction’?” (22 May 2019). https://www.ipbes.net/news/how-did-ipbes-estimate-1-million-species-risk-extinction-globalassessment-report

[6] Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer, “Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Science Advances 1, e1400253 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400253

[7] Roel van Klink et al., “Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances,” Science 368, 417–420 (2020). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931

[8] “Comment on ‘Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances’,” Science (2021). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd8947

[9] FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2024: Blue Transformation in action (Rome, 2024). https://www.fao.org/publications/fao-flagship-publications/the-state-of-world-fisheries-and-aquaculture/2024/en

[10] UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2 (2022). https://www.unccd.int/resources/global-land-outlook/overview

[11] UNCCD, “Chronic land degradation: UN offers stark warnings and practical remedies in Global Land Outlook 2” (26 April 2022). https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-land-degradation-un-offers-stark-warnings-and-practical

[12] FAO, “Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems: Global, regional and country trends, 2001–2023.” https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems.-global–regional-and-country-trends–2001-2023/en

[13] World Health Organization, “Household air pollution,” fact sheet (16 December 2025). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health

[14] World Health Organization, “Air pollution.” https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/air-quality-and-health/air-pollution

[15] UN DESA, World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results (18 November 2025). https://www.un.org/en/desa/WUP-2025

[16] Michael Tomasello, Henrike Moll, Malinda Goodrich and Claudio Tomasello, “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition,” Developmental Science 8(2), 113–124 (2005). https://dornsife.usc.edu/henrike-moll/wp-content/uploads/sites/404/2023/11/Tomasello_et_alll.pdf

[17] “Cultural intelligence, shared intentionality and human cognitive development,” Mind & Language (2024). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-024-09966-w

[18] Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(2), 57–74 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000968

[19] Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Sage, 1998). https://discourses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Teun-A.-van-Dijk-1998-Ideology.-A-Multidisciplinary-Approach.pdf

[20] Albert Bandura, “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3(3), 193–209 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

[21] Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 20(1), 53–77 (2001); discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Morality and Cognitive Science.” https://iep.utm.edu/m-cog-sc/

[22] Scott Barry, Joshua Knobe and David Loss, “A reason-based explanation for moral dumbfounding,” Judgment and Decision Making 13(2) (2018). https://sjdm.org/~baron/journal/18/181220a/jdm181220a.pdf

[23] Harriet Over, “Seven challenges for the dehumanisation hypothesis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 16(1), 3–13 (2021). https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/153302/

[24] “Recognizing humanity: dehumanization predicts neural mirroring and empathic accuracy in face-to-face interactions” (2021). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8094996/

[25] Joseph Lang, “The limited importance of dehumanization in collective violence,” Current Opinion in Psychology 35, 17–20 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.02.002

[26] “Dehumanization and aggression: A meta-analysis,” Aggression and Violent Behavior (2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178925000485

[27] Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (W. W. Norton, 2019); NPR interview, 1 March 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/01/698902400/mamas-last-hug-makes-case-that-humans-are-not-alone-in-experiencing-emotions

[28] Frans de Waal, interview with Nautilus, “Empathy, Morality, Community, Culture—Apes Have It All.” https://nautil.us/empathy-morality-community-cultureapes-have-it-all-234306

[29] Arne Naess, “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary,” Inquiry 16, 95–100 (1973). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00201747308601682

[30] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013); MacArthur Foundation, 2022. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2022/robin-wall-kimmerer

[31] Robin Wall Kimmerer, interview with Yale Environment 360, “Reciprocity: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Natural World.” https://e360.yale.edu/features/robin-kimmerer-interview

[32] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York Review / Random House, 1975). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-14346-5_6

[33] Richard D. Ryder, “Victims of Science” (Davis-Poynter, 1975) — the coinage of “speciesism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism

[34] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury, 2015) — Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. https://nature.berkeley.edu/albright/2021/kolbert

[35] E. O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (W. W. Norton, 2016); Half-Earth Project. https://halfearth.org/

[36] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41, 17–18 (2000). https://www.mpic.de/3865097/the-anthropocene

[37] J. R. Miller, “Biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20(8), 430–434 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2005.05.013

[38] “Breaking the intergenerational cycle of extinction of experience: Actions needed and pathways forward,” Cambridge Prisms: Extinction (2024). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-extinction/article/breaking-the-intergenerational-cycle-of-extinction-of-experience-actions-needed-and-pathways-forward/15EBF05C36F62DB4192A602B4C070F47

[39] “Societal extinction of species,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2022). https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(21)00359-1

[40] “The vicious cycle of biophobia,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2022). https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(22)00360-3

[41] William J. Ripple et al., “Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research,” PNAS 113(37) (2016). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1502556112

[42] John Carey, “Rewilding,” American Scientist (2016). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4743769/

[43] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949) — “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” https://www.aldoleopold.org/

[44] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962). https://www.rachelcarson.org/

[45] Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” Environmental Ethics 3(3), 197–218 (1981); developed in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1986). https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19813321

[46] Melanie Soga and Kevin J. Gaston, “Extinction of experience: the loss of human–nature interactions,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14(2), 94–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1890/150119

[47] Albert Schweitzer, “The Problem of Peace,” Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo (4 November 1954) — the fullest statement of his ethic of “reverence for life.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1952/schweitzer/lecture/

[48] Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Human exceptionalism,” The Guardian (16 November 2025) — on de Waal’s concept of “anthropodenial.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/16/human-exceptionalism-essay

[49] UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red — Powering the Trillion Dollar Nature Transition Economy (Nairobi, 22 January 2026). https://www.unep.org/en/publication-series/state-finance-nature

[50] Li Zhu, Terry Townshend, Rose Niu, Linda Krueger, Andrew Deutz and Kevin Bender, Financing Nature: A Mid-Decade Update — From Isolated Progress to Implementation at Scale (Paulson Institute, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, 23 September 2026). https://www.conservationgateway.org/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/documents/f/i/FinancingNature2026MidDecadeUpdate-d2.pdf

NewAntarctica.com / Ecology, Cognition & Human Nature

Truth and Lies

We have allowed advertising to visually represent real people, which viewers can then emulate. TV, then computers, internet and smartphones have progressively increased the sophistication and volume of these visually and auditorially ‘realistic” (portraying a person or persons) media-which has magnified the impact on the viewing public to extraordinary levels. What are the consequences?

The Manufactured Self: How Advertising Saturation Creates a Society of Performed Emotions.

We have allowed advertising to visually represent real people, which viewers can then emulate. TV, then computers, internet and smartphones have progressively increased the sophistication and volume of these visually and auditorially ‘realistic” (portraying a person or persons) media-which has magnified the impact on the viewing public to extraordinary levels. What are the consequences?

The first known video advertising featuring a person selling a product, appeared in the US in 1949 advertising a 12 inch Westinghouse Television, which (falsely) claimed that their new television eliminated rolling and static imaging on the screen, whilst conflating the image of the woman and the television set as being ‘easy on the eye’.

‘Video/archive: 1949 Westinghouse live TV commercial Archive

Timeline

1890s-1920s: Early movie advertising using projector slides and narrative product placements in silent films
1913: The first movie trailer is produced for a stage show
1941: The first licensed television commercial (Bulova watch) airs
1949: The first known TV advert featuring a person (Westinghouse)

The development of electronic media over the last 75 years has thus allowed advertising to visually represent ‘real’ people which viewers can then emulate. TV, then computers, the internet and smartphones have progressively increased the sophistication and volume of these visually and auditorially ‘realistic” media (portraying a person or persons)-which has magnified the impact on the viewing public to extraordinary levels.

Thus genuine feeling in social interactions is frequently replaced by rehearsed facial expressions, simplified phrases and ready-made identities.

Only thirty years ago, the current exaggerated open-mouthed expression of pleasure or surprise was rare in advertising and public life. A restrained smile conveyed satisfaction. A raised eyebrow suggested interest. Communication was subtler, more coded, and — critically — more likely to be genuine.

The shift began in the 1990s, driven by fashion photography and advertising, that discovered exaggerated facial expressions sold products more effectively. What followed was a gradual but relentless escalation.

Below is the chain of causation that has created this false world.

A. Advertising has saturated every media environment and increasingly every waking moment of human life.

B. Advertising operates primarily through emotional manipulation rather than truthful and factual representation.

C. This saturation and manipulation establish a kind of cultural template in which exaggeration, emotional performance, and the strategic misrepresentation of reality become normalized — not as aberrations, but as the default mode of social interaction.

D. People, having internalized this template, begin to present emotions they do not feel — in their faces, their voices, their body language, their written words, their social media posts, and their consumer reviews — not because of malice, but because the entire communicative ecosystem has been engineered to reward performed emotion over authentic real emotions and experience.

This is the logical consequence of an advertising ecosystem that spends trillions of dollars annually teaching human beings that how you make people feel matters more than what is true (2), and that ‘like-ability’ is the most predictive measure of commercial and personal success and infuence (2).

A car is associated with freedom. A drink is associated with belonging. A skin-care product is associated with confidence. A bank is associated with security. A fast-food meal is associated with family love. The message is not simply “buy this.” It is also “this is what happiness looks like,” “this is how desire should appear,” and “this is how a successful person responds.”

Marketing research treats emotional appeal as a central mechanism of persuasion because feelings can make a message seem personally relevant and memorable. The research is unambiguous: advertising succeeds not by providing information, but through performance of fake emotion. The University of Southern California’s analysis of advertising psychology found that 31% of emotionally driven ads succeed, compared to only 16% of rationally driven ads (2). The emotional response to an advertisement, ‘rather than the ad’s actual content, produces great influence on the intent of a consumer to buy a product” (2).

This finding is not just a description of what advertising does — it is a framework for how influence works in broader, (particularly Western) culture. When every person in a society is exposed to approximately 5,000 advertisements per day (2), they are receiving 5,000 daily lessons in a single method: make people feel something, and they will do what you want. The product being sold is irrelevant. The technique is transferable.

A person who has absorbed thousands of hours of emotionally manipulative advertising does not leave that training at the door of their workplace, their relationships, or their social media accounts. They have been taught, through relentless repetition, that performed emotion is the most effective tool of persuasion, and they will use it — often without conscious awareness that they are doing so, knowing that it works.

Workplaces already impose display rules on employees who must appear cheerful, calm or grateful regardless of their actual condition. Research on emotional labour shows that managing outward expression to meet such expectations can create strain, frustration and anger, particularly when the displayed feeling is far from the person’s lived experience.

Media and our ‘influencers’ from whatever source increasingly offer a smaller and smaller vocabulary of prefabricated phrases: “living my best life,” “good vibes,” “no negativity,” “you’ve got this,” “choose happy”- ad nauseam. These phrases can be comforting to the user in moderation. But they become emotionally impoverishing when they replace the harder work of identifying what is actually happening.

Look at any magazine cover, advertising campaign, or social media feed today and you’ll see it: the wide-open mouth. The gasp of delight. The hand over the heart. The breathless “Oh my God!” at a meal that is, after all, just a meal.

These expressions have become so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to ask a simple question: does anyone actually feel what they’re displaying?

Advertising Normalizes Exaggeration as Communication

The historical research on advertising reveals that before regulatory oversight, “hyperbole became the norm. Every product was the best, new and improved, the easiest to use, the safest, the most reliable” – Dewey, 2021. Once advertising regulation curbed the most egregious factual claims, the industry shifted to emotional and associative manipulation — techniques that are harder to regulate precisely because they operate through feeling rather than fact.

In consequence, a culture’s dominant communicative mode — the one practiced by its most visible, most funded, most professionally skilled communicators — is one in which saying something better than it is is not a failure of ethics, but a success of the craft.

Advertising professionals do not consider themselves liars; they consider themselves storytellers. And this reframing — from deception to narrative craft — has seeped into wider Western culture, providing a ready-made rationalization and excuse for anyone who wishes to exaggerate, embellish, or perform emotions they do not feel.

The Influencer Culture

Prior to the advent of the smartphone, personalised advertising on TV, Video and Film was acted via paid performers. The viewer was usually aware that the performer was a paid actor and not authentically portraying themselves. Nevertheless, the expert paid performer could (and still can) portray an element of personal authenticity in the delivery of the script.

However with the advent of the smartphone, the most direct mechanism through which advertising’s emotional performance template has colonised everyday social behavior is ‘influencer’ culture. ‘Influencers’ are, functionally, human advertisements — people who have monetized their personal lives opinions, and emotional expressions by making them persuasive to an audience.

Research on influencer authenticity demonstrates how thoroughly the advertising template has been absorbed into the viewers’ personal identity. The study found that perceived authenticity in influencers has a direct and indirect effect on consumer purchase intentions, mediated by trust and credibility (3). The standardized regression coefficient for trust (β = .44) reveals its centrality: audiences must believe an influencer is being genuine before they will be influenced by them (3).

‘Authenticity’ has consequently become a performance metric. Influencers do not simply need to ‘be authentic’; they must perform that authenticity convincingly enough to generate trust, which then generates purchasing behavior.

The research notes that “once the messaging of an influencer has been found to concur with the individual values and lifestyle of the followers, they are considered as intrinsically motivated and not extrinsically motivated by sponsorships, thus increasing the level of trust” (3).

Thus the most commercially valuable thing a person can do in the modern media ecosystem is convince others that their performed emotions are real. ‘Authenticity’ is not a quality to be possessed; it is a skill to be performed. And the better you perform it, the more influence — and money — you accumulate.

The Collapse of the Authentic and the Manufactured

The logical endpoint of this trajectory is visible in the emergence of virtual influencers — computer-generated personas that “replicate human appearance, personality, and social presence” while possessing “no memory, autonomy, or emotion” (4). Virtual influencers like Lil Miquela or imma.gram are entirely fabricated emotional performers. They do not (presumably!) feel anything. They have no bodies, no experiences, no inner space which makes meaning. Yet they engage audiences emotionally, generate trust, and drive purchasing behavior.

The research on virtual influencers reveals the cultural anxiety this produces: participants across multiple national contexts “expressed distinct thresholds for emotional resonance and divergent ethical concerns, particularly regarding disclosure, manipulation, and perceived authenticity” (4). The study introduces the concept of “synthetic mis-recognition” — the phenomenon of mistaking simulated emotion for real emotion — and argues that this mis-recognition has profound implications for “the ethics of simulating relational authenticity” (4).

But virtual influencers are not an aberration. They are the purest expression of what advertising has always taught: that performance of emotion is more valuable than the experience of it. If a computer-generated character with no feelings can sell products by performing feelings convincingly, then the message to every human content creator, social media user, and consumer is clear: your real feelings are less important than your performed ones.

Ordinary People as Advertisers of Themselves

The advertising template has spread beyond influencers and virtual characters to ordinary consumers. Research on inflated consumer testimonials found that psychological and emotional factors — including “self-image, self-enhancement as well as motivations for retribution against service providers” — significantly predict the creation of exaggerated, amplified review content (7).

The researchers frame this within Interpersonal Deception Theory, noting that “certain individuals tend to misrepresent facts and may willingly decide to deceive other persons, in their daily conversations, including in virtual ones” (7). The motivations are not solely selfish; they may include altruistic intentions, constructive criticism, and self-image management — all of which are emotional performances designed to create a particular impression in the minds of others.

What is significant though is that ‘ordinary’ people have adopted the exact techniques that advertising uses: exaggeration, emotional framing, selective emphasis, and the construction of a narrative designed to persuade rather than inform. The consumer writing an inflated review is doing, in miniature, exactly what a television advertisement does — making something sound better, more dramatic, and more emotionally resonant than it actually is. The advertising template has been democratised. Everyone is now their own advertising agency!

However the personal energy required to perform and deceive, rather than to simply express emotion, takes a considerable toll on both the performer and the receiver.

The Demand for Displayed Emotions

The chain of causation now becomes self-reinforcing. In a culture saturated with advertising and advertising-derived content (influencers, branded social media, curated personal narratives), the display of emotion becomes a social requirement. If everyone around you is performing emotion — performing happiness, enthusiasm, gratitude, outrage, desire — then the failure to perform emotion becomes conspicuous. It reads as coldness, disengagement, or social incompetence.

The research on virtual influencers captures this dynamic precisely: their appeal lies in their capacity to “emotionally engage users, often blurring the line between simulation and sincerity” (4). When the dominant mode of social interaction — mediated through screens, platforms, and algorithmically curated feeds — is one of performed emotional engagement, then real authenticity becomes not the natural state but the exception. The baseline expectation of interactions between people becomes performance.

The research on emotional abuse patterns identifies a key dynamic that applies metaphorically to the advertising-saturated culture: “You’re a different person around them. You find yourself doing and saying things you normally wouldn’t do but you have to in order to get through the interaction” (1).

In the advertising-saturated media environment, the “them” is not a single abuser but the person’s entire social ecosystem. People become different versions of themselves — performing emotions they do not feel, saying things they do not believe, presenting images that do not correspond to their reality — because the ecosystem demands it.

The Deceptive Design of Emotional Environments

The research on deceptive design in extended reality environments provides a technological dimension to this argument. XR (extended reality) technologies “enable new deception opportunities that are not present in other digital environments,” including the capacity for companies to “induce artificial emotions and target vulnerable users to influence their purchasing decisions” (6).

The study identifies that XR’s “immersive capabilities and extensive data collection enable subtle and powerful manipulation strategies” (6), and that these technologies can create emotional states in users that are then leveraged for commercial purposes. The concept of “emotional transparency” (from the virtual influencer research) becomes relevant here: in immersive advertising environments, the boundary between genuine emotion and induced emotion dissolves entirely (4). The user does not know whether they are feeling something real or something manufactured — and in a culture that has already normalized emotional performance, they may not care.

The Feedback Loop: Performed Emotion Becomes the Standard

The final link in the chain is the feedback loop.

Advertising teaches emotional performance. Influencers monetize emotional performance.Ordinary consumers adopt emotional performance.

Technology platforms are designed to induce and reward emotional performance. And at each stage, the threshold for what counts as “authentic” emotion is raised, because the culture has become so saturated with performed emotion that genuine emotional expression becomes indistinguishable from — and often less compelling than — its performed counterpart.

The research on influencer marketing confirms this: audiences rate “authenticity” not as the presence of genuine emotion but as the consistency, transparency, and personal relatability of the influencer’s performance (3).

A perfectly constructed performance of vulnerability will be rated as more “authentic” than a genuine but awkward expression of feeling, because the audience has been trained — by thousands of hours of advertising — to evaluate emotion on the basis of how well it is presented, not on whether it is real.

Emotional Alienation

When a person is required, by the structure of their social and commercial environment, to perform emotions they do not feel, the predictable consequence is a form of emotional alienation — a disconnection from one’s own (and other’s) internal emotional states.

The research on emotional abuse identifies this pattern at the individual level: victims report becoming “a different person” around their abusers, doing and saying things they would not normally do (1).

At the societal level, the same dynamic operates through the advertising-saturated media environment, which requires constant emotional performance and thereby erodes the individual’s connection to their actual feelings.

The Erosion of Trust

The research on inflated testimonials identifies a direct consequence of widespread emotional exaggeration: “A lack of credibility and trustworthiness in online reviews could negatively affect the consumers’ perceptions and attitudes toward the business” (7).

When everyone is performing, no one can be trusted — not because individuals are necessarily malicious, but because the ecosystem makes authentic communication structurally impossible.

The virtual influencer research describes this as a crisis of “emotional transparency” (4), and the deceptive design literature frames it as a problem of “synthetic misrecognition” (4) — the inability to distinguish real from performed emotion.

The Manufacture of Psychopathic Norms

Psychopathy, in clinical terms, is characterized not primarily by violence, but by superficial charm, manipulative behavior, and the absence of genuine emotional experience.

A culture that rewards emotional performance over emotional truth, that monetizes the appearance of authenticity, and that saturates every media environment with manufactured feeling, is a culture that structurally incentivises the behavioural profile of psychopathy — not because its members are all psychopaths, but because the system selects for psychopathic performance. This is especially true for those we deem as ‘leaders:-our politicians, our sports ‘heroes’, our cultural icons…

One of the key issues is that emotional awareness is not an ‘ornamental’ skill. It is vital to help people decide what they need, to communicate boundaries, to seek help, to repair relationships and to regulate others’ and their own behaviour.

It must be acknowledged however, that people differ in how they experience and communicate emotion, and our interpretations of others’, and our own emotions, must respect culture, neurodiversity, trauma history and individual circumstances. Emotional abuse, emotional neglect and physical neglect can have a profound effect on our capacity to express and understand the emotions of others.

The Advertising-Emotion-Deception Nexus

The argument, traced through the available research, can be summarised thusly:

Advertising’s saturation of all media(2) — from television to social media to extended reality environments (6) — has established emotional manipulation as the dominant mode of commercial communication(2).

This mode operates through exaggeration, selective framing, and the construction of inspirational emotional narratives that make products, services, and experiences sound better and more emotionally rewarding than they actually are.

This commercial template has been absorbed into broader culture through more and more sophisticated technology and influencer marketing (3), consumer review culture (7), social media performance, and the design of immersive digital environments (6).

Ordinary people, trained by thousands of daily exposures to emotionally manipulative advertising, have adopted the same techniques in their own self-presentation — performing emotions they do not feel, exaggerating their experiences, and constructing curated emotional narratives designed to persuade others rather than to communicate truthfully (7).

The result is a society in which emotional performance has replaced emotional experience as the default mode of social interaction — a society in which authenticity is a skill to be performed (3), in which computer-generated characters with no feelings can convincingly simulate emotional connection (4), and in which the structural demands of the media ecosystem may be engineering behaviors associated with emotional manipulation and the absence of genuine feeling.

While research remains limited on the issue, the societal frequency and intensity of alexithymia, a behavioural trait characterised by poor emotional awareness and description, may also be compounded by this advertising blitz of fake emotion.

There is a growing unease in modern life. People can be surrounded by messages, images, notifications, opinions and invitations to buy, yet remain strangely unable to say what is happening inside them. We may know that we are “stressed,” “fine,” “triggered” or “happy.” But we may not know whether we are grieving, ashamed, lonely, frightened, resentful, exhausted or morally disturbed.

This is Alexithymia: it is not the absence of emotion. It is a reduced ability to notice, identify and describe one’s own feelings. It is generally understood as a dimensional, subclinical trait rather than a diagnosis in itself. Researchers commonly describe three features: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing them to others, and an externally oriented thinking style that focuses more on facts and events than inner experience.

Are increasing numbers of people becoming alexithymic? The evidence does not yet establish a comparable, population-wide rise across the past several decades. Studies use different samples, cultures, questionnaires and thresholds. Some report high rates in particular groups, especially adolescents, students and people experiencing mental or physical illness. Those findings cannot be converted into a reliable global trend.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to take the possibility seriously. Modern societies expose people to chronic stress, childhood adversity, loneliness, commercial pressure, digital distraction and a powerful demand to display emotions that are legible, attractive and useful.

Visual displays like fist pumps or wide open mouths become a clearer expression to others when displayed on a small screen, as opposed to the subtle and multiple visual, auditory and chemical transmissions that (can) occur in real social settings.

We may be living in a culture that is increasingly emotionally performative while becoming less emotionally literate.

The Profound Impacts on Younger People

A child learns emotional language through their relationships. A responsive adult helps a child connect bodily states with words: “You are frightened,” “That hurt,” “You are disappointed,” “It is safe to be angry without hurting someone.”

When adults ignore, ridicule, punish or exploit a child’s feelings, the child may learn that inner experience is dangerous, useless or incomprehensible- so much safer and easier then, to just perform the required emotional display.

When feelings remain unnamed and unrecognised, they can be harder to regulate and easier to express indirectly through withdrawal, aggression, compulsive activity, substance use or physical symptoms.

Young people are not simply more vulnerable to advertising because their brains are immature, but advertising-saturated digital environment may also be actively impairing the development of the brain regions that would eventually allow them to resist advertising’s influence (17).

Children learn to identify and express emotions partly through mirroring — observing how the adults around them respond to situations. If those responses are consistently exaggerated or performative, children internalise a distorted model of emotional life.

In addition, younger people are particularly vulnerable to this ‘selling’ onslaught because of their more limited experiences of life, and consequently often model these exaggerated behaviours by ‘influencers’ and other salespeople in the media who are thus deemed to be ‘important’ and of high social status.

Young people are not merely more susceptible to advertising. They are being shaped by it at the neurological, psychological, and identity levels in ways that make performed emotion not a choice but the default response.

That is not to say that we should simply ban young people from accessing ‘social media’. What is needed instead is more effective parental and school-based training on how to educate and support children in safely and honestly engaging in real social settings.

With these skills and confidence, electronic social and other media and advertising becomes far easier and safer to navigate for a young person.

CONCLUSION

Let us not however deceive ourselves that humanity’s capacity to deceive each other and ourselves is somehow a new or unique ‘skill’ brought about by advertising! Propaganda techniques have been around for more than 2000 years!

The capacity to fake, to pretend and to deceive are not just human traits- they are traits exhibited by all species from time immemorial to extend the survival of the individual and the group.

What is unique however, is its current and pervasive prevalency in modern human society- an adaptation from a survival mechanism to a default mechanism for social acceptance and consumption.

Additionally, it has to be said that new communicative styles (a wide open mouth, a fist pump, or an OMG) are not solely the result of media inputs.

The human brain’s insatiable need for ‘more’ has been supercharged through advertising media and the technologies which have enabled saturation advertising.

On a finite planet, humanity’s insatiable need for ‘more” has only one outcome…

A population that cannot name its feelings is easier to manipulate through fear, resentment and commercial desire. Public debate becomes a contest between emotional triggers rather than an effort to understand competing needs. People who are grieving are told to be positive. People who are angry are offered an enemy. People who are lonely are offered a product.

Human societies function on an assumption of trust that others are, predominantly, communicating what they actually feel. Facial expressions evolved as honest signals. A genuine smile — the Duchenne smile, involving the muscles around the eyes — was a reliable indicator of real pleasure. We are neurologically wired to trust these signals.

Without that baseline of trust between its individuals, a community, a society, a culture, or a global culture, become fragmented, distrustful and fearful. Skepticism and social fatigue become the norm. When people cannot easily distinguish genuine emotion from performance, they may withdraw from emotional engagement altogether. And if we assume everyone around us is performing, we become less likely to respond with genuine compassion to someone’s real distress. Manipulation becomes that much easier. When the language of strong emotion is constantly performative, those who genuinely wish to deceive find easy fertile ground.

There is also an ecological consequence. The destruction of forests, rivers, animals and climate systems is not just a technical problem. It is a failure of relationship and moral perception. If people are trained to treat their own inner discomfort as noise, they also become less able to register the suffering of other humans, other species and the wider living world.

We must rebuild our emotional vocabulary and skills, develop and encourage honest communication, trauma-informed care, and revitalise institutions that allow real feeling of expression rather than requiring permanent positivity.

We must begin to make room for experience and emotional states that are less scripted and more honest.

Families and schools can teach children a richer emotional vocabulary without forcing them to perform it. Workplaces can question display rules that require permanent cheerfulness. Health services can ask about emotional awareness without dismissing physical symptoms.

Communities can create places where people are allowed to be uncertain, vulnerable, grieving, or conflicted and still worthy of belonging.

Research Sources and URLs

(1) :Emotional abuse signs and healing, personal testimony: Being “a different person” around others as a sign of manipulation; the pattern of performing emotions to survive an interaction

(2): USC Applied Psychology — “Thinking vs Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising” :31% emotional vs 16% rational ad success; 5,000 ads/day; likeability as the primary predictor of ad effectiveness

(3): Influencer authenticity, trust, and purchase intentions (Gen Z): Perceived authenticity mediates purchase behavior through trust (β = .44) and credibility; authenticity is a performed quality

(4): Virtual influencers: ethical and cultural dimensions (Myanmar, South Korea, Singapore, USA) :Synthetic misrecognition; emotional transparency; VIs simulate emotion without experiencing it; cultural variation in ethical discomfort

(6): Deceptive design in Extended Reality (University of Waterloo, 2024): XR enables “inducing artificial emotions” and targeting vulnerable users; immersive manipulation strategies |

(7): Inflated consumer testimonials: self-image, self-enhancement, retribution motivations: Self-image and self-enhancement predict exaggerated reviews; ordinary consumers adopt advertising’s techniques of exaggeration

(8): Hogeveen & Grafman, 2021, Alexithymia (Handbook of Clinical Neurology; PMC8456171). Alexithymia is a subclinical construct involving disrupted emotional awareness. It is linked to impaired functional outcomes and treatment response; major issues include emotional awareness, communication, interoception, and measurement. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8456171/

(9): Kick et al., 2024, Alexithymia as a mediator between adverse childhood events and the development of psychopathology: a meta-analysis (Frontiers in Psychiatry; PMC11246998 ). Meta-analysis found child abuse correlated with alexithymia (r=.26), alexithymia with general psychopathology (r=.44); emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect were stronger correlates than physical/sexual abuse. Mediation is partial and correlational. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11246998/

(10): Ursoniu et al., 2024, The interconnection between social media addiction, alexithymia and empathy in medical students (Frontiers in Psychiatry; PMC11446739 ). Cross-sectional sample of 649 medical students. 21.42% possible and 14.02% clear alexithymia by TAS-20 thresholds. Model found social-media addiction associated with alexithymia and an indirect association with empathy; only about 11% of empathy variability explained, single-site student sample, no causal inference. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11446739/

(11): Tsubaki & Shimizu, 2024, Psychological Treatments for Alexithymia: A Systematic Review (Behavioral Sciences; PMC11673933 ). Review of 18 RCTs / 21 intervention arms / 1,251 participants. Most psychological interventions reduced TAS-20 scores, but studies were heterogeneous and larger, higher-quality trials are needed.URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11673933/

(12): Advertising evidence: marketing research documents emotional appeals as a central persuasive strategy; research on social-media self-presentation finds expressions are often idealized, exaggerated, and unrealistic. These sources support discussion of a cultural environment of performed and commodified emotion, not proof that advertising causes alexithymia. URLs: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43039-026-00136-2 ; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18539-w

(13): Emotional-labour literature defines display rules as explicit or implicit expectations to show particular emotions, and links inauthentic display to strain/burnout in some settings. This supports a cautious analogy to commercial emotional display, not a direct clinical claim. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10863272/

The Killing Fields of Aotearoa/New Zealand

Just as Britain lead the world out of the evils of slavery in the 19th century, Aotearoa has the opportunity to lead the world out of the dark age of extraction and into an era of inter-species harmony. The choice, ultimately, is whether we will continue to be a hunter-killer state, or finally become the peaceful, harmonious society we claim to be.

The Hunter-Killer State and the Illusion of Species Supremacy: Re-imagining Aotearoa’s Relationship with the Living World

Globally, Aotearoa New Zealand is marketed as a pristine, peaceful utopia. It is the “clean, green” paradise of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, a nuclear-free haven, and a progressive society nestled in a breathtaking natural environment.

But this carefully curated branding masks a dark, systemic reality. Beneath the rolling green hills and the pristine marketing campaigns lies a society deeply structured around violence, domination, and killing.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the government’s recent $2.7 billion defense package to purchase five MH-60R Seahawk “Romeo” helicopters. This purchase is not merely a military upgrade; it is the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar manifestation of a national psyche addicted to violence. From the slaughterhouses that drive our export economy to the poisoned forests of our biodiversity projects, and our eager enlistment in foreign wars, New Zealand is not a peaceful nation. It is a profoundly violent one.

But to truly change this, we must look beyond the policies and confront the philosophical root of our violence: our arrogant and foolish belief in human supremacy.

The $2.7 Billion “Hunter-Killer”: Servicing Empire Over the Pacific

The MH-60R Seahawk is a premier “hunter-killer” helicopter, heavily optimized for Anti-Submarine and Anti-Surface Warfare. It is a weapon of war, designed to track and destroy enemies in the deep ocean.

Yet, the New Zealand government justifies this recent exorbitant purchase by claiming it will help with Pacific Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR). This is a profound deception. The MH-60R’s cabin is packed with mission computers and weapons systems, not optimized for carrying bulk disaster relief. With only five air-frames, NZ may only ever have one or two fully operational at any given time—leaving almost zero surge capacity for a major Pacific cyclone.

If the government genuinely cared about Pacific civil defence, they would have purchased heavy-lift, utility-focused aircraft like the Boeing CH-47F Chinook or the utility variant MH-60S “Sierra”. But we didn’t buy those. We bought hunter-killer choppers. Why? Because New Zealand has a long, sycophantic history of enthusiastically joining UK and US wars of aggression. The MH-60R ensures the Royal New Zealand Navy can act as a subordinate, interoperable asset for the US and Australian navies to thwart a mythical Chinese invasion thereat. It is a tool of empire, bought with money that could have been used to genuinely protect the Pacific.

The Slaughterhouse Economy: Millions of Lives, Objectified as “Products”

We know that those exposed to military violence abroad, bringtheir violence and trauma home with them This militarism abroad mirrors our violence at home. The foundation of New Zealand’s rural economy is built on the industrialized killing of sentient beings. Each year, the agricultural sector slaughters tens of millions of animals. While the industry uses sterile, bureaucratic language to desensitize the public to the terror and cruelty they inflict —referring to living, feeling individuals as “stock,” “meat,” “carcasses,” and “products”—the reality is visceral and brutal.

Recent scientific consensus has thoroughly dismantled the Cartesian illusion that animals are unfeeling automatons. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness formally acknowledged that non-human animals possess the neurological substrates of consciousness. Research has proven that cows experience grief, pigs possess complex problem-solving skills and emotional depth, sheep and even bees recognize human faces. They have full cognition, social structures, and a desire to live.

Yet our legal and economic systems maintain a staggering cognitive dissonance. While the NZ Animal Welfare Act was amended in 2015 to formally recognize animals as “sentient,” this very same state sanctions their mass slaughter. Below is a table illustrating the sheer scale of this killing over a recent five-year period (excluding the additional 100+ million poultry killed annually):

The methods of this killing are inherently violent: captive bolt guns, electrical water-bath stunning, and ex-sanguination. We normalize this daily, systemic bloodshed because it lines the pockets of big business and the export economy.

The “Pest” Paradigm: Militarizing Conservation

This culture of killing extends deep into our native bush. New Zealand’s biodiversity sector is dominated by a lethal paradigm: the obsession with killing introduced mammals to save indigenous birds.

Under the banner of “Predator Free 2050,” the state sanctions the killing of roughly 8 to 10 million possums annually, alongside millions of rats, stoats, and ferrets. We use military tactics—bombing the forests with 1080 poison, which causes a slow, agonizing death by internal organ failure, and deploying steel-jawed leg-hold traps.

This approach relies heavily on the sanctification of the hunter and the trapper as the heroes of our natural environment. But it requires a massive, willful blind spot. The NZ biodiversity movement rarely acknowledges the root cause of indigenous species decline: humans and our actions. The destruction of native habitats through rampant deforestation for grazing and dairy conversion, and urban sprawl is the primary driver of extinction.

Yet, rather than addressing the unsustainable expansion of the human footprint, or transitioning to true re-wilding, the conservation establishment defaults to endless culling. We are attempting to bomb, poison, and trap our way to ecological health, just as we buy hunter-killer helicopters to strafe our way to geopolitical relevance.

Beyond Human Supremacy: The Inherent Equality of All Life

To break this cycle of violence, we must dismantle the philosophical foundation that makes it possible: anthropocentrism: the belief that human beings are the supreme rulers of the Earth, and that all other life exists merely as a resource for our consumption. That belief is a destructive fiction and the key driving force for humans destruction of our natural environment globally.

The reality of our shared existence demands the recognition of the inherent equality of all living beings. This does not mean that a human, a cow, or a kauri tree are exactly the same; it means that their right to exist, to flourish, and to live free from unnecessary suffering is of equal moral weight. A pig is the center of its own universe, just as a human is. A possum, a rat, and a kiwi all possess an inherent value that is entirely independent of their utility—or perceived detriment—to human beings or our prioritising of one species over another because of our conservation ideology.

When we view the world through the lens of inherent equality, the language of “pests,” “stock,” and “resources” dissolves. We recognize that we are not the masters of the web of life, but merely one strand within it. The violence we inflict on the slaughterhouse and forest floor is directly derived from the arrogant and foolish delusion that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, the natural world.

Five Pillars for an Inter-species Aotearoa

To transition from a Hunter-Killer State to a society of inter-species harmony, we must move beyond identifying its failings and illogicality to creating a new reality. New Zealand has the geographic isolation, the wealth, the innovation and the progressive heritage to pioneer this shift. Such a new paradigm could look something like the following…

1. The Parliament of All Beings: Expanding Legal Person-hood

New Zealand is already a global pioneer in the “Rights of Nature” movement, having granted legal person-hood to the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua) and Te Urewera. But we have stopped halfway. We must expand this legal framework to grant person-hood and inherent rights to all sentient species and ecosystems.

Imagine establishing an “Ecological Parliament” of equals. Just as the Whanganui River has human guardians to speak for it in court, every major species—the kiwi, the kauri, the honeybee, the cow—would have legally appointed, ecologically trained guardians. Their sole mandate would be to veto legislation, economic projects, or agricultural practices that harm their species’ right to flourish. This shifts our legal system from protecting human ‘property’ to protecting ecological kinship and inter-connectivity.

2. From the Slaughterhouse to a Laboratory of Caring

The argument against ending animal agriculture is always economic: “We need the export revenue.” But this assumes we cannot innovate our way out of the slaughterhouse. New Zealand has world-class agricultural science and a highly skilled rural workforce.

We must redirect the billions in agricultural subsidies away from the meat and dairy export model, and invest heavily in new strategies like plant protein based agriculture, fruit and nut tree proteins and precision fermentation using food-forest, permaculture and organic principles.

Our farmers wouldn’t be forced out of business; they would be retrained and subsidized to become “ecosystem stewards” and bio-technologists. NZ could transition from being the world’s slaughterhouse to the world’s “Laboratory of Caring,” exporting high-tech, cruelty-free, climate-positive food systems and proving that a vibrant rural economy doesn’t require a bloody foundation.

3. Healing the Hunter-Killer Psyche (Eco-Psychology)

We cannot change our external policies without addressing the internal, psychological conditioning that makes us comfortable with killing. New Zealand’s cultural identity is heavily tied to the “Hunter” (the bloke with the rifle and his pig-dogs in the bush), the “Warrior” (the ANZAC mythos), and the “Conqueror” (the pioneer clearing the bush).

We must integrate ‘Eco-Psychology’ into our education system and public health initiatives. We need to actively deconstruct the “toughness” associated with killing animals and fighting in foreign wars, replacing the “Hunter-Killer” archetype with the “Cultivator-Healer” who understands humanity’s interconnection with the rest of the natural world and our own dependence on it for our own survival. True inter-species harmony requires humans to heal their own disconnection from nature and their own internalized violence.

4. Aotearoa as the World’s First Inter-species Sanctuary

In 1984, New Zealand took a massive geopolitical risk and declared itself a Nuclear-Free Zone. It was mocked by superpowers at the time, but it ultimately became our greatest point of national pride and remains so to this day. It is time to expand this legacy into an “Inter-species and Ecological Peace” Declaration’.

New Zealand should formally declare its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and landmass a “Sanctuary from Speciesism and Ecological Violence.” This would mean legally banning the importation of products derived from ecologically destructive practices, banning lethal conservation methods (like 1080 and leg-hold traps) on all public lands, and refusing to participate in international military alliances that project violence into the Pacific. It would be a beacon to the world, proving that a modern nation can choose coexistence over conquest.

5. Technological Symbiosis and Non-Invasive Conservation

Our current conservation model relies on brute force: poison, traps, and bullets. The future model must rely on deep listening and technological symbiosis. Instead of spending millions on helicopters to drop poison, we must invest in AI-driven bio-acoustic monitoring networks, drone-assisted native seed dispersal, and genetic research into disease and predator resistance for native birds like the kiwi and kākāpō.

We must use technology to understand and facilitate nature’s own resilience, rather than using technology to bombard nature into submission. In this new paradigm, we can move from being the arrogant “managers” of the forest to its humble “students.”

Re-wilding the Budget and the Mind

New Zealand likes to look in the mirror and see a peaceful, progressive, nature-loving nation. But a society that slaughters 22 million sentient animals a year, poisons and destroys its own forests, and eagerly spends billions on weapons of war is suffering from a profound moral sickness.

True environmentalism and true peace require us to lay down our weapons, our traps, and our poisons. We must abandon the arrogant illusion of human supremacy and embrace the inherent equality of all living beings.

How Gulf Oil Disruptions Threaten Australia and New Zealand’s Energy Security

The Global Context: A Crisis Without Precedent

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created what the International Energy Agency calls “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market” . Flows through the Strait—normally carrying 20 million barrels daily—have fallen to “a trickle,” with oil exports from Gulf producers dropping from approximately 20 million barrels per day to just 3.8 mb/d in early April .

This isn’t just about crude oil. The crisis has triggered unprecedented price spikes in refined products, with Singapore middle distillate prices reaching all-time highs above $290/barrel . For Australia and New Zealand—nations at the end of global supply chains—the implications are immediate and severe.

Price Forecasts: What to Expect by June 2026

Given that the war against Iran by Israel and the US is an existential one for Iran- i.e. Israel, and likely the US’s intent, is to destroy Iran as a cohesive state and break it into statelets who can no longer pose a threat to Israel’s Greater Israel project or disrupt future US control over Iranian oil, any peace agreement for Iran must include continued control over the State of Hormuz to ensure the state of Iran’s continued viability. It is unlikely that the US will concede to this in the short to medium term, especially given the control that Israel currently has over US foreign policy.

Additionally, should the US attempt further substantial attacks on Iranian infrastructure after the ceasefire likely ends on May 20th 2026, Iran has promised to destroy other Gulf States energy infrastructure.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed or severely constrained through June 2026 or longer, energy markets face a prolonged supply crisis with cascading price effects:

Crude Oil and Refined Product Prices

Product	Current/Recent Price	June 2026 Forecast (Hormuz Closed)
Brent Crude	~$103/bbl (March avg)	$115+/bbl (EIA peak forecast for Q2 2026)
Singapore Gasoil (Diesel)	$192/bbl (April)	$200-250+/bbl (IEA alternative scenario)
Singapore Jet Fuel	Surged 114% since Feb 28	$250-300+/bbl (record highs sustained)
VLSFO (Bunker Fuel)	S$2.30/litre (Singapore)	S$2.50-3.00+/litre (competing demand from refiners)
Australian Retail Diesel	AUD $3.20+/litre	AUD $3.50-4.00+/litre (potential doubling if crisis persists)
Australian Retail Petrol	~$2.20/litre (post-excise cut)	AUD $2.50-3.00/litre
US Retail Diesel	~$5.80/gallon (April peak)	$6.00-7.00+/gallon

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has presented two scenarios: a base case assuming gradual resumption of Hormuz flows by mid-year, and an alternative “prolonged conflict” case where “energy markets and economies around the world need to brace for significant disruptions in the months to come”. Under the prolonged conflict scenario, physical crude prices could sustain levels near $150/bbl, with refined products trading at unprecedented premiums .

As of mid-April 2026, oil futures traders are maintaining an almost constant West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price per barrel of around $100 US, while real Dated oil prices hover around the $140 mark. Futures traders are for some reason responding to oft repeated wild claims by Trump that victory, a peace agreement or at least an opening of the Straits, is imminent.

The IEA estimates it will take 2 years for global oil supplies to return to their previous levels once the Strait is reopened because of the extensive damage to Gulf refineries, storage facilities and docks.

Key Price Drivers

Diesel shortage structural: The IEA estimates 3-4 million barrels per day of diesel supply loss (5-12% of global consumption) directly tied to Hormuz disruptions
Refinery capacity offline: Middle East and Asian refineries cut runs by ~6 mb/d in April, tightening global product markets
Brent-WTI spread widening: The spread reached $12/bbl in March and is projected to peak at $15/bbl in April, reflecting Asian supply anxiety

Australia: The Diesel Nation at Breaking Point

The Dependency Problem

Australia is perhaps the most vulnerable developed nation to a liquid fuel emergency. In FY2021, 91% of all fuel consumed in Australia was imported—including 68% as refined products and imported crude for our remaining refineries .

Over the past 20 years, Australia like many other Western countries has substantially reduced the number of oil refineries on shore, opting instead for those refineries to become solely storage facilities for distilled oil products; predominantly from Asia. Two active refineries remain in Australia with the smaller one recently impacted by a refinery fire.

Australia sits at the end of a complex supply chain stretching thousands of kilometers from Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan. While only a small fraction of their diesel imports come directly from the Middle East, almost half of the crude oil for production of that diesel originates in the Middle East when traced back through those Asian refineries.

The Diesel Consumption Profile

Australia’s economy runs on diesel. In 2025, the nation consumed approximately 35 billion litres of diesel—far exceeding the 15 billion litres of petrol and 10 billion litres of aviation fuel . The consumption breakdown reveals critical vulnerabilities:Table

Sector	Diesel Share	Annual Consumption	Vulnerability Level
Mining	40% of total diesel	~14 billion litres	CRITICAL
Road Transport/Trucking	24%	~8.4 billion litres	HIGH
Agriculture	8%	~2.8 billion litres	HIGH
Manufacturing	7%	~2.5 billion litres	MEDIUM
Marine/Rail	Significant	~3+ billion litres	MEDIUM
Passenger Vehicles	~25% of remainder	~4+ billion litres	MEDIUM

Australia has one of the highest per capita diesel demands in the world—7.4 barrels per person annually—far exceeding the US and other major economies .

The Refinery Crisis

Australia’s domestic refining capacity has collapsed. Five refineries closed over the last decade, leaving just two operational: Ampol’s Lytton refinery in Brisbane and Viva’s Geelong refinery in Victoria. These facilities were already struggling before the current crisis—and then came the April 2026 fire at Geelong.

The fire at Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery—built in the 1950s—shut down critical units. As analyst Kevin Morrison noted: “This creates the conditions for higher prices, as it pushes up international demand for refined products when supply is massively constrained. It could not happen at a worse time.” Victoria alone consumes 252,000 barrels of fuel daily—41% diesel, 22% jet fuel—and now faces sourcing these volumes from already-tight Asian markets.

The structural problem? Our remaining refineries are configured to produce mostly petrol rather than aviation fuel and diesel—precisely the fuels most critical for agriculture, road freight, mining, and defense .

Stockholding: The 90-Day Myth

Australia has been in breach of International Energy Agency (IEA) obligations since 2012. The IEA requires 90 days of net import coverage; Australia holds just 68 IEA days, and when measured against actual consumption, this equates to roughly 30-34 days of real fuel security .

The government counts “fuel in transit”—on foreign-flagged tankers in foreign ports—toward reserves. But as the Australia Institute notes: “In the event of a global emergency, there is no guarantee that the oil that Australia has been promised access to… would be practically accessible.” These ships are not Australian vessels; they sail under foreign flags and owe no allegiance to Australian fuel security.

With the Strait closed, Australia is now pulling diesel along some of the longest and most expensive trade routes in the world—13,000-mile journeys from the US Gulf Coast taking up to two months .

Mining Sector: The $4.5 Billion Diesel Addiction

The mining industry is Australia’s most diesel-exposed sector, consuming approximately 9.6 billion litres annually—roughly 40% of national diesel consumption and 10% of total national energy use . The sector operates more than 50,000 large diesel-powered trucks, each consuming approximately 900,000 litres annually .

Cost Impact Calculations:

At pre-crisis diesel prices (~AUD $1.75/litre), a large mine’s annual fuel bill for a 200hp tractor running 1,500 hours was ~$74,000
At current prices (~AUD $2.25-2.50/litre), that same operation costs $100,000-112,000 annually—a 35-50% increase
If prices reach $3.50-4.00/litre by June, costs could double from the original baseline

According to S&P Global and BMO estimates using Wood Mackenzie data, every 10% increase in oil prices drives mining cost increases of:

Iron ore: +4.2% mining costs
Copper: +3.5% mining costs
Gold: +2% mining costs

With crude oil potentially averaging $100+/bbl (47% above 2025 average), mining costs could rise 16-20% for bulk commodities .

Operational Risks: The mining industry faces a shutdown timeline measured in weeks if diesel supplies are interrupted:

Best-positioned mines: 4-8 weeks of operational capacity
Typical remote diesel-heavy mines: 2-6 weeks before curtailment
Weakest operations: Days to 2 weeks

The ASX Materials Index has already plunged 20.3% since the conflict began, with fund managers dumping stocks amid fears of fuel shortages forcing production cuts .

Agriculture: Harvest Season Crisis

Australian agriculture consumes approximately 2.5 billion litres of diesel annually, with diesel accounting for 84% of on-farm energy consumption . The crisis has hit at the worst possible time—during harvest season when fuel demand peaks .

Impact on Farm Economics:

A farm using 80,000 litres annually faced fuel costs of ~$140,000 at $1.75/litre pre-crisis
At current $2.25+/litre, costs have jumped to $180,000+ annually—a $40,000+ increase per farm
If diesel reaches $3.50/litre by June, that same farm faces $280,000 annual fuel costs—double pre-crisis levels

Farmers are already making critical decisions about whether to proceed with crops given uncertainty about diesel allocations later in the year . Adding diesel and freight costs means nearly 60% of farmers’ cost base is increasing rapidly .

The Fuel Tax Credits Scheme (FTCS)—which provides AU$4.5 billion annually to mining and AU$1.3 billion to agriculture—has become a critical but increasingly inadequate buffer .

Food Supply Chain: From Farm to Shelf

Australia’s food supply chain is diesel-dependent at every stage:

Production: Tractors, harvesters, irrigation pumps
Processing: Generators, machinery
Distribution: Road trains, trucking (24% of national diesel consumption)

Higher diesel costs cascade through the food system:

Transport costs increase directly with fuel prices
Processing costs rise due to diesel-powered equipment
Retail prices must absorb these increases or face margin compression

The Australian Industry Group warns that disruption to fuel markets creates cascading supply chain impacts, with businesses already reporting fuel-related operational challenges .

Tourism and Aviation

The tourism sector faces a triple hit:

Jet fuel costs: Singapore jet fuel surged 114% since February 28
Airfare increases: AirAsia X has increased fares by up to 40% due to fuel costs
Ground transport: Higher petrol and diesel costs affect rental cars, tour buses, and visitor travel patterns

Air New Zealand has already canceled 1,100 flights impacting over 44,000 passengers between March and early May due to fuel cost pressures .

The Australian Government Response

On March 30, 2026, the Australian National Cabinet activated the National Fuel Security Plan, currently at Level 2 (“Keeping Australia Moving”) . Measures include:

Halving fuel excise from 52.6 cents to 20.6 cents per litre for three months
Temporarily reducing minimum stockholding obligations by 20% for diesel and petrol
Amending fuel quality standards to allow higher sulfur levels, releasing ~100 million litres/month of additional petrol supply
Appointing a Fuel Security Taskforce Coordinator
Underwriting additional fuel cargoes and strategic reserves

However, energy analysts question whether the excise cut was optimally targeted. Macquarie University’s Lurion De Mello notes: “Petrol is not the pain point. Diesel is the pain point” . Deakin University’s Samantha Hepburn warns: “Any disruption in diesel supply or sustained high prices… will directly affect production capacity, increase operating costs and ultimately push up food prices” .

The Australia Institute recommends accelerating electric vehicle adoption to reduce petrol demand, thereby freeing refining capacity for diesel and jet fuel security .

New Zealand: The Marsden Point Gamble

The Refinery Closure Decision

New Zealand made a calculated bet in 2022—and now faces the consequences. The Marsden Point refinery, which produced half the country’s petrol, two-thirds of diesel, and most jet fuel, was converted to an import terminal. The rationale was economic: the refinery was inefficient by international standards, and importing refined products from mega-refineries in Asia was cheaper.

The government and industry argued this improved security: “Closing the refinery has actually improved our security of supply, as there is now more than twice as much fuel on the water to replenish domestic stocks than when we produced it locally.”

But this logic contains a fatal flaw. New Zealand no longer imports crude oil—but the Asian refineries we depend on do. In 2024, New Zealand’s top four source countries (Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan) sourced almost 80% of their crude oil imports from Persian Gulf countries .

As MFAT’s July 2025 analysis states: “In the event of disruption of Middle Eastern supply, Asian refineries would be forced to source crude product from elsewhere, pushing up the global price for oil” . New Zealand faces indirect but severe exposure to Gulf disruptions through our refined product suppliers.

Current stock levels provide approximately 47 days of diesel, 51 days of petrol, and 49 days of jet fuel coverage—better than Australia but still precarious if Asian refining capacity falters .

As of mid-April 2026, the New Zealand government’s sole strategy has been to monitor the volume and consequent days left of the various oil substrates in the country. The reality is that the risks to New Zealand’s economy are the combined factors of stocks available and the cost at the pump of those stocks New Zealand may well find that by June there are still tankers available to supply oil substrates to New Zealand but at a price that is unaffordable to the public.

Already truck operators are warning of hugely increased supermarket food prices in the pipeline because of the massively increased transport costs involved in supplying the supermarkets from New Zealand’s highly centralised grocery supply chain. Decentralisation of essential services across new Zealand is thus a very urgent priority.

Economic Impact Forecasts

ASB Bank has downgraded New Zealand’s growth outlook due to the fuel crisis, forecasting:

GDP growth slowing through 2026
Inflation rising toward 4% before easing in 2027
Households facing $4,000-6,000 annual hit if fuel prices stay elevated

Westpac identifies tourism as particularly vulnerable, forecasting that “the most direct impact of the shock on exports will likely show up in falling visitor numbers” due to flight disruptions, higher airfares, and consumer reluctance to travel internationally during heightened tensions .

Tourism Sector Impact

New Zealand’s tourism sector—still recovering from COVID-19—faces severe headwinds:

Flight cancellations and route reductions: Air New Zealand has already cut capacity
Higher airfares: Jet fuel costs have surged 114%, forcing ticket price increases
Reduced international visitor numbers: Westpac expects reversal of recent strong growth in arrivals
Domestic tourism pressure: Higher petrol prices reduce Kiwis’ willingness to travel domestically

Regional Variations: Regions dependent on self-drive tourism—West Coast, Tasman, Southland, Gisborne—face particular pressure. These areas already have disproportionate visitor spending on fuel, primarily because of a lack of local international airports, making them vulnerable to petrol price volatility .

Tourism Industry Aotearoa reports businesses are experiencing “sharp increase in business costs as a result of the leap in fuel prices” . The NZX50 fell nearly 6% in March 2026, with travel and tourism stocks—including Serko, Air New Zealand, Tourism Holdings, SkyCity Entertainment, and Auckland International Airport—among the hardest hit .

The Political Reckoning

The Marsden Point closure has become politically contentious. New Zealand First MP Shane Jones, now Associate Energy Minister, has called the previous government’s decision “reckless.” Westpac chief economist Kelly Eckhold has challenged critics: “Would you close it if it was open today?”

Reopening Marsden Point is likely impossible. The refinery was configured to process imported Middle Eastern crude—not New Zealand’s own light, sweet domestic production, which is entirely exported. Even if the infrastructure remained intact (it doesn’t), the facility couldn’t process local oil.

Government Response

New Zealand has activated its Fuel Response Plan 2026, currently in Phase 1: Watchful . The plan outlines four clear phases responding proportionately to fuel security risks, assessed separately for petrol, diesel, and jet fuel. The government is:

Monitoring fuel stocks and shipments
Publishing twice-weekly stock updates
Coordinating with international partners
Preparing demand reduction measures if needed

MBIE emphasizes: “There is no need to change how you purchase fuel. Sticking to your usual habits helps keep the system running smoothly” .

However this ‘plan” does not seem to acknowledge the high probability of both lack of, and high prices for diesel, jet fuel and bunker oil in the longer term. Strategies that prioritise and create backup storage now for essential fuel service issues such as food transportation and health and emergency services are sadly lacking.

Its also important to acknowledge that for New Zealand to continue to received international shipping and jet flights it needs to have adequate fuel storage for that transport to return to their original port.

The Bunker Fuel Dimension

Both Australia and New Zealand face parallel challenges with marine fuel. Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil (VLSFO)—the 0.5% sulphur fuel required by IMO 2020 regulations—depends on specific low-sulphur crude grades that are now being competed for by refiners seeking diesel replacements.

Australian and New Zealand ports rely on Singapore and regional refineries for bunker fuel. As Vortexa analysis warns: with Hormuz disruptions, bunkering hubs like Singapore, Malaysia, and the Netherlands could face VLSFO supply shortages as refiners outbid bunker blenders for suitable crude grades .

This threatens not just commercial shipping but coastal trade, fishing fleets, and offshore industries that keep both economies functioning.

Strategic Implications & Recommendations

For Australia:

Diesel is the vital risk: Agriculture, mining, and road freight depend on diesel. The BADSP program addresses storage but not supply diversity .
Refining vulnerability: Two aging refineries cannot meet national demand. The Geelong fire demonstrates how quickly capacity can be lost .
Transit risk: 21+ days of “reserves” exist only on paper—on foreign ships that may never arrive in a crisis .
US Strategic Petroleum Reserve access: The 2020 agreement to access US reserves sounds reassuring, but fuel would take three weeks to reach Australia—and in a global crisis, American domestic needs would take precedence .
Mining sector transition: Rio Tinto’s renewable diesel trials at Boron and Kennecott mines show potential, but these transitions were planned for 2030-2050—not 2026 .

For New Zealand:

Refined product dependency: 100% reliance on Asian refineries creates single-point-of-failure risk .
Indirect Gulf exposure: While NZ doesn’t import Gulf crude directly, our suppliers do—making us hostage to their sourcing challenges .
Storage limitations: Current stock levels are adequate for normal operations but insufficient for prolonged disruption .
No refining fallback: Unlike Australia, New Zealand has zero domestic refining capacity to fall back on .
Tourism vulnerability: The sector’s recovery from COVID-19 faces reversal due to fuel costs and flight disruptions .

And let us also not forget the hugely significant global impacts of the loss of 20% of the world’s synthetic fertilisers, of sulphuric acid, and of LNG because of the Straits’ closure and the partial destruction of refining in the Gulf states.

The Path Forward

Both nations face the same fundamental challenge: they are price-takers in a volatile market, with limited ability to influence supply or substitute fuels in the short term.

Both Australia and New Zealand have optimised for economic efficiency (Just In Time processes) over energy security. In a world of renewed geopolitical conflict and supply chain fragility, that calculation desperately needs revision.

Increasing frequency and intensity of global weather events will undoubtedly and increasingly put severe pressure on global supply chains . Transitioning to a less oil dependant economy and one which is less dependant on global supply chains for all essential services, is vital.

Sources:

Australia Institute: “Over a Barrel: Addressing Australia’s Liquid Fuel Security”
Australian Government: National Fuel Security Plan
Australian Industry Group: “Fuel Supply and Supply Chain Watch”
ABC News: “Energy analysts raise concerns on fuel excise cut”
Commonwealth Bank: “How Aussie farmers are navigating fuel and fertiliser pressures”
Deloitte Access Economics via Financial Post: “Australian Fuel Supply to Get Even Tighter After Refinery Fire”
EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, April 2026
Fortune: “Oil prices may be falling, but for the wrong reason”
IEA Oil Market Report, April 2026
IEEFA: “Mining’s costly diesel addiction must be a budget priority”
Living More With Less: “Implications of the Iran war on Australia’s Fuel Supplies”
MFAT: “NZ economy not immune to conflict in the Middle East”
MBIE: “Middle East conflict and New Zealand’s fuel stocks”
Newsroom: “Economic growth forecasts downgraded as fuel price rise bites”
NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment: “Understanding variability in tourism spend”
P2P Agri: “Iran Fuel Crisis and Australian Farm Costs”
RenewEconomy: “Diesel replacement: Australia’s billion-dollar opportunity”
The Oregon Group: “Strait of Hormuz diesel shock threatens mining industry”
Transporting NZ: “Energy security – was closing Marsden Point a mistake?”
Vortexa/IEA analysis on VLSFO supply and bunker fuel markets
Westpac IQ: “NZ business feedback on recent oil price moves”
World Socialist Web Site: “War-driven fuel crisis threatens recession in Australia”
https://energyandresilience.substack.com/p/the-limits-to-the-energy-transition

Biocentrism (Kaitiakitanga): the only future we have

Bill Mollison , the brilliant developer of the concepts and actions of permaculture once said; “We are not superior to other life-forms; all living things are an expression of Life. If we could see that truth, we would see that everything we do to other life-forms we also do to ourselves. A culture which understands this does not, without absolute necessity, destroy any living thing” .

Biocentrism in environmental ethics emphasizes that all living things have intrinsic value and moral standing. It extends moral consideration beyond human beings to encompass the entire biosphere. This perspective suggests that every living organism, whether sentient or not, possesses a right to exist and be protected.

Such a human culture, is able to live, sustainably alongside its fellow species. Able to acknowledge that all species are part of the web of life that also supports humans. Without that web, humanity, and most other current species, will inevitably die.

Anthropocentrism: the belief that human beings have superiority over nature has driven 6000 years of human’s ecological destruction, biodiversity loss, and now climate crises. This worldview contrasts sharply with Indigenous perspectives (like kaitiakitanga) and emerging ecological ethics that argue for biocentrism (all life has intrinsic value) or ecocentrism (whole ecosystems matter).

Anthropocentrism’s drivers appear to be derived from humanity’s view that the attributes that humans have- particularly the capacity to manipulate his/her environment, make humans a superior being to all other species on the planet. Our self-defined view of what is superior is derived from our own attributes; rather like an elephant determining that it is superior to all other species because it can reach high places with its trunk.

However our “superior” capacity to manipulate our environment is also our downfall; through 4000 years of manipulation of the natural world around us we have progressively destroyed the living world we rely on to survive.

Many like to think that if we did not have capitalism, we would somehow return to a world where humans could co-habitat in sustainable peace with other species – however it is clear that capitalism is simply one of many manifestations of anthropocentrism. Our belief in our inherent superiority allows us to consider capitalism and the pursuit of ‘wealth” by exploiting and destroying other living things as though that had no cost, as a sane objective.

6000 years ago, humanity’s anthroprocentric view of the world did not impact on the rest of the natural world as it does now. There were perhaps 7 million humans in the world, mainly hunter/gatherers who made use of the environment around them, but whose capacity to create systemic damage to the living world was limited in scale. As our capacity increased to not only defend ourselves against more ‘naturally’ efficient predators but also to kill and destroy other living things, so did the human population. Within two thousand years , the global human population had exploded to 160 million. In 2025 the global human population is estimated at around 8.2 billion people. Most humans now live in towns and cities ( what the Romans called ‘civis” – or ‘civilisation’). Surrounded by an inanimate world of asphalt and concrete we have lost our link with the rest of nature. We do not see its value because we cannot see it- except perhaps to see it as ‘entertainment on a hiking trip in the ‘wilds’.

Many of the world’s religions, particularly but not exclusively, the Abrahamaic religions of Judea, Christ and Mecca instruct their followers to believe in humanity as superior beings before their god.

Perhaps part of that wanton destruction has been because humans not only do not understand the inter-relationships between living things, but are also largely oblivious to the living things around us- the insects, the microbes, the fungi, the birds and mammals that help sustain our lives. We do not see how we are ourselves inextricably woven into that intricate web of life.

This sense of superiority has also led humans to become largely compassion-less for the suffering of others- except perhaps for those people and other animals that we focus our attention on and value for whatever reason. e.g. Cats, dogs, dolphins, whales are somehow living things to be valued- but sheep cattle, rats mice can be killed mercilessly; they do not suit our purposes. Or, as in New Zealand, humans may decide that this living animal is to be exterminated because we value this other living species – it is perhaps cuter, more indigenous, more suitable, more useful for exploitation.

Like most other species on earth, humans do not have the capacity to view the world long-term. We are oblivious to the ever encroaching tide year by year of concrete and asphalt into the living world, or of the one more old growth tree cut down to make way for ‘progress’. We cannot see what we have so tragically lost and the many lives we have destroyed.

If we are to save this planet from ourselves, we must re-learn how to value ALL living things; to see their beauty, their intrinsic value , their importance- and to act with compassion to all living things.

Without that compassion, we may continue to find fine and ultimately futile ways to lower our carbon footprint while we continue to destroy the rest of the living world, but we are nevertheless simply hastening our species’ (and many others) demise.

We can start now. Instead of our media pushing us to buy more and more ‘things’, or to travel here or there-we need our media to begin displaying how it is to become interlinked with our world. To grow trees in every back garden and park, to teach young people that they do not need to be ‘somebody’ important- but instead to be kind and caring to all, to learn how to be at ease with what we have; to ‘need’ less.

Politicians need to understand that GDP is a meaningless piece of garbage that does nothing to improve human’s quality of life and certainaly nothing to sustain our living world.

Politicians also need to be educated to understand the vital importance of bringing an end to anthroprocentrism; that given the destruction we have caused, we must now become true guardians of the natural world or ‘kaitiaki’ as New Zealand’s Maori say. We must make more and more of our living world legislatively sacred -that all of nature itself has rights or ‘personhood’, like the sacred Whanganui River in New Zealand.

Links

Introduction to Permaculture Bill Mollison Tagari Publications Tasmania, (2011) Page 1

Understanding Our Collapsing World- https://open.substack.com/pub/predicament/p/understanding-our-collapsing-world

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/14/rights-of-nature-laws-gaining-momentum

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/intrinsic-value-ecology-and-conservation-25815400/

https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_41

The Sacredness of Life

Life on our planet is a complex and often invisible intertwining of organisms; each one dependant on many others for its survival.

The World Wildlife Fund states that half the planet’s wildlife population has vanished since 1970 as a result of human activity. 52 percent of Earth’s mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish disappeared over those 50 years, 40% of all insects species and 60% of birds are declining globally.

And those figures do not take into account the total populations of the different species of birds, insects and wild mammals that are being killed off or starved from lack of natural habitat. When did the moths last bang themselves against your lighted nightime windows?- when did the smashed insects last cover your windscreen with their bodies on that last holiday in the natural world?- when did you last see the huge flocks of birds that used to be everywhere?

That absence may seem of no consequence (or even a relief!) to many humans (especially those who live in urban spaces) but in fact we are all reliant on the multiplicity of other species for our survival-whether it be for pollination for our food, the birds that spread the seeds of life, the Mycorrhizal fungi that ensure plants and trees grow healthily, or the many predators and ‘pests” who keep life in balance.

We need to revive our lost understanding of our linkage to all other life on this planet. Not just the species that humans ‘like’; our native fauna and flora and our pets, but ALL life. We must begin again to look and listen with respect and compassion to the living world around us and help rebuild the natural world that sustains us. We are perilously close to cutting the remaining threads that bind us to life on Earth.

Acknowledging that human ‘growth’ is in fact creating more dead spaces, (more concrete sealing over the soil, more trees felled, and fewer wild spaces to name just a few of our nature destruction options) . Planting trees, reviving diverse habitats and nurturing all other species with compassion are just some of our key steps towards a better and sustainable world.

‘Cant Find My Way Home’

The heading for this post comes from one of the great compositions by Stevie Winwood and the UK band ‘Blind Faith’ in 1969.

It perhaps symbolises in 2024, the journey this human world is travelling and its likely future…

A world where pointless and savage wars in West Asia, Ukraine and Africa are spurred on by the quest for power and profit and where infantile ideologies predominate.

And a world where climate change continues its seemingly inexorable march towards a planet destroyed through the pure blind stupidity and ignorance of our ‘world leaders’.

Never before have we all been able to witness the savage brutality of a war of genocide in technicolour- never before have we seen Western media and politicians proselytising so blatantly for that inhumanity. An oh so stark reminder of the difference between Western weasel words about ‘freedom and democracy’ and their support of mass-murder when it profits them.

A reminder too that this has been the Western theme for 500 years of colonial exploitation of more vulnerable populations- that these centuries of exploitation are, in the immortal words in 2022 of EU’s blatantly racist and furiously stupid foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, the reason why Europe and the West is a garden and the rest of the world (in his view), a jungle.

To support this meme, our Western mainstream media continues to idolise the fiction of Western supremacy in all things. As the evidence that this is no longer the case continues to pile up, Western media have resorted to ever greater contortions and lies to support that meme. The recent violence in Amsterdam between Israeli and Dutch football fans – characterised as ‘antisemitism’ is just one of many examples.

Time and time again we have seen European (and U.S. ) political leaders make decisions based on an outdated and irrelevant ideology which ignores all rationality and the reality of the situation.

The most telling, and likely deadly, example of this, is their farcical contortions to prove to their electorates that they doing something about climate change when they are in fact doing worse than nothing. There are no reductions in CO2 emissions, and the hype about the electrification of energy and transport is just that- electrification is not substituting for coal or oil, it comes as an addition to the continuing use of high rates of coal and oil burning.

Our ‘civilisation;’ is locked into endless ‘growth’ (an awful word given that economic ‘growth’ is the total opposite of true organic living growth) – a paradigm that is destroying the planet, but from which we apparently have no wish to escape from.

While climate and environmental scientists have long been steadily ratcheting up their estimations of the devastating impacts of global warming and biodiversity to the living fabric of our world, it is only now that economists from the ‘Network for Greening the Financial System’ are beginning to estimate the true fiscal costs to climate warming- something that could and should have been done 50 years ago, as it would have provided some leverage for real change in this money obsessed world. In the latest estimates economists estimate that global GDP will contract by 33% by 2100 from a 3C rise in global average surface temperatures. That 33% reduction in global GDP is almost certainly a huge underestimation of the real fiscal costs of global warming.

That ‘canary in the coalmine’ early warning system for economies, the cost of insurance, is already rising rapidly as a result of the rapidly increasing unpredictability of our climate systems.

We still do not know for certain what is going to happen to global sea currents and sea level rise as a result of ice melt , but early indications are that there will be a complete collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) within a few decades. When that collapse occurs, not only will much of the Northern Hemisphere become much colder, but the Southern Hemisphere will warm much much faster.

If that’s not enough, the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth (LtG) authors (70 years ago) concluded that, if global society kept pursuing economic growth, it would experience a decline in food production, industrial output, and ultimately population, within this century. Recent remodelling of that study indicate ‘a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity’s goal in the twenty-first century.’

And then we can go to the annual farce of the COP global conferences: the pretence that global leaders are in fact doing something about climate change, when in fact they are doing less than nothing- actively promoting more oil and gas exploration and consumption because endless ‘growth’ on a finite planet is a logical and sensible thing to do -isn’t it?

To hold everything together, so that we don’t lose our trajectory and deviate from accelerating over the climate change cliff, our mainstream and social media incessantly promotes consumption and the vital importance of the constant expansion of each country’s mythical GDP.

Have we completely forgotten our way home?

_______________________________________

References

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/08/climate-breakdown-will-hit-global-growth-by-a-third-say-central-banks

Click to access climate-emergency-final-report.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.13084

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/editorial/editorial-cop29-climate-summit-is-indeed-like-a-dark-joke-given-the-lack-of-buy-in-from-world-leaders/a131893267.html

Sustainable Communities and Climate Change

As global supply chains are increasingly threatened by sea level rise and unpredictable weather, insurance costs will rise exponentially and we will inevitably be forced to produce as much food and essential items locally as possible.

The sooner we begin to develop sustainable communities, the greater opportunity we have to mitigate those inevitable risks and keep people and our environment protected. The strengthening of community communication, connections and skills is a key aspect of those changes.

While communities will gain much from greatly strengthened community and local skills, we will need to shed much of our current consumerist ‘growth’ mindset- a mindset that says our towns, businesses, GDP and exploitation of the natural world, needs to constantly increase. The project ‘Take the Jump’ provides excellent advice on reducing our footprint.

We know we live on a finite planet which is already exploited beyond its limits. As climate change accelerates, we will be forced to get off the treadmill of ‘ growth’ and consumerism.

We need to change the paradigm now from the god of ‘growth’, to a respect for all living things-to acknowledge that we are inescapably and thankfully part of nature and have to live within its means.

A Few Little Pieces of Gold and Silver

A Revised Letter to the Editor to a local New Zealand newspaper:

The current New Zealand government has, in a few short months, proposed a Fast Track Bill to permit friendly quick-rich developers to effortlessly destroy our natural environment which we all rely upon, not just for our wellbeing, but for our survival.

Similarly the proposed revisions to the Resource Management Act not only assist in this quick-rich process by stopping Councils from designating for at least 3 years Significant Natural Areas, but also permit farmers to resume ‘mud-farming’ and other farm process that not only destroy water quality but significantly impact on the wellbeing of farm animals.

But perhaps the pinnacle of achievement of this government to date in putting cash before humanity, is its proposal to resume Livestock Export by Sea. Thousands of cattle spend weeks at sea in pens wading in their own faeces horrific and terrifying conditions – but it makes lots of money!

The mark of a good human being is one who treats all other living beings with kindness, compassion and respect.I find it extraordinary that supposedly educated government ministers put money that they and their mates dont really need more of, before our long term survival and our humanity.

I would therefore respectfully suggest that Prime Minister Luxon and his Cabinet Ministers, spend a month at sea in a livestock transport ship wallowing in their faeces as a learning experience.

____________________________________

Links

https://eds.org.nz/resources/documents/media-releases/2024/make-a-submission-on-the-fast-track-approvals-bill-using-edss-template/

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/514993/government-reveals-first-changes-to-resource-management-act

Mud farming

Live export trade in New Zealand

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/511689/government-drops-need-for-councils-to-comply-with-significant-natural-areas-provisions

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2407/S00001/live-exports-a-global-animal-welfare-crisis.htm

The Beginning of a Journey into the Unknown

The famous Chinese ‘Book of Changes’, the I Ching; which provides guidance on becoming a wise person, notes in Hexagram 56 “The Wanderer” that “We are all wanderers in the Unknown. Those who travel beside the Sage are unharmed’.

Increasingly for people in the West particularly, there is a strong sense of the uncertainties that lie ahead of us. What was solid before: our economies, our climate, our status in the world, our future in general -are no longer certainties. And increasingly it is made apparent that we are being led by the blind- our ‘leaders’ who choose not to see, to look beyond their own immediate needs and greed and who ignore all the impending warning signs of a very different world ahead, and who choose not to implement plans for that new world ahead.

Israel’s genocidal attack on the people of Gaza has been enthusiastically supported by parties on the ‘left’ and right in the Western world, and Western mainstream media has carefully followed that line while pretending to be impartial.

We now have the spectre of elections in both the U.K and US where the choices in each case are between political leaders who demonstrate no morality and even less intelligence and who display minimal differences in their unconditional support of the already rich and powerful and mesmerisingly stupid foreign policy decisions. And with the further spectre of the Ukraine war being inexorably won by Russia with the soft backing of China and the global south, these Western ‘leaders’ see their power and illgotten wealth slipping away: there is panic.

Once again (for the hundredth time over the past two centuries) the ridiculous argument that “The Russians are coming!” is being promoted in MSM media to scare the bejeesus out of naive Western populations. Not only do the politicians agree on their brain-dead racist assumptions about Russia and China and the Global South, but their advisors are also in lock-step! The quality of decision-making in the West has (hopefully) reached rock-bottom!

Much of Africa has taken the opportunity of the West’s dissaray to rid themselves of the incredible exploitation by the last of the African colonisers- the French. Now, once again the indigenous Kanaks of New Caledonia are rising up against their colonialist French masters- but President Macron is holding firm- there is too much money to be gained from the nickel mine in New Caledonia.

A recent Canadian piece of analysis characterised one of the major risks to its population is ‘disinformation’ (otherwise known as perspectives on the world that are not aligned to the official perspective). It had previously been accepted in the West that expressing alternative views on the world was a key element of democracy (provided that it didnt actually change the power structure!)-but no longer…Diversity of opinion and knowledge is one the key factors that can help ensure humans’ evolution does not come to a sticky and dead end sooner rather than later.

Now, young people who express their opposition to Israel’s appalling genocide can be arrested as agitators and ‘antisemites’ and those who oppose the West’s involvement in the Ukraine war are ‘Putin’s puppets’. Rational analytical thinking is not permitted.

That Canadian analysis also points to climate change as a major threat to Canada’s (and the world’s ) wellbeing , but nowhere in any state’s manifesto across the globe are we informed that one of the key rational ways to address climate change and loss of biodiversity is de-growth. Economic “Growth” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) is our true God. Everything is measured against the ‘God of Growth’ who knows nothing and cares for nobody.

The only little problem with the fiscal measurement process called GDP is that it cannot measure the health and living viability of the planet nor the wellbeing of the multitude of species who inhabit it, and on whom human beings are totally reliant upon for our survival.

In my own little part of the world, our new New Zealand coalition of right wing zealots have in a remarkably short time, slashed 5000 government jobs, (or ‘red tape’ as they prefer to call it!), made access to government welfare that much harder, attacked the core premises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (our founding document), enhanced payments to rich landlords and promised tax breaks which will inevitably only benefit the wealthy. To add to the flavour they are currently working on a “Fast Track Act’ with their big business ‘colleagues’, to ensure that ‘development’ is not stifled or delayed by foolish issues such as environmental protection. Short term greed must always out-weigh long term human wellbeing and environmental protection.

Sadly New Zealand’s politicians , like so many Western politicians, seem to be progressively dumbing down to the point of becoming brain-dead zombies mesmerised by dollar signs, and where honesty, compassion and an understanding of the complexity and fragility of the living world and our total dependancy upon it, are things of the past..

And all the while, climate change pushes all living things on the planet ever more rapidly into a totally unrecognissable and unpredictable new world..

____________________________

Links

British singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, criticised "the political obstinacy and deafness” of the British government for failing to halt and continuing to support the killing of innocents in Palestine during his speech at the national march in London. pic.twitter.com/k4vZQxXoWV
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 19, 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report

Climate ‘poses systemic financial risks’ (theecologist.org)

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/5/18/refuge-of-the-last-dreamers-luang-prabang-a-city-suspended-in-time

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/last-dance-at-the-vampire-ball-west

SOME THOUGHTS ON FISCAL IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS FOR NEW ZEALAND (and others)

The Ideology of Disconnection – New Antarctica on Ecological Connectivity/Climate Change and Urban EnvironmentsOctober 30, 2026
[…] Make the encounter structural, not aspirational. The extinction of experience is a design problem, and therefore a design opportunity.[37][38]…
Western Support for Terrorists in Iran – New Antarctica on Racism and the Iran WarJune 14, 2026
[…] a long campaign since the Iranian revolution in 1979 to demean the government (which they call the ‘regime”) and…
Israel’s Murderous Collective Psychosis – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaApril 19, 2026
[…] The Nakba—the 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians—established the blueprint for Israeli land acquisition that continues today. Immediately after…
B. P. on The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH): Have Humans Bred Hollow Societies?January 28, 2026
RE: "Can We Break the Cycle? Yes — but only if we interrupt the feedback loops" Well, yeah "if we"…
False Outrage – New Antarctica on Mad Sad & Bad North KoreaJanuary 11, 2026
[…] to the post second world war killing spree, with CIA endless covert murders across the world, the Korean War…
Demonic Israel and the Savage West – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaJune 27, 2025
[…] everything associated with the state of Palestine and the history of Israel since the Nakba , Zionists have attempted…
Sinophobia and Hysteria in the Pacific – New Antarctica on Mad Sad & Bad North KoreaFebruary 24, 2025
[…] vital intelligence for many of the brutal offensive wars conducted by the US and NATO-including the genocide in Korea…
War with Iran? – New Antarctica on Christmas 2017 & The Dishonest BrokerAugust 5, 2024
[…] and freedom for Palestinians in Gaza; just as the US has pretended for more than 50 years to be…
War with Iran? – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaAugust 5, 2024
[…] When looking at motive and opportunity, one should always look first at the historical actions of the key players…
The Beginning of a Journey into the Unknown – New Antarctica on SOME THOUGHTS ON FISCAL IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS FOR NEW ZEALAND (and others)May 24, 2024
[…] SOME THOUGHTS ON FISCAL IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS FOR NEW ZEALAND (an… […]
The Striking Stupidity of Western Leaders – New Antarctica on New Zealand Supports Gazans to Die FasterApril 15, 2024
[…] and its allies and their complicity in Israel’s genocide . We cannot be informed about the Nakba of 1948…
New Zealand Supports Gazans to Die Faster – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaJanuary 31, 2024
[…] 75 years old strategy, begun in 1948 with the Nakba, is apparently all kosher and ok with those 12 white […]
The Psychopathic West – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaNovember 19, 2023
[…] has consistently brutalised the Gaza and West Bank Palestinian populations, as it has done since the Nakba (the Catastrophe)…
The Immorality of Western Politicians – New Antarctica on Remembering the NakbaOctober 8, 2023
[…] Israeli apartheid regime – which many have described as slow motion genocide, since the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe) when…
Media in an Unstable World – New Antarctica on Mad Sad & Bad North KoreaSeptember 19, 2023
[…] But hey, who needs facts when you need to inflame good white folks against the evil Russians,Chinese and Iranians…
A Descent into Fantasyland – New Antarctica on Ukraine and the NeoNazisAugust 22, 2022
[…] real Banderite neo-nazis still play a significant role in determining Ukraine’s state and war strategy- despite many of […]
NATO: The White Supremacists’ Club – New Antarctica on Ukraine and the NeoNazisJune 27, 2022
[…] For New Zealand to pretend it is not at war with Russia is absurd. New Zealand is aiding its…
A Change is Gonna Come.. – New Antarctica on Mad Sad & Bad North KoreaJune 13, 2022
[…] we can see racial prejudice in the extreme brutality against the Korean people in the Korean war ( what…
A War in Ukraine?- Again? – New Antarctica on The Ukrainian Situation-an analysisJanuary 20, 2022
[…] arms and training , as they have done so since the end of the Second World War (using the…
247paulgray on Western Hypocrisy on AfghanistanAugust 18, 2021
Nice observations. Yet these 'freedom from tyranny' operations (aka what have you got we want) will continue until the world…
The ‘Coming’ Climate Crisis – New Antarctica on Accelerating over the Cliff in our Latest Roadster, and never mind the road-kill!August 10, 2021
[…] However, right now that rate of increase of carbon emissions is just going higher and higher- we are indeed…
The Palestinian ‘Terrorists’ - OS.Report on The Palestinian ‘Terrorists’May 14, 2021
[…] Originally published here. […]

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The Manufactured Self: How Advertising Saturation Creates a Society of Performed Emotions.

Timeline

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The Global Context: A Crisis Without Precedent

Price Forecasts: What to Expect by June 2026

Crude Oil and Refined Product Prices

Key Price Drivers

Australia: The Diesel Nation at Breaking Point

The Dependency Problem

The Diesel Consumption Profile

The Refinery Crisis

Stockholding: The 90-Day Myth

Mining Sector: The $4.5 Billion Diesel Addiction

Agriculture: Harvest Season Crisis

Food Supply Chain: From Farm to Shelf

Tourism and Aviation

The Australian Government Response

New Zealand: The Marsden Point Gamble

The Refinery Closure Decision

Economic Impact Forecasts

Tourism Sector Impact

The Political Reckoning

Government Response

The Bunker Fuel Dimension

Strategic Implications & Recommendations

For Australia:

For New Zealand:

The Path Forward

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