Globalization & The Long Supply Chain/Climate
Yesterday, I chanced upon this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIOgtrjFGU
TL;DR : The Western World (for some reason called the Global North), decided to switch to biofuels, moved farming of corn at scale towards that, discovered palm oil n the tropics, pushed by hook/crook and other means large scale and exploitative palm oil plantations that involved at scale clearing of rainforests, peat forests and then subverted every attempt to regulate it and reduce the actual destruction. At one point Indonesia's emissions from burning forests exceeded that of all of US industry! Because palm oil was part of a really wide range of products across the West.
No imagine hygge/fika - entire cultures in parts of the West built around commodities that grow in the tropics and need the clearing out of forests at scale. Cacao, banana earlier. Paddy, wheat, pulses. Minerals. Oil. The list goes on and on.
It's not as if the people in these places weren't living well earlier or needed these markets to live a happy, decent life. Sure there were issues, but nothing like what the large scale destruction of their biodiversity and commons have caused. And most in these places have made mere subsistence wages when at all they did. The whole push usually started with either force, as Amitav Ghosh detailed out in The Nutmeg's Curse, or with bribing a few local strongmen, or with regime change and installed dictators.
Indeed, much of the wealth of the West and the "1st world" status is owed to this.
This pressure created on the "elsewhere" is unfair, unaccounted for and is now adding up as we see global impacts from it. The globalization and ever longer and more abstract supply chains that supported it are energy and material hungry, and devastate landscapes rapidly.
The primary shift is maybe of believing in "here" everywhere, but the pressure has to reduce as well. Sadly, governments, economists and even development agencies and orgs everywhere do not see this yet. We'll destroy the planet really quickly if we don't start to change this rapidly and quickly.
Sorry, kids. We really messed up this big time, and continue to make it worse.