Mongabay Newscast

Wealth inequality is a primary culprit behind the ecological and environmental collapse of societies over the past 12,000 years, which have come to be dominated by a small circle of elites hoarding resources like land, research shows. Today, instead of an isolated collapse, we face a global one, says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. On this episode of Mongabay’s Newscast, Kemp explains how wealth inequality is not just tied to, but may be the very cause of the ecological destruction we are witnessing today, and how tackling that is key to how we solve all these challenges, as he recently told The Guardian. “Imperial overexpansion, depleting the natural environment, having elite competition and popular immiseration, all [are] just simply the natural effect of inequality. All is driven by growing concentrations of power and wealth inequality,” he says. Humans are not naturally like this, Kemp explains. Rather, for the vast majority of their ex