Systems map of
underlying causes

• Civilization. A society is an organized human group with shared institutions, often within the borders of a state. A civilization extends beyond those borders: it brings together several societies that share techniques, knowledge, beliefs and some institutions (Durkheim and Mauss, 1913, in French). This one took shape in Western Europe, then its techniques and institutions spread to the rest of the world, above all through imperialism and colonialism (Eisenstadt, 2000).

  The main components of a civilization

  The historian Fernand Braudel distinguished four realities in it, and a continuity (Braudel, 1963, as summarized by Dagorn, 2003, in French):

  • A space. An area wider than a single society, with its limits, its core and its periphery (Mauss, 1930, in French).
  • Societies. Each keeps its political and legal institutions, which belong to the particular constitution of each people (Durkheim and Mauss, 1913).
  • Economies. Money, trade, techniques and tools, by contrast, travel from one society to another (Durkheim and Mauss, 1913).
  • Ways of thinking. Myths, languages and knowledge travel too: a civilization forms a kind of moral milieu shared by several nations (Durkheim and Mauss, 1913).
  • A continuity. Neither a given economy nor a given society, but what persists through them and changes only little by little (Braudel, 1963).

  The three words that follow describe part of ours: its economy (capitalist), one of its ways of thinking (productivist) and the way it draws on its space (extractivist).

• Capitalist. It produces to accumulate capital: money invested must yield more, and the surplus is reinvested.
• Productivist. It makes the pace of material transformation and economic growth an end in itself, measured by gross domestic product (GDP) or by physical output targets in a plan. This model, shared in the twentieth century by market capitalism and Soviet collectivism alike, assumes endless progress through machinery and mass consumption. It is the downstream engine that pulls and justifies the runaway growth of global material volumes.
• Extractivist. It draws upstream on the subsoil and the living world: fossil fuels, metals, biomass, sand, soils and water. These material flows have more than tripled since 1970, taken on a massive scale from geographic or social peripheries to supply consuming metropolises. Research documents in it a relationship to the world built on dispossession, the depletion of ecosystems and non-reciprocity (Chagnon et al., 2022). By drawing nearly 80% of the world's primary energy from fossil fuels, our system embodies the “thermo-industrial civilization” described by Jacques Grinevald (Grinevald, 2006; Rens and Grinevald, 1979, both in French).

This framing is one reading, that of research on socio-ecological transformation (Brand et al., 2021) and on extractivism. It leaves in the background a cause the map covers elsewhere: the relationship of domination over nature and other humans.