On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 NASA probe, having flown more than 6 billion kilometres, turned around and photographed our solar system. Against the vastness of space, a pale blue dot could just be seen: Earth.

“Look again at that dot”, wrote astronomer Carl Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate … Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.”

But our species, for all our intelligence, may be extinct far sooner than we once expected, and by our own hand.

Humanity has changed the face of the Earth, exhausting the soil, felling the forests, damming and draining the rivers, annihilating our fellow species and altering the very chemistry of our air and oceans. Nuclear war may be the only nightmare comparable to the holocaust that our economic practices bring us closer to day by day.

Our species is not marching blindly towards the abyss; our eyes are wide open. We know we live in a closed system, yet excel at turning natural “resources” into “waste” to be dumped. We know that our species depends upon a complex web of other species for our own survival, yet seem determined to sever even the last slender thread of life.

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature, but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst”, wrote 19th century socialist Frederick Engels.

Yet today, a deep rift between the world’s economy and ecology exists.

The capitalist economy is based upon the principle of private ownership of the Earth, of competition between its owners, with profit as the prize. Failure to make a profit from one economic cycle makes it harder to compete in the next one, and ultimately leads to a loss of ownership to more ruthless competitors.

The intersection between economics and ecology is found where labour is applied to nature to “create” all the wealth of our society — or more accurately, where we convert the wealth of nature for our own uses. Under capitalism, this connection between nature and human society is governed by the pursuit of short-term and short-sighted profit, rather than for meeting human needs. The end result will ultimately be fatal.

The profit system led the British Empire to annex and mine tiny islands and atolls around the world to fertilise the over-exploited farmlands of Europe. It led the Spanish Empire to replace the mountainside forests of Cuba with coffee plantations, only to see the soil wash away in the rain after only a few harvests.

It is this system that keeps our society addicted to fossil fuels today.

Having an economic system detached from its ecological base is profoundly stupid, but the vested interests that profit from it are not. They have successfully convinced many people that capitalism is the “natural” economic system of our species.

However, at some point — and soon — we need to recognise that capitalism has, in fact, alienated our species from nature. Otherwise, our own ignorance will be our downfal.