Xpost from E&E: To what degree can the unfolding planetary catastrophe be blamed on interest?

[GliderGuider]

5. How does extending your view back to the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries change the picture?

I tend to take a longer-term view of the human experience - I think many core drivers get obscured by the details of day-to-day or decade-to-decade life. The influences visible over longer time frames are the ones that will play the greatest role in the outcome.

Human civilization has been growing for a lot longer than environmentalism has been around. I agree that different countries have different situations, depending largely on their level of social organization and resource base. But growth has been a consistent feature of "victorious" societies for several thousand years. I suspect (and I'm just about to start researching) that these victorious societies were precisely the ones that had adopted monetary systems that featured interest-bearing loans.

My concern is that the victorious society is now global industrial civilization, and the vanquished will be all other life - and in the long run the victors themselves.