The Sixth Extinction?

Fazlun Khalid

Back in the late 1990s¹ I wrote about a nightmarish picture that kept recurring in my mind’s eye: my grandchildren living in an overheated and polluted planet looking over their shoulders were asking despairingly, “Is this what you have left behind for us?” Our complacency notwithstanding, what is happening now to planet Earth and all life forms upon it differs from anything that has happened before—with the possible exception of the demise of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, now known as the fifth extinction. That was a natural disaster, but in scale and concept this human-engineered event is unprecedented in possibly five major ways.

Firstly, the debacle we are facing now is an unnatural disaster.

Secondly, we are not mere spectators but active participants in this matter—this is a problem we the human species have collectively created.

Thirdly, the now familiar litany of deforestation, desertification, acid rain, polluted oceans and rivers, ozone-layer depletion, greenhouse effect, and the social causes associated with these problems, may seem like a series of events but is in reality one single event.

Fourthly, this is a disaster of global proportions affecting everybody and everything—it is an extremely painful way of learning the irrelevance of national boundaries.

Fifthly, the disease is terminal unless drastic measures are taken quickly. This is an optimistic perspective and some would argue that it is already too late to rewind the clock. We may already be on our way to tasting the dinosaur experience to extinction.

The conceptual construct of modernity is decidedly anti-environment. Today’s politics and policies are about increasing standards of living—and there is only one source from which we can extract wealth to enable us to do this, and that is the Earth. The following question, therefore, must be asked: is the Earth a life-sustaining source, or a resource to be exploited to satiate our greed? It is obvious that exploiting it takes precedence over protecting it. Using gross national products and rates of economic growth as measures of progress is the most obvious manifestation of this. According to Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using nature 73% faster than ecosystems can regenerate. This is the equivalent of living off 1.73 Earths and, by the end of July 2026, we have already consumed a whole year’s worth of resources. There are now 8 billion of us chasing after the good life while being oblivious to where we are going to end.

Our environmental problems arise from an exponential growth model which implicates politicians, economists, scientists, technocrats, and, by default, the rest of us. The founder of The Club of Rome, Aurelio Peccei², says that there has been a large-scale overshoot in the way:

…the human population and economy extract resources from the earth and emit pollution and wastes to the environment. Many of these rates of extraction and emission have grown to be unsupportable. The environment cannot sustain them. Human society has overshot its limits, for the same reason that other overshoots occur. Changes are too fast. Signals are late, incomplete, distorted, ignored or denied. Momentum is great, responses are slow.

There is no longer any doubt that exponential growth is the driving force causing the global economy to breach the physical limits of the earth³.

But these ideas are not new and, interestingly, were first postulated nearly a century ago long before environmentalism was even thought of as an issue. The scientist and historian, Henry Adams, propounded a theory early in the last century which suggested that the acceleration of technological change was forcing the acceleration of history. He concluded that this was caused by exponential growth and he forecast⁴ dire consequences should we persist in following the economic growth model:

At the accelerated rate of progression since 1600, it will not need another century to turn thought upside down. Law in that case would disappear… and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration.

A closer examination of this phenomenon of exponential growth by way of an “Islamic analysis” will, I believe, show us the causes which create the disequilibrium and which are uniquely visible from this perspective. In my view, there are two primary, interrelated causes: one quantitative, which has to do with our relationship to money, more specifically, how we conceive and create it; and the other qualitative which defines our relationship with the created world.

The history and ethos surrounding money, its relationship to the institutions and edifices created to enshrine it, and its connection to the ecological crisis, is, apart from a tiny minority of people, largely allowed to pass muster. If one penny was invested 2,000 years ago at 4% compound interest, it would have bought one ball of gold the weight of the earth in 1750 and over 8,000 balls of gold of the same weight in 1990⁵; at 5% compound interest the same penny would have bought this ball of gold by the turn of the 15th Century and over 2,000 billion balls of gold the same weight as the earth by 1990! Even one percentage point can make an enormous difference and it thus becomes clear why the Qur’an condemns usury (riba) so vigorously:

O believers, fear your God;

and give up the usury that is outstanding, if you are believers.

But if you do not,

then take notice that God shall war against you with His Messenger.

Al-Baqarah, 2:278-279

As a species we are devouring the Earth to extinction. And there is another aspect to modern money which we overlook and that is created out of nothing: credit creation. Credit creation, though a standard and daily practice like the charging of interest, is an aspect of banking little understood. What the banks are allowed to do legally by the state is to create credit, i.e. conjure money out of thin air. John Kenneth Galbraith (d. 2006), the doyen of American economists, said of this practice: “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”⁶ Riba has a wider definition than that given to usury or interest. If charging interest on “money” is unlawful gain, then creating “money” out of nothing and charging interest on it is even more so. Exponentially, created credit is nurtured and multiplied by interest which grows exponentially. What is regarded as normal today could be described as a gigantic confidence trick. And, what is more, we are all collectively culpable in perpetuating this trick.

The money in circulation today is “virtual” nothing. It does not represent anything but entries in bank ledgers, balance sheets and hard disks. It cannot be emphasised enough that this “wealth”, which helps us to sustain the fiction of standards of living, and drives us in pursuit of this mirage we call the quality of life, does not exist in reality, but only in fantasy⁷—it could be called a kind of fiscal psychosis. But this infinite amount of artificial money is deployed against the finite resources of God’s creation. It is not difficult for anyone to conclude from this that if the human race carries on like this, the earth will soon be reduced to empty desert and dead ocean. We cannot go on creating balls of gold the weight of the earth forever. What we call “progress” is an ever-dwindling fuse to oblivion—a Sixth Extinction⁸.

We will all go down together and perhaps the Earth will be a better place for it.

1. Fazlun Khalid, Ecology, sustainability & future generations – an Islamic perspective, Future Generations Journal, No. 22, Issue 1, 1997, Foundation for International Studies, University of Malta. ↩
2. Meadows & Others; Beyond the Limits; Earthscan, London, 1992. See ‘Overshoot’. ↩
3. Ibid; see ‘The Driving Force: Exponential Growth’. ↩
4. Calder & Amir Sadeghi (eds); Future of a Troubled World; Heineman, London, 1983. See essay by Gerard on Piel on the ‘Acceleration of History’. ↩
5. Margrit Kennedy; Interest & Inflation-free Money; Permaculture Institute Publications; Steyerberg, Germany; 1988. See ps. 10-13. ↩
6. Anthony Sampson; The Money Lenders; Coronet, London; 1988. See p.29, introduction to Chapter two, ‘Who Keeps the World?’ ↩
7. Fazlun Khalid, Signs on the Earth – Islam, Modernity and the Climate Crisis, p.136. Kube 2019, Leicester, UK. ↩
8. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt 2014, US/UK. ↩