r/BiosphereCollapse

A new research paper (published in Nature Food, 2026) looked closely at how growing food affects two big things: carbon storage (that is held in an ecosystem, like in trees, plants, soil, and vegetation) and biodiversity (variety of plants and animals). Here's what they found:

🔹 It's mainly about what we eat. 83% of the damage comes from food consumption, and animal-based foods (meat, milk, etc.) cause most of it: 59% of carbon loss and 71% of biodiversity loss.

🔹 Two products stand out. Beef and milk alone cause almost a third of carbon loss and 41% of biodiversity loss worldwide.

🔹 Animal products (including domestic use and exports) contribute above 50% of total agricultural carbon and biodiversity loss in more than half of the countries.

🔹 Trade matters too. Brazil exports the most environmental damage through its food exports, while China imports the most.

🔹 Damage is concentrated. Most of the harm comes from a small part of total farmland, not spread out evenly.

🔹 Different regions, different problems. Richer northern countries cause more carbon loss, while southern countries suffer more biodiversity loss.

This connects to something Acharya Prashant often talks about. He says our inner restlessness, that constant urge to want more, consume more, and never feel satisfied, is what pushes us to keep buying, eating, and using more than we need. This restlessness doesn't stay inside us; it shows up outside as more demand for meat, dairy, and resources. And that demand leads to cutting down forests and losing wildlife. So, he reminds us: unless we see through the restlessness within, we'll keep damaging the world outside, because what's happening to nature is really a reflection of what's happening inside us.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-026-01387-0

The article references physical causes for the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. burning fossil fuels, which emit CO2), but the primary causes are psychosocial in structure.

This psychosocial structure consists of the social agreements that products should be produced according to supply and demand, distributed according to who can afford them (making you economically invisible if you can't on both the distribution and supply side), decisions should be made according to profit maximization, and that everything previously mentioned should be regulated by the infliction of financial loss as a feedback loop for error correction.

When you look at our monetary system from this perspective it makes perfect sense why your phones are outdated at the end of the year, why everyone each gets their own car, why pavement sprawls all over north America, why nothing is produced to last, why companies have to use the cheapest rather than the most efficient or even optimal material to stay price competitive, why 40 percent of food produced is wasted, why the average plate of food has travelled 1,500 miles by the time it reaches your table, why harmful chemicals are in our food, why 30 percent of Healthcare costs are for clerical tasks, why waste is dumped in the ocean and rivers to cut costs, why pollution is dumped all over the place, why people are homeless, why we have to waste our lives working 40 hours a week, why the globe spends 2 trillion dollars annually on guns and the military instead of spending the 30 billion it would cost to end world hunger. When you look at the sheer amount of unnecessary production and reckless waste, the primary cause for the destruction of all life support systems on the planet is clear as crystal. It is the elephant everyone tries to ignore.

When you combine certain physical outcomes of this psychosocial structure with the psychosocial structure you get the monetary system. What I think most people don't understand is that the physical outcomes of the monetary system are actually what define it's structure. When a system shows a pattern of outcomes or behaviors, those outcomes are explained by it's structure, and in the case of the monetary system there is no blueprint anyone ever wrote, so we have nothing else to go off... unless you're just taking someone else's word for it. Keep in mind, there would be no such thing as supply and demand in this system if physical outcomes weren't observed that reflect such a rule. So it makes no sense to focus on politicians or policy change within the framework of the very system that's defined by the problems they try to solve. That logic is circular, and it's been circulating for 10,000 years now with no signs of improvement for most of the system's devastating outcomes, 75 years with all signs blinking red alert and worsening for it's outcome of destroying the conditions for life on Earth.

And it's so pathetic because what underpins the entire monetary system are social constructs that don't exist in physical reality. The social agreements that there is a President, mayor, business owner or stock market, that there are russians, americans, countries, exchange rates, etc... don't exist in physical reality. There is no president. There is a person that groups of people treat like a president and call president. There are no Russians. There is a group of people called russians. Physical reality is separate from social constructs. Just because social constructs can significantly affect physical reality, especially our physical social setting, doesn't mean they are the same.

It's as if we've agreed to get crushed to death by the weight of our own constructs.

Article

The article references physical causes for the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. burning fossil fuels, which emit CO2), but the primary causes are psychosocial in structure.

This psychosocial structure consists of the social agreements that products should be produced according to supply and demand, distributed according to who can afford them (making you economically invisible if you can't on both the distribution and supply side), decisions should be made according to profit maximization, and that everything previously mentioned should be regulated by the infliction of financial loss as a feedback loop for error correction.

When you look at our monetary system from this perspective it makes perfect sense why your phones are outdated at the end of the year, why everyone each gets their own car, why pavement sprawls all over north America, why nothing is produced to last, why companies have to use the cheapest rather than the most efficient or even optimal material to stay price competitive, why 40 percent of food produced is wasted, why the average plate of food has travelled 1,500 miles by the time it reaches your table, why harmful chemicals are in our food, why 30 percent of Healthcare costs are for clerical tasks, why waste is dumped in the ocean and rivers to cut costs, why pollution is dumped all over the place, why people are homeless, why we have to waste our lives working 40 hours a week, why the globe spends 2 trillion dollars annually on guns and the military instead of spending the 30 billion it would cost to end world hunger. When you look at the sheer amount of unnecessary production and reckless waste, the primary cause for the destruction of all life support systems on the planet is clear as crystal. It is the elephant everyone tries to ignore.

When you combine certain physical outcomes of this psychosocial structure with the psychosocial structure you get the monetary system. What I think most people don't understand is that the physical outcomes of the monetary system are actually what define it's structure. When a system shows a pattern of outcomes or behaviors, those outcomes are explained by it's structure, and in the case of the monetary system there is no blueprint anyone ever wrote, so we have nothing else to go off... unless you're just taking someone else's word for it. Keep in mind, there would be no such thing as supply and demand in this system if physical outcomes weren't observed that reflect such a rule. So it makes no sense to focus on politicians or policy change within the framework of the very system that's defined by the problems they try to solve. That logic is circular, and it's been circulating for 10,000 years now with no signs of improvement for most of the system's devastating outcomes, 75 years with all signs blinking red alert and worsening for it's outcome of destroying the conditions for life on Earth.

And it's so pathetic because what underpins the entire monetary system are social constructs that don't exist in physical reality. The social agreements that there is a President, mayor, business owner or stock market, that there are russians, americans, countries, exchange rates, etc... don't exist in physical reality. There is no president. There is a person that groups of people treat like a president and call president. There are no Russians. There is a group of people called russians. Physical reality is separate from social constructs. Just because social constructs can significantly affect physical reality, especially our physical social setting, doesn't mean they are the same.

It's as if we've agreed to get crushed to death by the weight of our own constructs.