We go about our daily lives as if nothing is wrong. The sun is shining, sometimes it rains, and life goes on. Maybe a storm hits the news, a wildfire burns somewhere, or a flood takes a village—but then everything seems to return to normal. Shops are full, cars drive by, flights leave on time. So we ask: how bad is it, really?
The Reality Beneath the Surface
When we look closer, the picture changes.
• Eroded Land: In the American Midwest, decades of industrial farming have stripped away rich topsoil. Heavy plowing and chemical fertilizers have left the land fragile, so fertile soil washes into rivers after heavy rains. Scientists warn that U.S. farmland is losing soil up to 10 times faster than nature can replenish it. In parts of Spain, desertification is advancing so fast that villages are being abandoned, orchards dry out, and the land turns to dust. And in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, clear-cutting vast areas of rainforest leaves bare earth that quickly erodes when the rains come. Once the trees are gone, the land often dries out completely—lush ecosystems collapsing into desert-like landscapes within years.
• Ruined Rivers: The Colorado River once carved canyons and nourished ecosystems all the way to the sea. Today, it is drained to irrigate thirsty crops like alfalfa and cotton in the desert—fields planted because they are profitable, not sustainable. In many years, the river fails to reach the ocean at all. The Ganges River, sacred to millions, is choked with untreated sewage and factory runoff. Factories dump toxins because it is cheaper than cleaning their waste.
• Vanishing Waters: The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, has been drained almost dry to irrigate cotton fields for global export. What remains is a toxic desert, scattered with rusting ships where fishing towns once thrived.
• Poisoned Lands and People: In the Niger Delta, oil companies found it more profitable to let pipelines leak than to fix them. Vast swamps are now covered in oil slicks, rivers are poisoned, and entire communities are left with dead fisheries and unsafe drinking water.
• Oceans and Reefs in Peril: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a swirling gyre of plastic waste twice the size of Texas—kills turtles, whales, seabirds, and fish. Microplastics are now found in human blood. Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching again and again. Fossil fuels keep economies “growing,” but rising ocean temperatures are turning coral wonderlands into white graveyards.
• Toxic Air: In Delhi, the air sometimes rises to 20 times above safe levels. Children grow up with reduced lung capacity just from breathing.
These are not isolated accidents. They are signs of systemic breakdown.
Why Is It Like This?
The logic is tragically simple.
• Profit over Planet: The Colorado is drained not by mistake, but because crops for export bring in money. The Ganges is polluted because cleaning up waste eats into profit margins. Much easier and cheaper to dump it into the Ganges. The Aral Sea disappeared so cotton could be sold worldwide. Oil continues to pour into the Niger Delta because safety measures cost more than they earn. Coral reefs bleach because burning coal and oil remains profitable, heating the planet and the oceans.
Profit over People: While rivers dry and forests fall, millions of children go to bed hungry every night. In parts of Africa, families struggle to find enough food, while at the same time billions of dollars’ worth of grain are fed to livestock or wasted to keep prices stable. Extreme inequality means that a tiny fraction of humanity lives in obscene luxury while entire communities lack clean water, education, and basic healthcare. The system is designed to serve profit first, even when it means children starve while supermarket shelves in wealthy countries overflow.
• Growth at Any Cost: Governments measure success in GDP, not in clean rivers or healthy soil. Every factory, every shipment, every barrel of oil counts as “growth,” even when it subtracts from life itself. We are locked in this mindset. We have to make money. At any cost, it seems.
• Externalizing the Costs: Pollution is free. Companies dump waste and pocket the gains, while nature and communities pay the price.
• Consumer Culture: Our throwaway economy thrives on constant demand for more—fast fashion, gadgets, cars, and single-use plastic. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one inevitable result of this model.
All of these examples—rivers, seas, reefs, people, air and land—are chapters of the same story: a system that rewards taking without giving back. A system that liquidates the Earth for short-term profit.
Is There Any Hope?
After seeing this, it is natural to ask: is there any solution? Or is it already too late?
What if… it isn’t?
What if humanity suddenly decided that enough is enough? That we will no longer sacrifice the living Earth and poor people for profit? What if we chose, together, to protect and optimize this planet so that humans, animals, and all of nature could thrive here—side by side, in balance?
What if the same intelligence, creativity, and technology that once exploited the Earth were redirected to heal it?
This is not fantasy. It is a choice. Humanity could decide tomorrow to change course. But this would mean a radical change. Ending the root cause of all of this:
The Monetary System.
But, but, how can we? We need it to live! What about jobs and income and everything?? Understandable arguments.
But there is a way. We could end the monetary system and still thrive on planet earth. We could live without money and trading and instead focus on healing the planet and ourselves in the process. We could in fact, with the technology we have available today, build a paradise on Planet Earth. A world that works for all living beings.
And that is exactly what has happened in Waking Up. When billionaire Benjamin Michaels wakes up in a world without money and trading, he is at first shocked, desperate, and lost. But then he realizes: this was the best decision humanity ever made. To stop the destruction. To stop chasing endless profit. To build a society where people and planet thrive together.
The book is fiction. But the question is not.
Would you like to be inspired and get lost in how this future world would actually feel like to live in? If so, I invite you to read the book. You can get it here: