The European industrialization was a result of a much older cultural pattern. It introduced the large scale use of fossil fuels , which caused the climate change, and the large-scale clear cults of ancients forest and large-scale mining. Via colonization, in 1938 Europe had controlled or still controlled 80 % of all land mass on the globe, the West imposed very effectively its capitalist economic model, with industrial large-scale way of producing and thinking as dominant, as superior in the entire world. The life style dream for the poor was and partly still is, to consume and behave like an American. The non -western cultures have not recovered from colonization, they still behave as if colonized I sometimes think. China and India seem to be as ecologically analfabets as the US. Not to speak about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Read Jared Diamonds books and you can learn how various human societies all over the world and along history, non Western as well as Western, have made a mess of their relationship to natural environment and that disappeared as a result. But they did not dominate the globe and did not impose their style of production.
Climate change on a regional level occured already in the Antique, with forest clearcuts in Mesopotamia and Egypt turned the areas to deserts. Something early Christians already were trying to change. They considered Nature to be free of sin and holy ( like St Antonius in the desert, who became 105 years old) the later Christians, when their faith became the Roman empires state religion in its most militaristic phase, and forgot this ecological side of their tradition. Its almost forgotten until now. Its not only industrialization, its an entire pattern of ideas, values, attitudes and behaviors originating from severe ecological analfabetism, leading dominant elites to collective self-destructive behavior that some associate with the introduction of agriculture. It was then mankind started to dominate nature by breeding animals , keeping them captivated , the same with plants: captivate them, dominate them, control their breeding; . some antropologists idealize the hunter-gatherer societies as the last stage of humankind that was ecologically sound. i do not believe in trying to reverse time and go back to the past, i do not believe everything was perfekt or even better in the past. We have to reinvent ourselves.
the elites nows can not react effectively and can not even think the ecological crisis. They pretend it does not exist, because they cannot conceive that they are depend on the ecosystem , on small crabs in the ocean, bvacteria making oxygen, and trees with mushrooms and so on, and that they cannot control them. They either deny to get knowledge about this or believe they can " fix" the problem easily.
if a virus show s up the elites make vaccines and medication ( lousy but ok)- against the ecological crisis, they fail to act,are stil failing every day… even not trying.
I believe in ecological small scale and large scale agriculture, permaculture and food forests- and justice in distribution of goods, and greening all deserts- our only change to reverse the climate change, get CO2 out of the air again.“The soils will save us” Kristin Ohlson describes that plan. Water can we won out of Sahara humid air by hand made condensation towers and villages in the desert can grow food there and make soil. If there is nno war of course. IN war, nothing constructive is possible.