Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Mass Migration is Biosphere Collapse

Mass migration is biosphere collapse

Refugees flowing into Europe and elsewhere globally are the direct result of over-population, ecosystem collapse, climate change, militarism and inequity. Mass migration has the potential to overrun entire societies and human civilization, and even threatens to collapse the biosphere. Migration must be controlled; and refugees and economic migrants assisted to return to productive, sustainable uses of land as close as possible to their place of origin.


First and foremost the mass exodus of refugees and migrants from Africa and the Middle East into Europe is an ecological disaster. Entire regions have overshot the carrying capacity of their land and water; which has been exacerbated by abrupt climate change, and rising human populations with unlimited aspirations for consumption.

An estimated 60 million refugees were forced from their homes by conflict last year. Nearly one billion people live on less than $1.50 a day, and many if not most would migrate in search of economic opportunity if given the chance. Today alone 12,000 migrants arrived in Munich, Germany.
It is a physical impossibility for Europe and America to house all of Africa, Middle East, and South America’s true refugees as well as hundreds of millions of poor people that want to migrate to a better life. Trying will lead to global ecological, social, and economic collapse.

For all intents and purposes Earth is fully occupied. Thus the nature of mass migration has changed since Europeans colonized the world. There no longer exist large intact ecosystems for refugees to flee to, murder the locals, and cut down natural ecosystems to produce illusory economic progress for a while before moving on repeatedly. We live in a different world that is threatened with global biosphere collapse and we need to adjust our expectations on migration accordingly.

Ecological science knows we have already exceeded numerous planetary boundaries in regard to sustaining a habitable Earth, one of which – as identified by myself in recently published peer reviewed science – is the need to maintain natural and agro-ecological ecosystems across 2/3 of the land, though 1/2 has already been lost. Natural and semi-natural ecosystems that remain are crucial to sustaining local and regional environmental sustainability, as well as the overall well-being of our one living biosphere that makes all life possible.

Earth’s remaining natural capital and thus a livable Earth are profoundly threatened by mass flows of migrants in so many ways. Newly arrived migrants quickly embrace Western style over-consumption (which dramatically reduces remaining natural ecosystems), refugee pathways are strewn with rubbish and nature trampled, and protected ecosystems are routinely violated. Ecosystem loss is thus both cause and effect of ecocidal mass migration.

In the flows of refugees to Europe we are witnessing the bioregional scale ecosystem collapse occurring in Africa and the Middle East as it expands its scope to become a global level ecological disturbance. There is no way the biosphere will be sustained with such large, poverty stricken populations on the move.

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