The road that cannot be taken

The roadmap to nowhere on Earth

On 11 June 2026, the United Nations released a remarkable document, The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. This report is remarkable on many levels, beginning with its fundamental challenge to the prevailing global development ethic of market-driven continuous material growth. Roadmap is a blueprint to reform (up-end, actually) the world economy. It was advanced, not by a secret cabal of subversive conspirators, but “…through contributions from a wide range of familiar actors, including unions, civil society groups, academic experts, States and UN agencies”. The primary author, Olivier De Schutter (Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights) compiled and integrated inputs from more than 400 individuals instructed to address a crucial question:

How can we address poverty and inequality emergencies without seeing economic growth as the precondition for progress?

De Schutter and some other contributors recently summarized their rationale and goals in a Guardian article under a heading beginning with “we economists have done the maths”.

“For decades, the recipe was simple: grow the economy, and poverty would gradually disappear. But the promise that economic growth would ‘lift all boats’ has not been kept…. At the top, fortunes ballooned; at the bottom, families turned to food banks. Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity.

“It has also become ecologically unsustainable.

“Many low‑income countries still need growth… But the dominant path to growth – based on resource extraction, cheap and compliant labour, export dependence and deepening debt – has widened inequality and degraded the environment…

“…we are united in the conviction that our economies must be redesigned around the fulfilment of rights and collective wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than maximising output at any cost.

Hence the need “…to change the rules upstream (See pillars 3-5). That means, for instance, decent work and employment guarantees, living wages and fair remuneration, stronger unions and workplace democracy… It means public control of strategic assets, credit guidance to steer investment towards social and ecological priorities, and support for the development of the social and solidarity economy.”

According to these authors, “the most immediate role of the Roadmap will be to guide national anti-poverty strategies.” In this narrow respect, Roadmap is a brilliantly constructed, remarkably comprehensive, and theoretically excellent plan, not least because it would reinvest the gains from growth in the maintenance of essential social, biophysical and built infrastructure. ‘Wealth’ would accumulate mostly in the public domain rather than languish in the investment accounts—or dissipate in the self-indulgent fantasies—of the rich.

From the perspective of ecological economics and human ecology, the most important bits of the report’s six policy pillars are:

PILLAR 3 - UNIVERSAL BASIC SERVICES AND SOCIAL PROTECTION which advocates for such radical strategies as:

3.1 Universal access to education;

3.2. Universal access to nutritious food;

3.3. Universal access to health coverage;

3.4 Universal access to housing;

3.5. Universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene;

3.6. Universal access to clean energy;

3.8. Universal digital connectivity and access Universal social protection;

3.9. Universal social protection;

3.10. Minimum income guarantees; and

3.12. Universal basic income.

PILLAR 4 - ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE Ecological limits and sufficiency which requires, among other measures:

4.1. Caps on resource use, emissions, and pollution;

4.2. Rationing luxury commodities;

4.5. Community governance of the commons;

4.6. Affirming rights of nature and biodiversity protection;

4.8 Agroecology and food sovereignty;

4.10 Redistribution and Equitable Governance of Land

PILLAR 5 - TRANSFORMING THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER including such great leaps forward as:

5.1. Sovereign debt cancellation and Global South debtors’ coalition;

5.2. Curbing the dominance of private credit ratings agencies through multilateral credit rating

5.6. A United Nations Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation

5.7. A binding Covenant on the Right to Development;

5.8. South-south trade and investment compacts & payment systems;

5.9. Democratization of intellectual property regimes, technology sharing and establishing knowledge commons

5.10. Ending investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms

Toward ‘steady-state’ as operating system

Even a quick read of authors’ brief summary and the key ‘pillars’ is enough to show that Roadmap is not merely a plan to alleviate poverty. From the corporate boardrooms and government suites of modern techno-industrial (MTI) states everywhere, it will be seen as an ideological wrecking-ball, a ‘radical-left’ heresy aimed at leveling the towering edifice of growth-bound neoliberal economics to its foundations and equitably sharing the world’s wealth.

This would be no small achievement on several grounds. To implement Roadmap would require: first, that ‘humanity’ cease to self-divide into a motley assortment of fractiously competitive, often-belligerent, frequently-warring national tribes and alliances and come together cooperatively in an ennobling, agreed-to common purpose and; second, that this uniquely united world community abandon the free-wheeling expansionist beliefs, values, assumptions and cultural norms that have defined techno-industrial society for at least two hundred years. There is no longer room for macro-corporations, billionaires, or resource hoarding, only adequacy for all. Roadmap demands that humanity embrace a diametrically upending economic narrative focused on social justice and equality, framed by biophysical limits and the need to maintain the structural integrity and essential life-support functions of the ecosphere.

From the perspective of biophysical and ecological economics, this is certainly a more enlightened and biophysically appropriate vision than is the status quo. If humanity really wishes to achieve sustainability, we can no longer define the economy as a self-generating, ever-expanding system floating free of the ‘environment’ unconstrained by natural law. Economic activity must be bolted to biophysical reality. The architects of the re-jigged economy implicitly recognize that the present human enterprise is a growing fully-contained, dependent subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere (as long emphasized by the late ecological economist, Herman Daly). To eliminate this fatal incompatibility, the operating system for the new economy must mimic the steady-state operating system of the ecosphere.

To mainstream economists and other techno-optimists, however, ‘steady-state’ is a loathsome phantasm or at least a curse word—which may be why the term appears only twice, and very meekly, in a long report.

There’s actually no need for such reticence. A ’steady-state’ does not mean stagnation and death—it refers to a more or less constant, if fluctuating, level of energy and material throughput. The ecosphere, for example, is essentially a steady-state that has thrived for countless millennia (re)producing itself using the more-or-less constant stream of solar energy, and by continuously recycling all the necessities for life. And the ecosphere is hardly stagnant—it is constantly rebuilding and reshaping while evolving ever-greater diversity, complexity and resilience.[1] So, theoretically, could it be for the human enterprise. As Roadmap illustrates, it is entirely possible to conceive of an equitable steady-state economy if we shift the policy emphasis from sheer quantitative growth (getting bigger) to true qualitative development (getting better).[2]

Cultural reality check

The pivotal words in the previous sentence are ‘possible to conceive’. While Roadmap appears dramatically off-piste from MTI center, most of its core themes are hardly novel or unique. Think of the classical harmonies in ‘Malthus’ and ‘Marx’—18^th and 19^th Century, no less!—and the hundreds of academic papers and books that have contributed to the global sustainability opera.[3] Numerous highly-motivated social groups from feminist-, civil- and indigenous-rights organizations, through the trade union and climate justice movements to various national ‘Green’ Parties, sing parts of the libretto. Several other econo-variants—degrowth, feminist, steady-state, biophysical, ecological, solidarity economics, etc.—stage whole acts of the revisionist spectacle if in somewhat different keys. Conceiving of alternative ways to choreograph a humane and ecologically sound economy is a fairly commonplace activity.

Implementing socially-just no-growth economics is an entirely different matter.

If history and the momentum of MTI culture are any guide, Roadmap has less chance of taking flight than does a butterfly glued to a lead brick.

This is doubly discouraging; sweeping intellectual achievement though it is, Roadmap doesn’t go nearly far enough. Like most other broad-brush prescriptions for economic reform, including the degrowth movement and most green party platforms, Roadmap does not adequately deal with ecological overshoot. Limited rationing and the redistribution of economic benefits and costs may honour the commitment to social justice, but does nothing to reduce aggregate energy and material throughput by the almost 45%[4] (80%/capita in rich countries) needed to salvage the ecosphere.

Similarly, Roadmap entirely skirts the population taboo. Even fairly conservative estimates suggest that earth could sustainability support a population of only ~ 2.5 billion at today’s average material standard of living, [5] down from the current 8.3 billion (a drop of 70%).[6] This implies that the global community should be developing and adopting a new non-coercive procreative ethics and advancing national/global population planning. Instead, many countries —particularly those facing the dreaded spectre of peak population—remain addicted to the perpetual growth ethic and are actively pursuing pronatalist policies.

Hostile takeover

The economist authors of Roadmap claim to have “done the maths”. To their credit, they do acknowledge crucial indices such as humanity’s inflated ecological footprint and recognize the impacts of extractive growth on biodiversity. Yet there are a few significant numbers that escaped being sufficiently mathed in their analysis:

· The human ecological footprint exceeds global biocapacity by ~78%. Roadmap does not address the implicit necessary ~45% contraction of the human enterprise.

· Human biomass plus that of our domestic livestock comprises ~96% of total mammalian biomass. Wild mammal species combined account for <4%.

· Human biomass alone is 10 times greater than the biomass of all terrestrial mammals combined.

· H. sapiens is competitively displacing many non-human species from their ecosystems and poisoning many others. Even surviving vertebrate populations have declined by 73% since 1970.[7]

· The human population is about 14,000 times greater than the arithmetic mean among species of non-human mammals of similar body size. If humans were an ecologically ‘normal’ (i.e., typical) species our global population would be <600,000.

· The mass of human-made artefacts (i.e., the material output of human activities) now exceeds total natural biomass on Earth.

· H. sapiens has become the greatest geological force changing the face of Earth. For example, we move about 24 times more material around the planet than rivers move sediment to the oceans.

When these and like data are taken into account it is apparent that the human enterprise has effectively merged with the ecosphere. This is, however, a parasitically hostile takeover; to maintain their current economic trajectory, humans are liquidating the crucial assets that made the ecosphere an attractive acquisition in the first place, including much of non-human life. As noted many times in earlier posts, overshoot is a terminal condition. The massive socio-economic reforms outlined in Roadmap do not address this biophysical reality; its cartography does not map to real-world territory.

A more likely trajectory

Which brings us back to one of our recurrent themes. I have argued that modern techno-industrial culture is inherently unsustainable and cannot be ‘fixed’. A major—and without a viable plan, likely chaotic and painful—contraction of the human enterprise is almost inevitable. Systemic negative feedbacks will kick in to subdue humanity’s hubristic excesses.

Perhaps the most novel thing about our contemporary predicament is the global scale of the coming ‘correction’. Large-scale human societies are inherently prone to implode; every significant civilization to date has collapsed following much the same trajectory. This pattern emerges inexorably from the way certain innate human individual and social behaviours play out in the context of the human-made, but alien-synthetic, social/institutional/political socio-cultural environments that characterize super-sized societies.

Civilizational collapse is a uniquely human complex systems phenomenon.

Why might this be so? Part of the explanation resides in human evolutionary history. Hominids have been around for millions of years; H. sapiens for 350,000 years, but so-called ‘civilization’ for only ~6000 years. In short, ‘civilization’ and the large-scale communities/institutions it generates have existed for only a tiny fraction of hominin existence, just 2% of even anatomically modern humans’ time.

This means that the human brain and behavioural repertoire evolved in, and are adapted to, life in small foraging groups or hunter-gatherer bands living in relatively unchanging, spatially limited home ranges. This suggests, in turn, that the human psyche and innated associated behaviours may well be maladapted to many of the physical and social dimensions of life in large-scale societies. If so, should we not expect to see aberrant behaviours and social dysfunction—albeit disguised as ‘normal’ by virtue of custom and repetition across cultures and through recorded history?

Supporting evidence is all around us— hyper-competitiveness, institutional psychopathy, rigid social hierarchies, econo/political elites, division of labour (including still common slave labour), gross inequality, rampant corruption, etc., are all structural emergent phenomena facilitated by large-scale organizations and institutions. Roadmap’s social justice and equality are not on the list.

Similarly, most of the socio-urban pathologies — under-employment and poverty, chronic anxiety and depression, substance abuse (including the opioid crisis), discrimination, homelessness, criminal gangs, etc. — confounding society today are inevitable behavioural emergent phenomena characterizing over-large social congregations in physically hostile environments. These phenomena, nearly universal in large-scale societies, were virtually absent from hunter-gatherer bands, the pre-agricultural life-mode for even anatomically modern H. sapiens

All is complicated by the fact that cultural evolution has vastly outpaced bio-evolution; our cognitive wetware cannot effectively run contemporary cultural software—we have rendered ourselves cognitively obsolete. Moreover, things are getting worse; the accelerating rate of techno-change guarantees that adaptation recede ever-further beyond human reach. One need think only of the angst and insecurity that are blooming simultaneously with the rise of AI-assisted corporations and oligarchs.

I call this entire phenomenon the human maladaptation syndrome (described more fully and in associated references in https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/civilization-and-the-human-maladaptation ).

What now?

We cannot escape who we are. If the human maladaptation syndrome runs true, then we moderns are, once again, caught up in a true systemic predicament that has no solution at scale. H. Sapiens seems fatally cursed: we have an unprecedented wealth of data, analysis, models and scenarios describing the potholed road and non-negotiable curves that lie ahead. We also possess encyclopedic knowledge of how to build better socio-economic highways, yet we remain psycho-cognitively paralyzed, collectively mind-cuffed into staying our present course. It’s blinders on and ‘full open throttle’ for global MTI culture.

There is, as yet, no convincing synthesis of humanity’s ‘ways of knowing’ that can overcome or redirect the repeating cycle of civilizational collapse. Humanity is arguably entangled in an evolutionary trap reinforced by MTI forms of social learning. Ancient behavioural patterns that were once adaptive—e.g., temporal, spatial and social discounting­—have become impediments to change; new patterns characteristic of large-scale ‘civilization’ (including institutional ‘architecture’ that actually selects for dark triad personalities) are positively destructive from the get-go.

Conceivably, irresistible political pressure in the form of world-wide social protest could press the cultural reset button—Roadmap details why this might be justified. But is mass social upheaval really likely? Most ordinary people, including those in poverty, are arguably more immediately dependent on MTI institutions than are the 1%—consider global ‘just in time’ supply chains for food and other essentials, not to mention the jobs and money people need for access to said essentials. Virtually everyone has a stake in maintaining something like the status quo as long as possible, which dampens enthusiasm for insurrection. In any event, the result of open revolt would likely be tragically chaotic and any relief short-lived—shorter-lived, even, than MTI culture itself is likely to be.

In the circumstances, humane, socially just Roadmaps that show the world community theoretical alternatives, however brilliantly conceived, are destined merely to reveal inviting roads not taken that cannot be taken.

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[1] At least it was until the great set-back that began with the extraction-based industrial revolution.

[2] ‘Growth’ is actually a juvenile phase in the ‘ontogeny’ of most living organisms. Think of your own life-cycle: from conception through your first couple of decades, your body is growing and complexifying. Then growth stops. As an adult, you become a steady-state bio-system but you can continue developing, becoming a better person and improving in every way—intellectually, professionally, and socially—for most of the rest of your life.

[3] Particularly since the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, managed to put an incipit version of sustainable development on the negotiating table nearly forty years ago.

[4] This is likely a considerable underestimate since ecological footprint analysis does not address many human impacts such as micro-plastic contamination and accelerating methane releases that cannot be represented in terms of productive ecosystem area.

[5] Which most high-income citizen consumers would regard as grossly inadequate.

[6] These authors conclude “…it is clear that Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources. As such, some form of societal downscaling appears inevitable, whether achieved actively or in response to continued declines in population growth.”

^[7] Ecosystem simplification reduces bio-resilience and endangers remaining life-forms, including humans.