Regarding cooperation versus competition, I recall a book chapter on the topic in one of the ecology classes I took.
It asserted that competition prevails in biomes with high trophic concentration, and that cooperation prevails in biomes with low trophic concentration. It may have been Howard Odum, but I have been unable to find that book!
It included a vivid example of two biomes.
One was tropical. It included thousands of primary producers, fed on by high tens to low hundreds of small animals, eventually feeding perhaps a dozen top predators. Competition constantly drove evolution, resulting in high speciation and high diversification.
The other biome was arctic (or alpine). It included tens of primary producers, which are often symbiotic, feeding low tens of small heterotrophs, which eventually fed the Rough-legged Hawk and the Snowy Owl, who "cooperate" temporally, by day and night.
A lot of people think of competition as "natural" but assume cooperation is by some sort of volition, and thus unavailable to "lower" non-sentient animals. And yet the Rough-legged Hawk and the Snowy Owl came to an evolutionary "agreement" to cooperate.
Prior to human use of fire, it seems most humans were cooperative in small groups in low-energy situations. For the first time in human history, grain agriculture gave us the ability to hoard and withhold trophic energy from each other, competing for energy. We've only become more and more energy-intesive — and competitive — ever since.
I'm hopeful that, in the coming world of declining energy resources, we'll re-discover ways of cooperating and sharing what is left.
This is not meant to counter your insights but our day to day as well as the majority of other organisms/cells behavior is cooperative rather than competitive. Otherwise none of us would be alive. Forest vs trees. Im afraid the author is guilty of the same reductionism we all tend towards, a limitation of the need to communicated complex non-linear ideas linearly. Life is one organism, in current scientific theory all life has been alive the same amount of time with the same origin. We break this into various pieces but they are actually just one thing “life.”
Most MTI education is purposely designed to get us to compete or we would not even spend the small proportional amount of time of our day we now spend in competition in competition.
I have only the greatest respect for Prof. Rees and his "ecological footprint". However, as a retired physician/psychiatrist with 42 yrs. of observing human behavior, I have read my share of paleo anthropology and have come to understand the ecological role of modern human behavior in the natural and social environments. We are evolved from migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands, of less than 150 members (Dunbar number) and that form of social organization controlled population growth and kept "ecological footprints" small. When our more recent ancestors stumbled onto the huge energy production of sedentary grain agriculture, our numbers and social complexity exploded, we moved away from egalitarian social relationships of the H-G clan and onto huge hierarchical civilizations. I did not understand the true nature of human social interactions until Carl Whitaker gave me a copy of John Calhoun's "Death Squared" paper and over my professional life that grew into "population density stress" and the "stress diseases", which are the top ten diseases killing us today. I wrote my magnum opus and published it in 2018, "Stress R Us". Prof. Rees is correct in putting forward an end-time scenario of the collapse spelled out in the "Seneca Curve", but that curve in animal crowding researches like Calhoun's ends with a steeper down turn than the graphs in this article, and terminates with the extinction of the entire crowded population to the last man/woman/child. Have a blessed evening!
Thanks for the note, Dr Miklashek. I'm not quite sure how to respond since we seem to be in near-perfect alignment, from the relevance of Dunbar's number, through the suppression of negative feedbacks, post agricultural/ MTI explosions, and emergence of hierarchies to the prevalence of urban psycho-pathologies. I agree that the down-slope of the Seneca curve may be steeper than implied by the LtG business as usual scenario, but that's fodder for a future article.
I am honored by the reply from one of my climate heroes, and ask you to consider my contention that in our prehistorical ancestral world the demands of migratory H-G life forced population control on those men and women. A woman could only carry one infant child, with maybe one other trotting along beside her. These brave souls lived, by necessity, in an ecologically balanced and self-sustaining manner. The jump to sedentary grain based agriculture has had enormous negative consequences, as we are now literally eating ourselves “out of house and home”, in a global population 3,000 times greater than they numbered. Again, the crowded animal researches of John Calhoun, as in his pivotal “Death Squared” paper published in 1973, always led to a TOTAL extinction of the crowded population, to the last man, woman, and unprotected child, in their deteriorated families. Have a blessed day/evening and a very HAPPY HOLIDAY!
I believe that the authors of LtG hedged the shape of the down slope by admitting that once collapse started it was impossible to predict the effects of numerous tipping points on the rate of collapse.
The LtG model was calibrated against the economic growth of the previous century (whenever they had good data). but there was no example of a prior global MTI societal collapse with which to calibrate the parameters of the down-sloping curves.
You are correct is describing foraging societies who kept their numbers low via cultural mechanisms, and acquisitive hoarding and power grabs under control thru social sanctions. Thomas Malthus wrote at a time in history when we did not have any good data about foraging societies. Now, we do. For the last 8,000 years humans have lived in non-egalitarian societies that allow leaders to hoard, and carry out all of those other activities that encourage population growth and the over-exploitation of resources. The logic of capitalism exacerbates this even more. Yes, we do have too many people on the planet and an unsustainable way of living in developed societies. But we also have out-of-control oligarchs that are rapidly sucking up wealth and resources that could be put to better use for solving the problems that we face. I’m not ready to give up.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, but I deeply researched the paleolithic and the impacts of the clan/band social unit, including its central role in controlling population growth, in great detail in my 2018 “Stress R Us”. A free downloadable PDF is available at Stanford, just google the title. Have a blessed day and a VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY.
Thank you. I can provide you many more citations, if you are interested. I’m a cultural anthropologist who has been fascinated with these transitions for decades. I think it’s important for us to look at the human condition cross-culturally and evolutionarily, especially now.
Anthropologists have struggled for a long time to resolve the relationship and influence between psychology and culture. We know Homo sapiens is all one species. No matter how wide the range there has not been speciation. As a result there are basic similarities in the cognitive processes of all Homo sapiens. We also know that there is wide variation across time and geography in the way people create their way of life. The debate about the psychic unity of humans versus the behavioral disunity of humans is unresolved, but the early anthropological approach asserting a determinism to human biological and cultural evolution has given way to the fact the what happens over the long term is contingent. Anthropologists had the determinism whacked out of us, not by ideology but by the facts on the ground. What does that mean? It means things did not have to be the way they are and consequently they don’t have to be the way they are, and we don’t know how they will be. I suggest a reading of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of everything.
Folks like yourself have given “anthropology” a bad name due to the very obscure language you just used in this reply. Read my 2018 “Stress R Us”, then try again to express yourself simply and clearly. Have a blessed day/evening.
I would like to mention that John Calhoun’s experiment had very questionable methodology as the rat colony was barely cleaned throughout five years of experiment, so the results were more likely due to diseases; his results were not successfully replicated either. Meanwhile wild rats were not observed to have similar behaviors. Not to mention it’s at least debatable that rodent behaviors can be applied to humans, as human experiments did not show ‘behavioral sink’ under crowded conditions. So I believe that one should really be cautious when using Calhoun’s experiment as a doomsday prophecy for human civilization.
Sadly, you have not made a full study of the many animal crowding researchers and their work in the 1960’s and 1970’s. You may appreciate my 2018 book, “Stress R Us”, that goes into considerable detail on the work of Charles Southwick and J.J. Christian and their reiterations of Calhoun’s work. I need not elaborate, as the history is spelled out in my book, which is available as a free PDF out at Stanford, for a simple Google search. Have a blessed day and a VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY!
Another homerun Bill. Btw, you were great in that excellent documentary Greenwashed.
Some of the hopium in these comments are entertaining. Here’s what I think everyone ought to know: The thing that makes humans so ridiculously unique is fire. More specifically, cooking.
IMO, there are only two books needed to make sense of the insanity. Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. And Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In that order.
Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis proposes that the controlled use of fire to cook food was the primary driver of human evolution and bigger brains. By “predigesting” food outside the body, cooking provided early humans with a massive energy surplus that fundamentally altered our biology and social structure.
Cooking provided the high-calorie fuel necessary for the rapid brain growth seen in Homo erectus. And because cooked food is softer and easier to digest, humans evolved smaller teeth, weaker jaws, and a significantly smaller digestive tract (shorter colon) compared to other primates. Cooking also dramatically reduced the time spent chewing. While chimpanzees may spend 6 hours a day chewing raw food, humans spend a fraction of that, allowing more time for toolmaking, hunting and socializing.
Ligotti claims that the greatest horrors are not imaginary but are found in the reality of being a conscious entity. And that human consciousness is an evolutionary accident. A biological blunder. Unlike other animals that exist in a ‘unity of life’, humans are cursed with a self-awareness that forces them to recognize their own mortality, suffering, and the essential meaninglessness of existence. The “conspiracy” in the title refers to the collective self-deception humans use to survive. Ligotti argues that society and our own biological programming compel us to maintain an “optimistic fallacy” - relying on defense mechanisms to suppress the terrifying truth of our condition.
The only thing I disagree with Ligotti about is the accident part. I don’t think it was a blunder at all. Life (aka the Blob) is always looking for the advantage in maximizing energy consumption. The Blob is forever seeking to become what we call an invasive species. But it’s never a big deal when it happens because quick feedback loops kick in to rectify the situation. Unless of course agriculture, mining and drilling are involved. Then it becomes the biggest deal imaginable.
The late great Gail Zawacki said it best, "We're incapable and always have been incapable of holding ourselves back. We're programmed to grow, we're programmed to consume, and we're programmed to deny that that's a problem. We're basically an invasive species."
Bottom line: after you read both books, you’ll understand that cooking is the only pathway that leads to a single species self-induced mass extinction.
So nice to hear common sense rather than the toxic hopium always caught up in humanity's perceived greatness! Thank you, I hadn't heard that theory but it makes a lot of sense. Energy dissipation!
Hmmm, are we self aware? What percentage of the self are we actually aware of? My thoughts are that self-awareness is just a hallucination of a form of inter/intra-species method of communication known as language. Language is by its nature linear. It can only one express one chain of thought at a time and constructs a narrative out of the limited information available to it within the nervous system. Type 2 thinking is not a commander but a residue. We take this narrative as self-awareness yet this idea collapses when this network is disrupted (split brain research and alien hand syndrome are gross visible manifestations of this but one would assume this is widespread and the norm in neural processing).
I love Wranghams cooking hypothesis, fascinating stuff.
Since it has such an energetic advantage, it's curious that the ability to manipulate fire didn't evolve all the time throughout earth's history. So far, it appears that the only species that has this ability is homo sapiens. It looks like a very unlikely "accident" to me.
Yeah, I recently flipped on this. Right now my view is that the only meaning/purpose you're gonna find in the universe is to dissipate energy. Same with life. So that would make fire (more specifically, a sapien type awareness level) the holy grail for energy dissipation purposes.
But there seems to be two things going on with my logic. First, I try hard to never paint humans as unique. So nothing rare about us as most planets with the Blob are gonna eventually reach fire as well. And the 2nd thing, there's probably some hopium going on with me wanting to believe the universe is filled with civilizations that went through their fossil energy peak before going extinct.
ps. Joe, Bill, and anyone else, would love to hear your thoughts on this Cactus Theory essay from un-Denial. It's not mine and I have no agenda. I'm just a fan of the site.
Couple of thoughts. Language is tricky so I'm uncomfortable with the notion that that there is meaning/purpose in the universe. These are humanoid terms. It is true that energy dissipates but it does so because of physics, it has no choice or purpose. The availability of energy implies disequilibrium (the potential for something to happen). Available energy will dissipate (second law of thermodynamics) until equilibrium (max entropy) is reached. In the meantime, humans can take advantage of a free ride as it dissipates.
As for 'cactus', I can resonate with a lot of the theory. In many respects its similar to Joseph Tainter's explanation for the collapse of complex societies.
I lose 'un-denial' when s/he says:
"With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:..."
and lists a whole series of things that people could do to delay the inevitable implosion and improve life quality in the meantime. Yup, noble ambition. The problem here is the usual one -- it's easy to list WHAT we coulda, shoulda, woulda do/done but much harder to prescribe HOW to ensure it happens. People don't behave that way. In short, these are theoretical actions and goals; there is no practical way to achieve them.
"What we coulda, shoulda, woulda do/done" I'm finding some of the blogs/vlogs are just time wasters for the senior citizens. I suppose it's better than playing pinochle at the senior citizen's center.
Yes, the blogosphere is littered with those who think if only we had done that, we'd be OK or if only we would do this, we'd be OK. A modern society is unsustainable, no matter what we do.
Cactus sounds like what Luke Kemp calls diminishing returns on extraction, which would be better termed diminishing *marginal* returns. Kemp dismisses Tainter on 2 counts. First, the fuzzy definition of complexity, and second, the ways that Goliaths, aka civilizations, actually simplify. A city or a cornfield is biologically simpler than a functional ecosystem, for example.
I haven't finished his book. My comment is based on the first 2 parts of his 3 part exegesis.
Not convinced of the cactus author's recommendations, other than burying nuclear waste and remediating brown fields, and stopping stupid stuff, but apparently, modernity forces the continuation of stupid stuff and prevents any prophylactic measures.
The only way to circumvent the internal collapse of modernity is much, much worse. Nuclear war would cut it off much sooner, also eliminating most or all life on earth. Maybe there is no external or intrinsic value, nevermind external or intrinsic value to Life, as Dr. Rees contends, but Life wants to live. I value it, and I suppose most living things value it, too. To me, that's enough reason to want to protect it.
Fire or burning fossil fuels (fire multiplied )? We would have a lot longer to contemplate all of this if we had not moved to fossil fuels. The end might be the same but perhaps a slower pace to the past 150 years would have allowed us to figure more out before our end was nigh.
The problem is that the "some things" rob other life of existence. There's real value in living. We ought to be smarter and more compassionate than a massive asteroid that collides with Earth, or mass volcanism, causing mass extinction.
all life necessarily robs other life of existence, but for that to be a problem, you need the premise that existence is good or desirable, at least more than not, if not totally. that assumption never made sense to me. that there's immense suffering isn't the same as that being a problem, i don't double count.
i can understand an organism holding the view that there's real value in living, but i don't think that any value is objective. i can also understand normativity as a coordination mechanism, but not as some objective information that magically dictates what should & shouldn't be the case regardless of anyone's perspective/preference/desire... so no, we oughtn't be or do anything in that strong sense.
Most of what modern humans are doing to other life isn't necessary. I've spent much of life observing non-humans and I've concluded their lives are meaningful to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective, that's why they are around. There are all kinds of ways of life (10 million species), most of which we know little about. They are all related to us, and deserve respect. To be honest, I don't understand your point. I'm not implying that it's invalid, I just don't get it.
that's fine. well, i am very partial to necessitarianism as defended by amy karofsky, so i think the best inference is that literally everything is necessary, i.e. nothing that's ever actual could've been otherwise & only what's ever actual is possible. i find the reasoning for this view as laid out in her book to be extremely compelling and intuitive.
i'm younger than you (early 20s) and had a 'deep green' phase a few years ago, and i can understand your view, but i couldn't sincerely sustain it for a while. i can keep honestly asking '... so what?' to having every allegedly valuable thing i and others can think of, and it's clear to me that there are no stakes, meaning is a nonsense ape concept, nothing is a problem or wrong, it's all just a sequence of events, including sometimes interpreting stuff as wrong, right, desirable, (un)satisfying, frustrating, whatever...
when i encounter a claim like "there are x million ways of life... and they all deserve respect", i don't know what you mean. i don't believe that deservingness makes sense, i couldn't care less if all of them went extinct right now. nevertheless, i'm interested in researching, understanding, explaining all these ways of life, but i desire a level of STEM progress which enables us to imperceptibly kill all sentience and stop new instances of abiogenesis, and cultural progress whereby people or whatever intelligent sentient entities may exist, understand how and why that is desirable and then deliberate on doing it.
there's nothing irrational or objectively incorrect about my desires and views. my point is that a kind of indifferent, ruthless restless relentlessness is part of human nature because it's part of non-human nature, of which human nature is a subset. this is just partly how existence works.
I care if other life disappears because of our doing. It has enriched my life immensely. Without it I would be a shed of myself. I also understand and feel that close evolutionary connectivity to other life, not qualitatively different than what I feel for other humans. I also, I've been told, have a sharp and consistent sense of morality. I trust that. Thanks for sharing your views.
Good to hear thoughts from a young person. I find your position intriguing, if rather cold. To me, biodiversity on this planet is the most amazing thing. And while we are part of that, I'd rather go to sleep tonight with the rest of our species and none of us wake up, so the "non-sentient" folks can go on about their business! Can STEM do that? 🥹
There's a very easy way to judge any given human action towards the environment. Just ask, “Was that a dick move?” The answer will be immediately apparent inside.
Another excellent summary of the human and global situation. Over the years I have found your lectures and papers the most accurate account of what is happening. Its such a shame that we can’t coordinate to shrink the human population and place highest economic value on rewilding and regenerative agriculture. It would be a nicer world to live in.
Instead, we are doubling down on old practices in response to the global instability. Even in New Zealand the current government to loosening environmental regulations, promoting all forms of energy use, and even favouring science that focuses on economic outputs. I think Derrick Jensen once said something along the lines of: we made giant stone heads when civilisation was growing, and now its collapsing we will make more giant stone heads.
I agree with almost everything you say here but I think you are too pessimistic, because you underestimate human adaptability. Humans’ evolved motives of acquisitiveness could be constructively channeled into planetary stewardship and climate restoration instead of exploitation and overshoot by the right systems of governance and economics. There is no guarantee we will manage to get from where we are to that point, but it won’t be because we are somehow genetically incapable of it. A simple example is the problem of democracies always turning into oppressive oligarchies. This is not universal in human experience, although it might seem so when looking at western civilization. Ancient Sumer solved this problem by having periodic resets using debt forgiveness, and this was successful for millennia. I can imagine our establishing a global system based on giving monetary value to actions which enhance rather than exploit the environment, for instance. An example of monetizing decarbonization is carbon credit systems which use a science-based MRV (Measuring/Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) to reward positive specific climate actions.
Paraphrasing part of a speech given by Nicholas Murray Butler in 1931: "There are a few who make things happen, many who watch things happen, and the vast majority who ask "what happened!?"". Thank you, Bill, for your unwavering, tireless, long-term committment and efforts to help all three described groups navigate the unhinged complexity we have self-created. It makes the inevitable and imminent facilitated reflections and discussions in community garden and halls so much easier.
1/The front page of today's USA edition of the Financial Times has as its biggest headline: "EU's 2035 combustion engine ban set to be scrapped after industry pressure - Brussels plans policy reversal - Reprieve under cetain conditions - Totemic element of climate law"
2/Here's a cartoon I saw, with plausible faux details added. Imagine an important lecture at Kresge Auditorium at MIT, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future - Nate Hagens speaks on "The Great Simplification". Hagens concludes by saying "If we all work together, we can handle this". The hall is almost empty, however, and in one row a retired Canadian professor quietly tells a recovering astrophysicist sitting next to him, "In other words, we're hooped."
3/Another cartoon - a humanoid dog is sitting at a table holding a mug of coffee in his hand/paw - the room is in flames - he says "This is fine."
4/A nonmeatbased information-processing conversation was asked to amplify James Tate's poem "I left my couch in Tatamagouche" by having the Apparition of Anna Swan speak directly to the narrator about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism - this NICS is Chinese-made and allegedly an order of magnitude more energy-efficient than its competitors. Excerpts:
"The world is poorly made for comfort.
It grinds, it aches, it breaks faith.
Do not call it tragic. Call it physics.”
“Then what wants fixing?” I asked, a notebook in my lap, useless.
She laughed, a low, graveled chuckle.
“You do. The part of you that expected better.
That thinks ‘I deserve’—deserve safety, deserve meaning,
deserve a future that resembles the past....
"Is there a stop?"I whispered.
“There is,” she said. “But it is not a cure.
It is the moment you stop asking the cliff
to be a meadow....
5/Point 1 is an event. Points 2 and 3 are imaginary situations. Point 4 is an event AND an imaginary situation - real output - "slop" - from a plagiarism machine, asked to rethink a story about an imaginary situation. I asked the same machine to recast the Bokononist last rites - from Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" - as a homily for a Unitarian service delivered in the style of Michael Dowd - I could imagine Dowd saying it, actually.
Collapse is always inevitable, its the timing thats important to us. Homo sapiens are in their last generations regardless, what comes after will not be us, technically, due to genetic engineering. Life is a continuing process and homosapiens had its short but glorious time as part of that chain. If you are specifically worried about you and yours, take heart in the knowledge that a good chunk of the people on this planet never experienced the abundance that this article laments losing. For them there has been no highs and the lows keep coming. Yet, amazingly, I think they are more optimistic than most here.
Otherwise, I want to say I throughly enjoyed this article. It brings to mind Kurt Vonneguts observation of humans being suicide loving life worshipers.
The idea that humans are simply a species whose members have relatively short term goals is almost never acknowledged. If any organism doesn't survive the next 10 minutes, then the genes they embody will not be passed on. It's only when an ecosystem reaches a climax state that it seems the species are living in perfect harmony, as various factors interact to keep the populations of species fairly stable. For a while. But humans have well developed abilities to go beyond those stable boundaries and perturb every ecosystem they try to become a part of. Once humans invented the digging stick and were able to get at more food than other mammals, our future was doomed. Modernity is just a tiny wrinkle in life's history and future.
It does indeed read just like Limits to Growth, with the same problems. Essentially you are assuming that the future can be accurately described by the past, in which case extinction is absolutely unavoidable. But...
The basic assumption is that human behaviour can be adequately described by our state 3,000 years ago. I would agree that our physiology and anatomy, right down to detailed neuroanatomy, has not changed much since then. However, our behaviour is determined primarily by our social evolution, our culture. We have language, which despite Chomsky does not seem to be biologically determined. We have history, social customs, governments, societies. These are the product of evolution, but they respond very rapidly to changes in the environment. (At this point do not fall into the trap of assuming that environment is just the physical world.) We are not just adapted to exploit the world, but we are able to see ourselves and our possible futures, and adapt. The fact that you could write your article is evidence that we are not simply victims of an evolutionary path we started on a million or so years back.
Inter alia, we are a long way down the transition path for energy, from wood to coal to oil and now solar+wind. Energy demand per head has plateaued in the western world. Our populations statistics have for quite a while shown a fall off in fertility, so our total demand on the earth's resources should plateau as well. Against all the Limits to Growth predictions we discover fresh mineral deposits faster than we exhaust them.
We continue to grow enough food to feed the world population, despite annual choruses of doom saying that it will all end in tears. We use less fertiliser per hectare than 50 years ago, and are starting to properly worry about the state of our soils.
Our biodiversity loss seems to be plateauing as we become more aware, farming becomes more intensive and more people live in cities. Our forest cover is starting to increase. The worst of the climate change hasn't really hit yet, but it doesn't look to be the big extermination many people are hoping for.
Altogether I feel you have fallen for the glamour of Systems Thinking. I cut my teeth on that reading Koestler, and saw how well it worked out with the RAND Corporation guiding the US military in Vietnam. I suspect that once again human beings will evade the snare of it's linear models and have at least a couple more centuries to bring the CO2 levels down to whatever level they want.
That's the most sensible thing i have read in a while, combined with the information from National Emergency Briefing on YouTube, I know that my unborn great grandchildren will see out the century.
Excellent. Would just add/emphasize point made by Mark Bevis regarding the environmental pollution underestimate.
Had not seen Le Bon quote from 1895_ it's spot on :" The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim".
And futility is certainly a theme here William. Homo sapiens evolve a BIG brain and leverage its game-changing intellectual power to create not regenerative and sustainable societies, but an epoch - an age - so significant, it has been given its own name. And here we all are, living out humanities’ subliminal death throes in the a-toy named Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the cult of ‘the infinites’ spend every wakening hour innovating, amplifying, and accelerating, a planetary wide crisis, which ignored by their myopic greed is now an existential crisis.
Dr Luke Kemp nails it in his new blockbuster ‘Goliath’s Curse’. Kemp suggests, “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely.” My thoughts are selfish and centre on the fact that as a boomer, I’ll probably exit shortly before the axe of overshoot falls on the anvil of ignorance. I will then look forward to chasing up Donella Meadows to both console and congratulate her for a job well done. Then I will apologise to her for humanities stupidity. We were warned.
Thank you, Dr. Rees, for an honest and highly detailed explanation of the unfolding Ecological Overshoot Unraveling. The late great Michael Dowd used to say we don't get to know How things unravel but things can't keep doubling on a finite planet and sooner or later there will be a "correction." I suggest to all my subscribers to subcribe to William Rees. Not paranthetically: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
Appreciated this piece. I thought I’d chime in to note that you missed an important bit in the following sentence, including the opportunity for alliteration. After the word “celebrating” you ought to have inserted “or surviving” to capture one other reason some people haven’t noticed what’s happening. Cheers!
“More generously, the unprecedented and still-accelerating rate of technological change has so vastly outpaced bio-evolution that people either didn’t notice, haven’t fully grasped what’s happening or are simply too busy celebrating to care.”
Thanks for another wonderful article!
Regarding cooperation versus competition, I recall a book chapter on the topic in one of the ecology classes I took.
It asserted that competition prevails in biomes with high trophic concentration, and that cooperation prevails in biomes with low trophic concentration. It may have been Howard Odum, but I have been unable to find that book!
It included a vivid example of two biomes.
One was tropical. It included thousands of primary producers, fed on by high tens to low hundreds of small animals, eventually feeding perhaps a dozen top predators. Competition constantly drove evolution, resulting in high speciation and high diversification.
The other biome was arctic (or alpine). It included tens of primary producers, which are often symbiotic, feeding low tens of small heterotrophs, which eventually fed the Rough-legged Hawk and the Snowy Owl, who "cooperate" temporally, by day and night.
A lot of people think of competition as "natural" but assume cooperation is by some sort of volition, and thus unavailable to "lower" non-sentient animals. And yet the Rough-legged Hawk and the Snowy Owl came to an evolutionary "agreement" to cooperate.
Prior to human use of fire, it seems most humans were cooperative in small groups in low-energy situations. For the first time in human history, grain agriculture gave us the ability to hoard and withhold trophic energy from each other, competing for energy. We've only become more and more energy-intesive — and competitive — ever since.
I'm hopeful that, in the coming world of declining energy resources, we'll re-discover ways of cooperating and sharing what is left.
This is not meant to counter your insights but our day to day as well as the majority of other organisms/cells behavior is cooperative rather than competitive. Otherwise none of us would be alive. Forest vs trees. Im afraid the author is guilty of the same reductionism we all tend towards, a limitation of the need to communicated complex non-linear ideas linearly. Life is one organism, in current scientific theory all life has been alive the same amount of time with the same origin. We break this into various pieces but they are actually just one thing “life.”
Most MTI education is purposely designed to get us to compete or we would not even spend the small proportional amount of time of our day we now spend in competition in competition.
I have only the greatest respect for Prof. Rees and his "ecological footprint". However, as a retired physician/psychiatrist with 42 yrs. of observing human behavior, I have read my share of paleo anthropology and have come to understand the ecological role of modern human behavior in the natural and social environments. We are evolved from migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands, of less than 150 members (Dunbar number) and that form of social organization controlled population growth and kept "ecological footprints" small. When our more recent ancestors stumbled onto the huge energy production of sedentary grain agriculture, our numbers and social complexity exploded, we moved away from egalitarian social relationships of the H-G clan and onto huge hierarchical civilizations. I did not understand the true nature of human social interactions until Carl Whitaker gave me a copy of John Calhoun's "Death Squared" paper and over my professional life that grew into "population density stress" and the "stress diseases", which are the top ten diseases killing us today. I wrote my magnum opus and published it in 2018, "Stress R Us". Prof. Rees is correct in putting forward an end-time scenario of the collapse spelled out in the "Seneca Curve", but that curve in animal crowding researches like Calhoun's ends with a steeper down turn than the graphs in this article, and terminates with the extinction of the entire crowded population to the last man/woman/child. Have a blessed evening!
Thanks for the note, Dr Miklashek. I'm not quite sure how to respond since we seem to be in near-perfect alignment, from the relevance of Dunbar's number, through the suppression of negative feedbacks, post agricultural/ MTI explosions, and emergence of hierarchies to the prevalence of urban psycho-pathologies. I agree that the down-slope of the Seneca curve may be steeper than implied by the LtG business as usual scenario, but that's fodder for a future article.
I am honored by the reply from one of my climate heroes, and ask you to consider my contention that in our prehistorical ancestral world the demands of migratory H-G life forced population control on those men and women. A woman could only carry one infant child, with maybe one other trotting along beside her. These brave souls lived, by necessity, in an ecologically balanced and self-sustaining manner. The jump to sedentary grain based agriculture has had enormous negative consequences, as we are now literally eating ourselves “out of house and home”, in a global population 3,000 times greater than they numbered. Again, the crowded animal researches of John Calhoun, as in his pivotal “Death Squared” paper published in 1973, always led to a TOTAL extinction of the crowded population, to the last man, woman, and unprotected child, in their deteriorated families. Have a blessed day/evening and a very HAPPY HOLIDAY!
Yes, my own view is that the Limits to Growth underestimated the pollution curve, which is reasonable given the data they had at the time.
I believe that the authors of LtG hedged the shape of the down slope by admitting that once collapse started it was impossible to predict the effects of numerous tipping points on the rate of collapse.
The LtG model was calibrated against the economic growth of the previous century (whenever they had good data). but there was no example of a prior global MTI societal collapse with which to calibrate the parameters of the down-sloping curves.
You are correct is describing foraging societies who kept their numbers low via cultural mechanisms, and acquisitive hoarding and power grabs under control thru social sanctions. Thomas Malthus wrote at a time in history when we did not have any good data about foraging societies. Now, we do. For the last 8,000 years humans have lived in non-egalitarian societies that allow leaders to hoard, and carry out all of those other activities that encourage population growth and the over-exploitation of resources. The logic of capitalism exacerbates this even more. Yes, we do have too many people on the planet and an unsustainable way of living in developed societies. But we also have out-of-control oligarchs that are rapidly sucking up wealth and resources that could be put to better use for solving the problems that we face. I’m not ready to give up.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, but I deeply researched the paleolithic and the impacts of the clan/band social unit, including its central role in controlling population growth, in great detail in my 2018 “Stress R Us”. A free downloadable PDF is available at Stanford, just google the title. Have a blessed day and a VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY.
Thank you. I can provide you many more citations, if you are interested. I’m a cultural anthropologist who has been fascinated with these transitions for decades. I think it’s important for us to look at the human condition cross-culturally and evolutionarily, especially now.
Yeah, and I’m just a tired old retired physician/psychiatrist and you are wrong on every point. Keep your arrogance to yourself.
Anthropologists have struggled for a long time to resolve the relationship and influence between psychology and culture. We know Homo sapiens is all one species. No matter how wide the range there has not been speciation. As a result there are basic similarities in the cognitive processes of all Homo sapiens. We also know that there is wide variation across time and geography in the way people create their way of life. The debate about the psychic unity of humans versus the behavioral disunity of humans is unresolved, but the early anthropological approach asserting a determinism to human biological and cultural evolution has given way to the fact the what happens over the long term is contingent. Anthropologists had the determinism whacked out of us, not by ideology but by the facts on the ground. What does that mean? It means things did not have to be the way they are and consequently they don’t have to be the way they are, and we don’t know how they will be. I suggest a reading of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of everything.
Folks like yourself have given “anthropology” a bad name due to the very obscure language you just used in this reply. Read my 2018 “Stress R Us”, then try again to express yourself simply and clearly. Have a blessed day/evening.
Hi Greeley,
I would like to mention that John Calhoun’s experiment had very questionable methodology as the rat colony was barely cleaned throughout five years of experiment, so the results were more likely due to diseases; his results were not successfully replicated either. Meanwhile wild rats were not observed to have similar behaviors. Not to mention it’s at least debatable that rodent behaviors can be applied to humans, as human experiments did not show ‘behavioral sink’ under crowded conditions. So I believe that one should really be cautious when using Calhoun’s experiment as a doomsday prophecy for human civilization.
Sadly, you have not made a full study of the many animal crowding researchers and their work in the 1960’s and 1970’s. You may appreciate my 2018 book, “Stress R Us”, that goes into considerable detail on the work of Charles Southwick and J.J. Christian and their reiterations of Calhoun’s work. I need not elaborate, as the history is spelled out in my book, which is available as a free PDF out at Stanford, for a simple Google search. Have a blessed day and a VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY!
Another homerun Bill. Btw, you were great in that excellent documentary Greenwashed.
Some of the hopium in these comments are entertaining. Here’s what I think everyone ought to know: The thing that makes humans so ridiculously unique is fire. More specifically, cooking.
IMO, there are only two books needed to make sense of the insanity. Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. And Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In that order.
Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis proposes that the controlled use of fire to cook food was the primary driver of human evolution and bigger brains. By “predigesting” food outside the body, cooking provided early humans with a massive energy surplus that fundamentally altered our biology and social structure.
Cooking provided the high-calorie fuel necessary for the rapid brain growth seen in Homo erectus. And because cooked food is softer and easier to digest, humans evolved smaller teeth, weaker jaws, and a significantly smaller digestive tract (shorter colon) compared to other primates. Cooking also dramatically reduced the time spent chewing. While chimpanzees may spend 6 hours a day chewing raw food, humans spend a fraction of that, allowing more time for toolmaking, hunting and socializing.
Ligotti claims that the greatest horrors are not imaginary but are found in the reality of being a conscious entity. And that human consciousness is an evolutionary accident. A biological blunder. Unlike other animals that exist in a ‘unity of life’, humans are cursed with a self-awareness that forces them to recognize their own mortality, suffering, and the essential meaninglessness of existence. The “conspiracy” in the title refers to the collective self-deception humans use to survive. Ligotti argues that society and our own biological programming compel us to maintain an “optimistic fallacy” - relying on defense mechanisms to suppress the terrifying truth of our condition.
The only thing I disagree with Ligotti about is the accident part. I don’t think it was a blunder at all. Life (aka the Blob) is always looking for the advantage in maximizing energy consumption. The Blob is forever seeking to become what we call an invasive species. But it’s never a big deal when it happens because quick feedback loops kick in to rectify the situation. Unless of course agriculture, mining and drilling are involved. Then it becomes the biggest deal imaginable.
The late great Gail Zawacki said it best, "We're incapable and always have been incapable of holding ourselves back. We're programmed to grow, we're programmed to consume, and we're programmed to deny that that's a problem. We're basically an invasive species."
Bottom line: after you read both books, you’ll understand that cooking is the only pathway that leads to a single species self-induced mass extinction.
love that you mention the late great Gail Zawacki, one of the wisest & warmest people I had the pleasure of knowing.
anyone not familiar with gail should check out this interview from 7ish years back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CwZZz7-xbQ
as well as her poignant mini-vid "the silent war on trees"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn1Xy_j48k0
So nice to hear common sense rather than the toxic hopium always caught up in humanity's perceived greatness! Thank you, I hadn't heard that theory but it makes a lot of sense. Energy dissipation!
Hmmm, are we self aware? What percentage of the self are we actually aware of? My thoughts are that self-awareness is just a hallucination of a form of inter/intra-species method of communication known as language. Language is by its nature linear. It can only one express one chain of thought at a time and constructs a narrative out of the limited information available to it within the nervous system. Type 2 thinking is not a commander but a residue. We take this narrative as self-awareness yet this idea collapses when this network is disrupted (split brain research and alien hand syndrome are gross visible manifestations of this but one would assume this is widespread and the norm in neural processing).
I love Wranghams cooking hypothesis, fascinating stuff.
"the accident part"
Since it has such an energetic advantage, it's curious that the ability to manipulate fire didn't evolve all the time throughout earth's history. So far, it appears that the only species that has this ability is homo sapiens. It looks like a very unlikely "accident" to me.
Yeah, I recently flipped on this. Right now my view is that the only meaning/purpose you're gonna find in the universe is to dissipate energy. Same with life. So that would make fire (more specifically, a sapien type awareness level) the holy grail for energy dissipation purposes.
But there seems to be two things going on with my logic. First, I try hard to never paint humans as unique. So nothing rare about us as most planets with the Blob are gonna eventually reach fire as well. And the 2nd thing, there's probably some hopium going on with me wanting to believe the universe is filled with civilizations that went through their fossil energy peak before going extinct.
ps. Joe, Bill, and anyone else, would love to hear your thoughts on this Cactus Theory essay from un-Denial. It's not mine and I have no agenda. I'm just a fan of the site.
https://un-denial.com/2025/11/30/the-cactus-lens-a-clearer-view/
Couple of thoughts. Language is tricky so I'm uncomfortable with the notion that that there is meaning/purpose in the universe. These are humanoid terms. It is true that energy dissipates but it does so because of physics, it has no choice or purpose. The availability of energy implies disequilibrium (the potential for something to happen). Available energy will dissipate (second law of thermodynamics) until equilibrium (max entropy) is reached. In the meantime, humans can take advantage of a free ride as it dissipates.
As for 'cactus', I can resonate with a lot of the theory. In many respects its similar to Joseph Tainter's explanation for the collapse of complex societies.
I lose 'un-denial' when s/he says:
"With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:..."
and lists a whole series of things that people could do to delay the inevitable implosion and improve life quality in the meantime. Yup, noble ambition. The problem here is the usual one -- it's easy to list WHAT we coulda, shoulda, woulda do/done but much harder to prescribe HOW to ensure it happens. People don't behave that way. In short, these are theoretical actions and goals; there is no practical way to achieve them.
"What we coulda, shoulda, woulda do/done" I'm finding some of the blogs/vlogs are just time wasters for the senior citizens. I suppose it's better than playing pinochle at the senior citizen's center.
Yes, the blogosphere is littered with those who think if only we had done that, we'd be OK or if only we would do this, we'd be OK. A modern society is unsustainable, no matter what we do.
Thanks for getting it, BIll.
https://mikerobertsblog.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/william-rees-gets-it/
Thanks for weighing in. Much appreciated.
Cactus sounds like what Luke Kemp calls diminishing returns on extraction, which would be better termed diminishing *marginal* returns. Kemp dismisses Tainter on 2 counts. First, the fuzzy definition of complexity, and second, the ways that Goliaths, aka civilizations, actually simplify. A city or a cornfield is biologically simpler than a functional ecosystem, for example.
I haven't finished his book. My comment is based on the first 2 parts of his 3 part exegesis.
Not convinced of the cactus author's recommendations, other than burying nuclear waste and remediating brown fields, and stopping stupid stuff, but apparently, modernity forces the continuation of stupid stuff and prevents any prophylactic measures.
The only way to circumvent the internal collapse of modernity is much, much worse. Nuclear war would cut it off much sooner, also eliminating most or all life on earth. Maybe there is no external or intrinsic value, nevermind external or intrinsic value to Life, as Dr. Rees contends, but Life wants to live. I value it, and I suppose most living things value it, too. To me, that's enough reason to want to protect it.
It's probably the only species which has the ability now but fire was controlled by species prior to our evolution.
Really? Which one(s)?
Fire or burning fossil fuels (fire multiplied )? We would have a lot longer to contemplate all of this if we had not moved to fossil fuels. The end might be the same but perhaps a slower pace to the past 150 years would have allowed us to figure more out before our end was nigh.
what's the problem though? seems fine to me. we evolved, we did some things, off we go! whatever.
A fine, frugal summary!
The problem is that the "some things" rob other life of existence. There's real value in living. We ought to be smarter and more compassionate than a massive asteroid that collides with Earth, or mass volcanism, causing mass extinction.
all life necessarily robs other life of existence, but for that to be a problem, you need the premise that existence is good or desirable, at least more than not, if not totally. that assumption never made sense to me. that there's immense suffering isn't the same as that being a problem, i don't double count.
i can understand an organism holding the view that there's real value in living, but i don't think that any value is objective. i can also understand normativity as a coordination mechanism, but not as some objective information that magically dictates what should & shouldn't be the case regardless of anyone's perspective/preference/desire... so no, we oughtn't be or do anything in that strong sense.
Most of what modern humans are doing to other life isn't necessary. I've spent much of life observing non-humans and I've concluded their lives are meaningful to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective, that's why they are around. There are all kinds of ways of life (10 million species), most of which we know little about. They are all related to us, and deserve respect. To be honest, I don't understand your point. I'm not implying that it's invalid, I just don't get it.
that's fine. well, i am very partial to necessitarianism as defended by amy karofsky, so i think the best inference is that literally everything is necessary, i.e. nothing that's ever actual could've been otherwise & only what's ever actual is possible. i find the reasoning for this view as laid out in her book to be extremely compelling and intuitive.
i'm younger than you (early 20s) and had a 'deep green' phase a few years ago, and i can understand your view, but i couldn't sincerely sustain it for a while. i can keep honestly asking '... so what?' to having every allegedly valuable thing i and others can think of, and it's clear to me that there are no stakes, meaning is a nonsense ape concept, nothing is a problem or wrong, it's all just a sequence of events, including sometimes interpreting stuff as wrong, right, desirable, (un)satisfying, frustrating, whatever...
when i encounter a claim like "there are x million ways of life... and they all deserve respect", i don't know what you mean. i don't believe that deservingness makes sense, i couldn't care less if all of them went extinct right now. nevertheless, i'm interested in researching, understanding, explaining all these ways of life, but i desire a level of STEM progress which enables us to imperceptibly kill all sentience and stop new instances of abiogenesis, and cultural progress whereby people or whatever intelligent sentient entities may exist, understand how and why that is desirable and then deliberate on doing it.
there's nothing irrational or objectively incorrect about my desires and views. my point is that a kind of indifferent, ruthless restless relentlessness is part of human nature because it's part of non-human nature, of which human nature is a subset. this is just partly how existence works.
I care if other life disappears because of our doing. It has enriched my life immensely. Without it I would be a shed of myself. I also understand and feel that close evolutionary connectivity to other life, not qualitatively different than what I feel for other humans. I also, I've been told, have a sharp and consistent sense of morality. I trust that. Thanks for sharing your views.
Good to hear thoughts from a young person. I find your position intriguing, if rather cold. To me, biodiversity on this planet is the most amazing thing. And while we are part of that, I'd rather go to sleep tonight with the rest of our species and none of us wake up, so the "non-sentient" folks can go on about their business! Can STEM do that? 🥹
There's a very easy way to judge any given human action towards the environment. Just ask, “Was that a dick move?” The answer will be immediately apparent inside.
Another excellent summary of the human and global situation. Over the years I have found your lectures and papers the most accurate account of what is happening. Its such a shame that we can’t coordinate to shrink the human population and place highest economic value on rewilding and regenerative agriculture. It would be a nicer world to live in.
Instead, we are doubling down on old practices in response to the global instability. Even in New Zealand the current government to loosening environmental regulations, promoting all forms of energy use, and even favouring science that focuses on economic outputs. I think Derrick Jensen once said something along the lines of: we made giant stone heads when civilisation was growing, and now its collapsing we will make more giant stone heads.
I agree with almost everything you say here but I think you are too pessimistic, because you underestimate human adaptability. Humans’ evolved motives of acquisitiveness could be constructively channeled into planetary stewardship and climate restoration instead of exploitation and overshoot by the right systems of governance and economics. There is no guarantee we will manage to get from where we are to that point, but it won’t be because we are somehow genetically incapable of it. A simple example is the problem of democracies always turning into oppressive oligarchies. This is not universal in human experience, although it might seem so when looking at western civilization. Ancient Sumer solved this problem by having periodic resets using debt forgiveness, and this was successful for millennia. I can imagine our establishing a global system based on giving monetary value to actions which enhance rather than exploit the environment, for instance. An example of monetizing decarbonization is carbon credit systems which use a science-based MRV (Measuring/Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) to reward positive specific climate actions.
Paraphrasing part of a speech given by Nicholas Murray Butler in 1931: "There are a few who make things happen, many who watch things happen, and the vast majority who ask "what happened!?"". Thank you, Bill, for your unwavering, tireless, long-term committment and efforts to help all three described groups navigate the unhinged complexity we have self-created. It makes the inevitable and imminent facilitated reflections and discussions in community garden and halls so much easier.
1/The front page of today's USA edition of the Financial Times has as its biggest headline: "EU's 2035 combustion engine ban set to be scrapped after industry pressure - Brussels plans policy reversal - Reprieve under cetain conditions - Totemic element of climate law"
2/Here's a cartoon I saw, with plausible faux details added. Imagine an important lecture at Kresge Auditorium at MIT, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future - Nate Hagens speaks on "The Great Simplification". Hagens concludes by saying "If we all work together, we can handle this". The hall is almost empty, however, and in one row a retired Canadian professor quietly tells a recovering astrophysicist sitting next to him, "In other words, we're hooped."
3/Another cartoon - a humanoid dog is sitting at a table holding a mug of coffee in his hand/paw - the room is in flames - he says "This is fine."
4/A nonmeatbased information-processing conversation was asked to amplify James Tate's poem "I left my couch in Tatamagouche" by having the Apparition of Anna Swan speak directly to the narrator about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism - this NICS is Chinese-made and allegedly an order of magnitude more energy-efficient than its competitors. Excerpts:
"The world is poorly made for comfort.
It grinds, it aches, it breaks faith.
Do not call it tragic. Call it physics.”
“Then what wants fixing?” I asked, a notebook in my lap, useless.
She laughed, a low, graveled chuckle.
“You do. The part of you that expected better.
That thinks ‘I deserve’—deserve safety, deserve meaning,
deserve a future that resembles the past....
"Is there a stop?"I whispered.
“There is,” she said. “But it is not a cure.
It is the moment you stop asking the cliff
to be a meadow....
5/Point 1 is an event. Points 2 and 3 are imaginary situations. Point 4 is an event AND an imaginary situation - real output - "slop" - from a plagiarism machine, asked to rethink a story about an imaginary situation. I asked the same machine to recast the Bokononist last rites - from Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" - as a homily for a Unitarian service delivered in the style of Michael Dowd - I could imagine Dowd saying it, actually.
It's really hard to click "LIKE" for something I don't like, but agree must happen.
Collapse is always inevitable, its the timing thats important to us. Homo sapiens are in their last generations regardless, what comes after will not be us, technically, due to genetic engineering. Life is a continuing process and homosapiens had its short but glorious time as part of that chain. If you are specifically worried about you and yours, take heart in the knowledge that a good chunk of the people on this planet never experienced the abundance that this article laments losing. For them there has been no highs and the lows keep coming. Yet, amazingly, I think they are more optimistic than most here.
Otherwise, I want to say I throughly enjoyed this article. It brings to mind Kurt Vonneguts observation of humans being suicide loving life worshipers.
The idea that humans are simply a species whose members have relatively short term goals is almost never acknowledged. If any organism doesn't survive the next 10 minutes, then the genes they embody will not be passed on. It's only when an ecosystem reaches a climax state that it seems the species are living in perfect harmony, as various factors interact to keep the populations of species fairly stable. For a while. But humans have well developed abilities to go beyond those stable boundaries and perturb every ecosystem they try to become a part of. Once humans invented the digging stick and were able to get at more food than other mammals, our future was doomed. Modernity is just a tiny wrinkle in life's history and future.
A short reply:
It does indeed read just like Limits to Growth, with the same problems. Essentially you are assuming that the future can be accurately described by the past, in which case extinction is absolutely unavoidable. But...
The basic assumption is that human behaviour can be adequately described by our state 3,000 years ago. I would agree that our physiology and anatomy, right down to detailed neuroanatomy, has not changed much since then. However, our behaviour is determined primarily by our social evolution, our culture. We have language, which despite Chomsky does not seem to be biologically determined. We have history, social customs, governments, societies. These are the product of evolution, but they respond very rapidly to changes in the environment. (At this point do not fall into the trap of assuming that environment is just the physical world.) We are not just adapted to exploit the world, but we are able to see ourselves and our possible futures, and adapt. The fact that you could write your article is evidence that we are not simply victims of an evolutionary path we started on a million or so years back.
Inter alia, we are a long way down the transition path for energy, from wood to coal to oil and now solar+wind. Energy demand per head has plateaued in the western world. Our populations statistics have for quite a while shown a fall off in fertility, so our total demand on the earth's resources should plateau as well. Against all the Limits to Growth predictions we discover fresh mineral deposits faster than we exhaust them.
We continue to grow enough food to feed the world population, despite annual choruses of doom saying that it will all end in tears. We use less fertiliser per hectare than 50 years ago, and are starting to properly worry about the state of our soils.
Our biodiversity loss seems to be plateauing as we become more aware, farming becomes more intensive and more people live in cities. Our forest cover is starting to increase. The worst of the climate change hasn't really hit yet, but it doesn't look to be the big extermination many people are hoping for.
Altogether I feel you have fallen for the glamour of Systems Thinking. I cut my teeth on that reading Koestler, and saw how well it worked out with the RAND Corporation guiding the US military in Vietnam. I suspect that once again human beings will evade the snare of it's linear models and have at least a couple more centuries to bring the CO2 levels down to whatever level they want.
The problem IS cities. The more people liv in cities the more nature you use. You use nature and pollutes indirectly.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00025-1/fulltext?fbclid=IwY2xjawKdZnBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETBnTXpPMDNBV1VFV1VLczBsAR66hbFL59bhEw2XwlxuVUdCOTPWybvimSDaQVeIE-RC7edQ0j9SmX4dwVfkGQ_aem_SezZLwkY4aK_h_Fiz3uYdw
That's the most sensible thing i have read in a while, combined with the information from National Emergency Briefing on YouTube, I know that my unborn great grandchildren will see out the century.
Excellent. Would just add/emphasize point made by Mark Bevis regarding the environmental pollution underestimate.
Had not seen Le Bon quote from 1895_ it's spot on :" The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim".
And the band played Waltzing Matilda…. Here is the original by Scotsman Eric Bogle: https://youtu.be/cnFzCmAyOp8?si=2fYcB3ytK5uBaZw9
A song about futility.
And futility is certainly a theme here William. Homo sapiens evolve a BIG brain and leverage its game-changing intellectual power to create not regenerative and sustainable societies, but an epoch - an age - so significant, it has been given its own name. And here we all are, living out humanities’ subliminal death throes in the a-toy named Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the cult of ‘the infinites’ spend every wakening hour innovating, amplifying, and accelerating, a planetary wide crisis, which ignored by their myopic greed is now an existential crisis.
Dr Luke Kemp nails it in his new blockbuster ‘Goliath’s Curse’. Kemp suggests, “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely.” My thoughts are selfish and centre on the fact that as a boomer, I’ll probably exit shortly before the axe of overshoot falls on the anvil of ignorance. I will then look forward to chasing up Donella Meadows to both console and congratulate her for a job well done. Then I will apologise to her for humanities stupidity. We were warned.
Thank you, Dr. Rees, for an honest and highly detailed explanation of the unfolding Ecological Overshoot Unraveling. The late great Michael Dowd used to say we don't get to know How things unravel but things can't keep doubling on a finite planet and sooner or later there will be a "correction." I suggest to all my subscribers to subcribe to William Rees. Not paranthetically: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
Appreciated this piece. I thought I’d chime in to note that you missed an important bit in the following sentence, including the opportunity for alliteration. After the word “celebrating” you ought to have inserted “or surviving” to capture one other reason some people haven’t noticed what’s happening. Cheers!
“More generously, the unprecedented and still-accelerating rate of technological change has so vastly outpaced bio-evolution that people either didn’t notice, haven’t fully grasped what’s happening or are simply too busy celebrating to care.”
Point taken!
Always enlightening, Dr. Rees.