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OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
The OVERSHOOT podcast tackles today’s social and ecological crises driven by our excessive population and consumption and explores the paradigm shifts needed to bring our human footprint into balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests, hosts Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware examine the drivers of overshoot: from the pronatalism fueling overpopulation, to economies based on consumerism and social injustice, to the worldview of human supremacy that exploits animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance offers transformative pathways beyond technological fixes, toward interconnectedness with all beings. With a global rank of 1.5%, we draw listeners from across 150 countries.
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New to our podcast?
There are over 100 episodes of OVERSHOOT. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend you listen to these episodes first:
William Rees: Confronting Overshoot Eileen Crist: An Ecological Civilization Angela Saini: How Men Came to Rule Alan Weisman: Countdown
Episodes
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South Korea’s No-Birth Generation
As South Korea’s birth rates continue to decline, reporter Ji-Hye Jeong highlights the rising tide of young feminists who are staging a strike against patriarchy. Despite relentless backlash, the surge in South Korea’s women’s resistance movements - from the 2015 feminist 'reboot' and 'escape the corset' to 4B - offers a radical response to the misogynistic forces that compel women into marriage and motherhood.
Falling Birth Rates are Not a Crisis
Sociologist Philip N. Cohen debunks the pronatalist claims on both the right and left that falling birth rates spell disaster. Noting that pronatalism is a key feature of authoritarian states, Cohen warns that the adoption of this problematic 'fertility crisis' framing among liberals is paving the way for coercive right-wing policies, and why we must abandon this narrative.
Combatting the Extinction Crisis
Biodiversity is collapsing under the pressures of human overpopulation, overconsumption, and animal agriculture. Tierra Curry and Stephanie Feldstein of the Center for Biological Diversity explain how science, law, and advocacy can protect wildlife and wild places. They also share strategies for combating extinction and staying motivated to act in an age of ecological crisis.
AI and the Decline of Human Agency
AI, under the dangerous control of tech oligarchs, is creating a world with shrinking human choice, creativity, and connection. Technology journalist Jacob Ward, author of The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, describes why restraint and skepticism are necessary to fight back against the AI juggernaut.
Confronting Human Exceptionalism
The myth of human exceptionalism casts humans as separate from and superior to the rest of life. Primatologist Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, shows how science and culture reinforce this worldview, and why replacing it with awe and empathy for the natural world is essential to life’s future on Earth.
The Dystopian Delusions of Tech Overlords
Silicon Valley billionaires promise salvation through space colonization, immortality, superintelligent AI, and endless growth. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever, debunks these profoundly immoral and biophysically impossible delusions.
Data Grab: The New Colonialism
Data is the resource, and our lives are the territory. Ulises Mejias, author of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back, reflects on data colonialism as a new social order that extends the extractive logic of historical colonialism into our everyday lives.
Epicurean Simplicity
The future is bioregional. Writer Stephanie Mills reflects on decades of questioning growth and cultivating a rooted relationship with the living world. She advocates for an Epicurean simplicity - choosing the simple pleasures of community, place, and nature.
The Dangers of Effective Altruism
Philosopher Alice Crary argues that effective altruism (EA) and longtermism, both shaped by Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian fantasies, ignore social structures of oppression and offer either incremental welfarism or galactic transhumanism over genuine animal and human liberation.
An “Abundance Agenda” for Nature
Ben Goldfarb, environmental journalist and author, challenges the techno-fix growth agenda that delivers an abundance of concrete and condos and a scarcity of wildness and wildlife and lays out a vision for an “abundance agenda” for nature.
Leading the Legal Fight for Animals
From freeing animals from experimentation and exploitative entertainment to exposing agribusiness humane-washing, Jeff Kerr, PETA’s Chief Legal Officer, leads the organization’s bold, precedent-setting strategy to secure legal recognition of animals as beings with inviolable rights.
The Rise of One-Child Families
Social psychologist Susan Newman, author of Just One, shares the abundant research challenging long-held myths about only children and why the growing popularity of one-child families reflects greater parental and child satisfaction and ecological awareness.
Capitalism’s War Against Animals
A global war against animals is driven by capitalist exploitation and profit. Dinesh Wadiwel, author of Animals and Capital and The War Against Animals, shows how capitalism treats animals as commodities, raw materials, and self-reproducing labor and how we might advance animal and human justice.
Humachines, Big Tech, and Our Future
A dystopian fusion of human and machine is being pushed on us by a big tech elite. Michael D.B. Harvey, author of The Age of Humachines: Big Tech and the Battle for Humanity's Future, offers pathways for reclaiming a future rooted in democracy and ecological balance.
Radical Alternatives to “Progress”
Shrishtee Bajpai, researcher and activist with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, reveals how local struggles for self-determination connect across cultures and what is being done to weave a 'pluriverse' of possibilities rooted in social and ecological justice..
Progress: Humanity’s Worst Idea
For 5,000 years civilizations have told themselves stories of progress. Today, the progress myth has become humanity's most dangerous illusion. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea, joins us.
Complexity and Collapse
Modern techno-industrial civilization is running up against the law of diminishing returns - and societal collapse is inevitable. B, author of The Honest Sorcerer blog, reveals why our civilizational complexity carries the seeds of its own destruction.
The Elite’s Fixation with Low Birth Rates
From center-left Ezra Klein to right-wing Matt Walsh, the fertility panic is an elite fixation that is rooted in a human supremacist worldview and a deep fear of slowing growth. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, joins us.
The Fertility Industry’s Dirty Secrets
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is often seen as a triumph of reproductive freedom, but its origins are deeply entangled with patriarchy, pronatalism, and eugenics. Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, IVF survivor and author of Silent Sorority and Finally Heard, joins us.
The Omnivore’s Deception
The meat industry and its defenders promise ethical consumption and sustainable farming, but animal agriculture fuels ecological destruction, entrenches human supremacy, and masks cruelty with comforting myths. John Sanbonmatsu, philosopher and author of The Omnivore’s Deception, joins us.