Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism
We chat with population ecologist, co-creator of the ecological footprint analysis, and one of the world’s best big-picture ecological thinkers, Dr. Bill Rees. Bill explains how our blind faith in human exceptionalism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics fooled us into disregarding ecological limits and brought us into a state of extreme overshoot. These same false stories enabled humans to use cheap abundant energy to convert nature and nonhumans into human artifacts, and rich nations to exploit the resources of other countries, while degrading the biophysical basis of existence.
Continuing on this trajectory but with green-tinted glasses will be catastrophic. Nothing short of a co-operative, well-planned, orderly contraction of the human enterprise – economic activity, production, consumption, and population – is needed to align with Earth’s productive and assimilative capacity. But, as Bill concludes – that which is “ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, while the politically feasible is ecologically catastrophic”. Can communities like ours, rooted in ecological wisdom and natural limits, act as lifeboats paddling strongly away from the eddies of the sinking Titanic to prepare for a post-industrial world?