The Collapse of Modernity

The collapse of modern techno-industrial civilization is inevitable. William Rees, human ecologist and ecological economist, argues that humanity's nature evolved in simpler times and has left us wholly incapable of understanding the enormously complex and life-destroying global civilization we've created. The worldview of human exceptionalism, fueled by fossil energy and sustained by the myth of limitless growth and human ingenuity, is driving us deeper into ecological overshoot and leading humanity toward a painful contraction in both human population and consumption. Highlights include:

• Why human beings, who evolved in much simpler social environments, have become 'cognitively obsolete' and are maladapted to understand the enormous complexity and catastrophic ecological consequences of modern techno-industrial civilization;

• How fossil fuels and technology enabled humanity to escape the negative feedbacks of famine, disease, and predation and set the stage for the single most abnormal period in human history, characterized by explosive growth in population, consumption, and ecological impact;

• How human exceptionalism and the cultural myth of limitless human ingenuity sustain the belief that technology can substitute for nature and enable infinite growth on a finite planet;

• Why climate change is only one symptom of ecological overshoot, which encompasses resource depletion, biodiversity loss, pollution, and humanity’s growing demands on the biosphere, and why these increasing negative feedbacks will overwhelm modern techno-industrial civilization;

• Why renewable energy and technological fixes have failed to displace fossil fuels at the necessary scale, and why ecological overshoot can only be ameliorated through a large contraction in both population and consumption;

• How the small scale of human groups in the past allowed for the detection and suppression of antisocial or psychopathic tendencies, and how large-scale modern institutions reward psychopathic and exploitative behavior, concentrate power, and entrap the large majority of us in these destructive systems;

• Why well-meaning plans for an ecologically and socially just future suffer from the 'what/how conundrum' - with wonderful ideas of what humanity could conceivably do but with few details of exactly how societies can overcome the economic dependencies, institutional incentives, and cultural norms that perpetuate overshoot;

• Why cities are the human analog of animal feedlots and how re-localizing essential production and building smaller, ecologically grounded communities could help societies navigate contraction and reduce dependence on fragile global supply chains;

• Why the only path to overcoming ecological overshoot requires abandoning the entrenched growth-centered narrative of human exceptionalism and recognizing the need for substantial planned reductions in both material consumption and human population.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Substack blog: standstoreeson blog by William E. Rees

• Substack article: The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH): A Guide to Symbolic Selection, Behavioural Architecture, and the Evolution of Human Gameboards by Greg Elliott

• Podcast episode: Confronting Ecological Overshoot with Bill Rees on the OVERSHOOT podcast

• Podcast episode: The Poverty of Growth with Olivier De Schutter on the OVERSHOOT podcast

• UN Report: The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. Presented under the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on

  extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter. June 2026

• Report: Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

• Testimonials

• Share Your Thoughts With Us

• Support this Podcast

• Subscribe to our Newsletter

• TRANSCRIPT

  William Rees (00:00:00):

  We are the first species to create an environment for which we are totally maladapted to live. And I call this the human maladaptation syndrome. People are not connected to the biophysical systems and the life support services upon which they are ultimately and utterly dependent. And because of that psychological and spatial disconnect, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to understand the need for grossly reducing the scale of the human enterprise. And nobody in the mainstream society is yet willing to confront the realities of overshoot. I have personally no doubt that as the negative feedbacks begin to impinge upon our society, these negative feedbacks will take us down one way or another. And so we've got to start preparing for that.

  Alan Ware (00:00:49):

  That was Bill Rees - population ecologist, ecological economist, and originator and co-developer of ecological footprint analysis. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, Bill gives us the hard facts of why the failure of modern techno-industrial civilization is inevitable and the massive challenge we face in transforming how we live on Earth.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:01:22):

  Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative behavioral and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.

  Alan Ware (00:01:47):

  I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot, the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest. William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, professor emeritus, and former director of the University of British Columbia School of Community and Regional Planning. His research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the implications of global ecological trends for human prospects. He has special interest in cities as particularly vulnerable components of the human ecosystem and in psychocognitive barriers to rational environmental behavior, especially public policy for sustainability.

  (00:02:58):

  Professor Rees is perhaps best known as the originator and co-developer of ecological footprint analysis, which shows that the world is far into overshoot. Dr. Rees has authored hundreds of peer reviewed and popular articles on these and related topics. He's a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a founder and former director of the One Earth Initiative, a fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and an associate fellow of the Great Transition Initiative. A fellow of Royal Society of Canada, Professor Rees is internationally recognized and multiply awarded. He's a recipient of a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in both the International Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics and the 2012 Blue Planet Prize jointly with his former student, Dr. Mathis Wackernagel. From 2014 to 2019, Dr. Rees was a full member of the Club of Rome. In 2015, he received the 2015 Herman Daly Award from the US Society for Ecological Economics, and in 2016 was awarded a Dean's Medal of Distinction from UBC's Faculty of Applied Science.

  (00:04:07):

  And now on to today's interview.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:04:10):

  Hi, Bill. Alan and I are thrilled to have yet another opportunity to chat with you. Welcome to OVERSHOOT.

  William Rees (00:04:17):

  Well, thank you very much and the pleasure I'm sure is all mine.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:04:20):

  And Bill, as an advisor to Population Balance, you've helped us deeply understand the depth and breadth of our predicament of ecological overshoot. In fact, our changing the name of our podcast to OVERSHOOT is a recognition of your profound efforts in defining, measuring, and confronting overshoot. And since our last interview with you in 2023, you have continued to be prolific in your thinking and writing, especially through your blog Stands to Reason (standstoreeson) about the larger social and ecological predicament. And we are excited to explore these new ideas with you today. So Bill, you've argued that humanity might be inherently unsustainable by both nature and nurture. Let's start with the limits of our evolved nature. What characteristics of humanity's evolutionary inheritance make us particularly prone to ecological overshoot?

  William Rees (00:05:19):

  That's a wonderful question. And I think we have to say at the outset, no matter how far I go into this, we're going to be looking at one thread of thinking about this. There are many, many dimensions that we simply won't be able to touch upon, but to get down to the basics as I see it, and keep in mind I'm speaking as an evolutionary ecologist, as a human population ecologist. So I think the first thing we have to understand that humans are an evolved species. A lot of people are going to have to stumble over that right off the top. A good number of people simply don't believe in evolution. But if we start from evolution, we have to recognize that human beings evolved in very simple circumstances, basically in extended family groups as hunter gathering societies. If we even look at anatomically modern humans, that's 350,000 years of history, and we can go back a couple of million years of hominid evolution before that.

  (00:06:15):

  So my point is that civilization so-called has only been for the last, oh, five, 6,000 years, which is less than 2% of even modern human evolutionary time. So for 98% of human evolutionary history, we evolve in very simple circumstances. We'd only meet a few tens of individuals in our lifetimes. Dunbar's number I think was 150 people would be about the most you'd ever expect to interact with. We lived in simple habitats that were very familiar to us and that weren't going to change in the course of our lifetimes. So this meant that our brains were not particularly well challenged in the course of our evolution. In fact, we evolved to think in the very short term. It was much more important to know whether that movement in the brush beside you was a leopard than it was to think five or six years ahead of time.

  (00:07:09):

  So the bottom line here is the human brain really evolved in simple times, and therefore we think in simple terms, singular cause-effect relationships. We think of one thing at a time. Most of us can't in fact contemplate more than one thing at a time. We don't think systematically. Again, most people don't connect the dots between different issues going on in the world out there. So in many, many ways, I think we are cognitively obsolete. So that's my first observation, that evolution has rendered human beings cognitively obsolete to deal with the kinds of environments we have created ourselves. So if we leap ahead to the present day, we live in a global environment of billions of people. You meet more than 150 on a typical day if you just take the bus to work, so to speak. And so we're in a new environment and have been in that environment for only one and a half percent or so of human evolutionary history, and we're completely maladapted to life in that environment.

  (00:08:16):

  Now, since it's the only environment we've ever known, people won't recognize this, we don't realize that many of the behaviors that we exhibit in our modern techno-industrial civilization are totally maladaptive behaviors, and they emerge from the circumstances that we ourselves have created, this incredibly complex, multiply overlapping complex systems. I mean, we've got cultural systems, economic systems, communication systems, transportation systems, the whole human enterprise overlapping with another complex system called the ecosphere, which consists of numerous ecosystems. And now we've all merged together into a mega system of incredible complexity far beyond the capacity of any individual human being fully to understand or even marginally understand for that matter. So my first point would be that evolution has left us essentially cognitively impaired to deal with the modern circumstances in which we find ourselves. And I think many of the crises we're facing today is indicative of our inability to cope with the realities that we've created.

  (00:09:23):

  But there's a great deal more to this. Human beings evolved and we are in competition with numerous other species. So in the course of that competition, we acquired, again, evolutionarily, the capacity to expand into every available habitat in the search for new food resources, new space, and so on and so forth. Now, every species has this tendency. No species is going to leave uninhabited a habitat that it has access to that is suitable for its existence. That's what nature does. We expand to fill available space. The next thing we do is to use up to the ability or to the limit really of our technology, all available resources. So if you think of today, copper's scarce, oil and gas are scarce. We're seeing scarcity in all kinds of minerals that have suddenly become highly in demand as we move into the electronic era and so on and so forth.

  (00:10:18):

  Human beings have cleaned up the seas, we're overfishing, our soils are being depleted and so on and so forth. In other words, we tend to use up all available resources. That's an evolutionary offshoot of our competitive superiority on this planet. We've simply, using technology, come to a point where we're overusing and therefore abusing most of our ecosystems. The third thing that we're left with is the capacity to expand exponentially population-wise under ideal circumstances. So if you think again over the vast course of human history, for the most part, human populations didn't grow or grew exceedingly slowly because there was a balance between the tendency for population growth, that potential for exponential growth, which is a positive feedback mechanism, but it was always held in check by negative feedback mechanisms, the competition for space, the competition for resources. If we got too densely populated disease set in, I mean, many European communities were virtually wiped out or lost half their populations during the Middle Ages, during the great plagues and so on.

  (00:11:30):

  War's another great leveler. So human populations have historically been held in check through this balance of positive and negative feedback, but modern technology has eliminated much of the negative feedback. So if you think of our invention of public health standards of one kind or another, modern waste disposal systems, modern plumbing, sewage disposal, and all of these things greatly reduced our exposure to diseases. Modern medicine with various antibiotics and so on continued that progression. So technology removed many of those negative feedbacks. And then just 200 years ago, we started using fossil fuels in enormous quantities, which gave us all the food and other resources needed to sustain a growing human population. So on the one hand, we massively reduced the death rate and at the same time developed technologies to provide all the food and resources needed to sustain the population growth that was released. So for 200 years, we've seen this massive explosion in human numbers from a mere billion in 1810, say, to eight billion today.

  (00:12:38):

  Think about that. It took, again, just looking at anatomically modern people, almost 350,000 years to reach our first billion. Then in just 200 years, a tiny, tiny fraction of that time, we expanded eightfold to eight billion. And that's the situation we're in today as a result of this combination of our technological progress and the biological factors underlying our massive expansion. So here we are then driven by biological imperatives to expand and to grow and at the same time incapable psychologically and cognitively of dealing with the circumstances of the massive systems that we've created. And I think that pretty much sums up the modern dilemma and how our evolutionary heritage is clashing with the circumstances in which we find ourselves today. Is that clear?

  Nandita Bajaj (00:13:28):

  It's very clear. Yes. Thank you for that. And you've talked about also the unsustainability that's not just inherent in nature, in our nature, but also our nurture. And at the same time, as a lot of these natural instincts to expand and take up all available space were happening, there's also examples in our past of our cultural norms, our nurture that kept us from realizing the maximum power principle to its ultimate end. Can you speak to the role of nurture and cultural norms that for a lot of our history, even in the absence of necessarily the natural negative feedback loops, may have played a role?

  William Rees (00:14:17):

  Yeah, this is again, a really important question and one we can barely touch upon, but the bottom line is this, and again, it's an evolutionary issue. Human beings evolved to be storytellers. Stories, myths are the ways in which primitive peoples try to explain and understand and cope with the uncopeable in their environments. Thunderstorms, massive events like earthquakes or volcanoes, these kinds of things were mysterious beyond comprehension. So we developed various ways of coping, stories, to try to make sense of these strange things going on in our environment. We developed tribal mythologies of one kind or another and all sorts of ways of appeasing the gods, including human sacrifices, which we believed in profoundly and helped us to settle our ways of being. Well, modern humans, I'm going to jump way ahead now because I think this is the crux of the matter. Modern humans, very modern humans just in the last several hundred years have not abandoned this evolutionary tendency.

  (00:15:21):

  We create stories and live by our stories, and these stories are far more important. We're much more emotionally engaged with our made up social constructs than we are with real data. So the enlightenment was an enormously important period in relatively recent human history because it was a period during which we allegedly abandoned superstition. We let go a lot of our religious beliefs and the stories that had previously been adequate to explain what's going on, the idea of gods and so on and so forth. But the enlightenment pushed all of that aside, but in its place created another story. And it's a quasi-religious one that I think everybody would refer to generally speaking as the notion of human exceptionalism. By the way, there's confusion over the meaning of this term. Of course, humans are exceptional, but exceptionalism is a philosophical standpoint that says, look here, human beings are not part of nature.

  (00:16:20):

  We're not like other species. We're special. We have a soul, that's the religious component coming into this. We're not therefore subject to natural law. In fact, human ingenuity is an extremely important resource, if not the most important resource. Human beings, therefore, not being part of nature, don't have to depend on natural resources because human ingenuity as the greatest resource can find substitutes for any good or service provided by natural systems. So that's what the exceptionalist idea is all about. It just sets us aside as if we're different from all other species. Now, interestingly, that's a social story. It's a cultural story, but it's erected within an ecologically historic framework that has evolved. It's the way people are. We go for our stories rather than for reality. Well, what does this mean in modern terms? It means that for the most part, again, we think in simple terms.

  (00:17:21):

  Climate change is a big issue, but we don't connect it to plunging biodiversity, massive losses of soil, overfishing, and a whole variety of other things. And by the way, if we did, it wouldn't matter because human ingenuity can take care of any of those things. The idea here is that human ingenuity substitutes for nature, and we have an economic system, by the way, which is entirely rooted in the exceptionalist idea. So if you look at any major modern economics textbook, it starts with the fundamental assumption that the economy is essentially a self-regulating, self-producing system that operates separately from nature. Yeah, it admits we need some natural resources, but if you take into account the notion that human exceptionalism gives us the idea that human ingenuity is the most important resource, then the connections with nature aren't all that important. So if you believe that the economy and nature are separate systems and that the economy and therefore the human enterprise as a whole doesn't depend on natural systems, and if you believe that human ingenuity can in any case replace or substitute for any factor in nature, you've created the mental model, the story we tell ourselves that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible.

  (00:18:40):

  So that's the major story of our culture. Every major economic system today is based on expansionist thinking, the notion that we can continue to grow forever, and that is precisely what we were talking about earlier. We've created this 200-year explosion in growth. We take it to be completely normal, not only of population, but of the economic enterprise. There's been 110-fold increase in the economy during that eightfold or nine-fold increase in population. We take that to be the norm when in fact it describes the single most abnormal or anomalous period in human history. So that's it. That's it in a nutshell. We've got a story propelling human beings that is so powerful that it deflects our increasing understanding of the risks that this is imposing upon us because of the negative feedback that is beginning to resurge from the environment. We've temporarily relieved humanity from the negative feedback.

  (00:19:40):

  Hence, we had an explosion due to our natural expansionist tendencies and our capacity for unlimited population growth, or at least exponential population growth. But now we've grown so large that the system is beginning to feed back upon us, and I think it's important to understand just how large our system has become. Most people are unaware of a simple fact, but the human population today is something like 14,000 times larger than the average population size for other mammals of similar ecological requirements and body size to human beings, 14,000 times. And this means that human biomass, the simple weight of human beings, plus our domestic livestock, comprise about 96% of the total weight of mammals on the planet. So that means all of wild mammals are now confined to a mere 4% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. Human biomass, just the weight of people, is 10 times greater than the biomass of all terrestrial mammals combined.

  (00:20:44):

  So this means that human beings are competitively displacing most non-human species from their ecosystems, and then we poison many others so that even the surviving vertebrate populations have declined by 73% just since 1970. So the mass of human beings is having enormous effects on the living biomass of other creatures on Earth. Moreover, the mass of human artifacts, just the stuff that we build, all of our toys and technologies and automobiles and so on and so forth, now exceeds the total weight of biomass on the planet. Human beings have become the greatest geological force changing the face of the Earth. We move about 24 times more materials in our construction and agriculture and so on than does all the erosion of rivers moving sediment into the oceans. So those are all enormously impressive, I would say, statistics about how human beings have come to outgrow the biophysical capacity of Earth to support civilization.

  (00:21:46):

  And most of that has occurred in just the last couple of hundred years, a tiny fraction of 1% of the total lifetime of human beings on the planet, and it's a period to which we are, in my view, cognitively obsolete in understanding. We don't get it. We don't get the implications of this, and hence we're floundering around trying to solve single problems at a time in isolation from the whole, what I call, symptoms of gross cultural dysfunction.

  Alan Ware (00:22:14):

  And as you mentioned, the human groups that did have negative feedback in their environment that reduced their population through various means, illness or lack of food, would learn the hard way and then learn to manage the commons. And we have a long history of indigenous and traditional groups managing the commons, but they were receiving that negative feedback. And then as you've mentioned with fossil fuels and this enormous energy surplus, around the same time as you're getting these enlightenment ideas of human exceptionalism, those would've gone nowhere without the energy and material surplus that fossil fuel allowed. And then as you've said, the negative feedbacks on us became much reduced, allowing us to go from one to eight billion and fueling the story of human exceptionalism. The story itself, if it were visibly failing for the last 200 years, it would not have nearly the hold that it does, I think, on people because it's been backed up by material reality that people have seen.

  William Rees (00:23:15):

  We've been enormously successful. Every species has this inherent tendency to expand into all available habitat and to use resources to the limits of its own technological capacity, but human technology enabled us to extend this far beyond anything that any other species has managed to achieve. So in many respects, if you think of our whole system on a finite planet, we're in the worst of all possible worlds because we both have a natural predisposition and a cultural reinforcement of that natural predisposition to grow beyond the limits of the system to sustain us. Well, people will say, look, oh, come on, look, everything's fine. The world's still ticking ahead, but we're not now supporting eight billion people because we're living by drawing down the accumulated natural capital that took millions of years for nature to compile. A race car can accelerate as long as there's fuel in the tank, but it's drawing down that fuel and it will stop accelerating the instant it runs out of gas.

  (00:24:16):

  Well, our culture is not much different. We're drawing down the fuel tank of the planet. We're draining the battery, and when the battery's empty, we're going to have some serious reckoning. And that serious reckoning, Alan, comes back in the form of renewed negative feedback. Put it in this context, climate change is renewed negative feedback. It's the system telling us you've gone too far and people are already dying as a result of that negative feedback of climate change. This super El Nino that we're about to enjoy may greatly increase immediate mortality. Sea level rise is going to have an amazingly impactful effect on certain coastal cities and so on. We're seeing a resurgence in some kinds of diseases. Some experts predict there will be several more pandemics before the century's out. That's negative feedback. The increase in competition for resources is going to explode, as some would say, in the form of more and more regional and possibly even a global war.

  (00:25:18):

  We're seeing that already in the form of the Russian attack on Ukraine, which is really all about resources. Ukraine is an incredibly resource rich country, both agriculturally and in mineral and industrial terms. The United States is grabbing oil from Venezuela, Canada, beware by the way. We're seeing this increased resource pressure all over the planet as things become scarcer, even as the demand for resources increases with the increasing expansion of the human enterprise, such as through data centers and so on. Huge increase in the demand for energy just to run that single technology. So the feedbacks are starting to pile up, and some of us argue that those negative feedbacks will overwhelm techno-industrial society before the end of this century and slam us back very considerably.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:26:07):

  And Bill, you're talking about the 200-year-old story of modern techno-industrial society. Predating that is of course the rise of so-called civilization when these early states and empires started to take root, and we've had other guests describe it as that's kind of when a lot of these social hierarchies began, these dominator values became ascendant. And you've written about the usefulness of system theorist Greg Elliott's psychopathic selection hypothesis in better understanding both how what you've called the maladaptive nature of MTI culture came into existence and why it persists. So could you walk us through a bit about what the psychopathic selection hypothesis is and why is it so relevant to our current predicament?

  William Rees (00:27:03):

  Again, a really important question, and I think the answer ties together all of the things that you mentioned. But again, I want to put this in a biological and evolutionary context. For most of human evolutionary history, we lived in small tribal organizations, which by nature were two things that we've lost today. The first is cooperative. No human being could survive as a solitary animal. Some animals can, humans can't. We're a spindly naked ape with no fangs and no claws to speak of. So cooperation by necessity is the means for survival in those small groups. Moreover, when you have a small group, it's very difficult for any person to deviate from the norm. You can't accumulate, you can't acquire, you can't hoard resources because you'll be found out. Everybody knows everybody else, and people who act in an antisocial way are going to be slammed back into line.

  (00:28:00):

  They could even be ostracized, abolished from the group and hence left to survive on their own, which is really not possible. So while we may have tendencies to deviate and to want to accumulate and so on, these would be repressed in small social groups. And I think both paleoanthropology and modern anthropology suggest that small-scale communities like this are both egalitarian and cooperative by nature. Now, as we came into civilized existence, we shifted from very small scale to very large scale social organizations consisting of very complex structures, thousands of people involved at a corporation or a government department. Most of our institutional forms today are very large scale, and this enables deviant personalities to hide. You can get away with not having much empathy for your colleagues. You can get away with doing things that twig the system to increase your own advantage. You can express selfish attitudes.

  (00:29:02):

  You can express narcissistic attitudes. So Greg Elliott has proposed that in fact, in large scale organizations, the environment is favorable to the rise to prominence of psychopathic or triad personalities. People who tend to be lacking empathy, who tend to want to dominate, who want to self-aggrandize and move more resources to themselves and so on and so forth. And the large scale of organizations enables them to do this. I think there's general agreement that in the population at large, fewer than 1% of the population exhibit psychopathic tendencies of those kinds. But in large scale organizations, financial organizations, major corporations, even government departments, it rises by an order of magnitude. Say 10% or even 20% of the people tend to exhibit these kinds of qualities. I'm talking about people at the top. So the vast majority of people in those corporations are not necessarily tending toward those triad personalities, but the leaders may be.

  (00:30:10):

  And Elliott's hypothesis is not only does that environment select for those leaders, but once they're in place, they begin to change the nature of the environment. It's operational characteristics to favor their particular modus operandi, which makes it even more favorable for additional people of like mind to rise into position of power. So you have a situation then that favors the emergence of psychopathic tendencies at the very top. Now, I suppose if we take a leap into the present day, everybody who looks at it seriously makes the argument that Donald Trump is a certifiable psychopath. He totally lacks empathy. He's totally narcissistic and self-aggrandizing. He's twisting the entire system, all of its rules. Trump's personal fortune has increased by billions in the course of his presidency. Those of his close associates by hundreds of millions in the course of his presidency. Look at Benjamin Netanyahu as a psychopath, Putin as a psychopath.

  (00:31:13):

  Think of other major leaders and the kinds of actions they take. They press a button or issue commands every day that result in the deaths of thousands of human beings. It takes a psychopathic personality to be able to do that. There are circumstances, I suppose, that justify war, but we're in a situation today where the world seems increasingly to be controlled by and run by people with tendencies to disregard the greater good completely and in favor of their own interests. And it all comes back to something that I think I've been emphasizing without really stating it throughout this conversation, something I call the human maladaptation syndrome. So if you think of, again, human evolution, 97.5% of human evolution was small scale, those cooperative egalitarian societies we talked about. It's only been the last, less than 2% through human evolutionary history, we've let loose the tendencies that enable us to behave in this particular way.

  Large scale and human behavioral and psychological tendencies do not match.

  Alan Ware (00:32:20):

  And as you mentioned, well, the large scale institutions allow the psychopaths to hide from our detection, whereas in a group of 150 people, we would know who was overly narcissistic or lazy or BSing or we would have various ways to sanction them and we haven't. So we have these organizations that can embody the founders who often might have a psychopathic lack of empathy and then what Greg Elliott calls the cognitive fossils, that contemporary institutions become cognitive fossils from their maybe psychopathic origins. And then though most of the people in those organizations are not psychopathic, the incentives have been structured around a more psychopathic lack of empathy. And what I thought was interesting thinking about this, we've had several different economists, Clive Spash and Joshua Farley on talking about how so many people are trained in economics, neoclassical economics, which has its own kind of psychopathic homoeconomicus where you're encoding it into the middle managers and the lower level people are taking on what Greg Elliott calls the symbolic environment of money.

  (00:33:33):

  So all these metrics become reality and that you're incentivized on those metrics and not the harm you're doing people by firing them. They're just numbers on a balance sheet.

  William Rees (00:33:42):

  That's exactly correct. Natural selection tends to obviously select for those properties of human anatomy or behavior that are more advantageous in particular circumstances. But Greg's hypothesis takes us into the domain of symbolic selection, so such things as money or status or market share or power become selectable entities within that system. And so those are the things that people have become oriented toward and which accumulate in the systems that we're talking about. But there's another extremely important dimension of Craig's idea that seems to me should be drawn out more. And that's what he calls, we've become an entrapment game because even though only a fraction, say 10% or fewer of the leadership may have these lack of empathy kinds of behaviors, the vast majority of people involved in the entity, in the corporation or the government may be perfectly normal, decent human beings. Moreover, so are the rest of us out here in society.

  (00:34:45):

  We may have bought into this game, but we're not psychopaths per se. Nevertheless, we're completely dependent on the system that has evolved. So every one of us here depends on the system, this abstract symbolic system for our jobs, for access to money, which is a symbolic access to real resources and so on. So when you get into this kind of situation where the system is shaped by narcissists and psychopaths, but engages all of us and we can't change the system because we depend on it, you've got a classic entrapment situation, because the certain costs of defecting, the loss of income, the loss of job, loss of access to all of the necessities of life are far greater than the maybe only incipient costs in the future of sticking with the system. In fact, there are disincentives for people to really object much to the nature of the system in which we find ourselves.

  (00:35:43):

  We're entrained in it. It's too costly to get out of it. What's the alternative? How do I access food and resources and money and housing and all the rest of it if I don't participate in the system? So it's an incredible psychological trap that we have created and again, indicative of our cognitive inability to cope with the very systems that our combined biological and social instincts have put together.

  Alan Ware (00:36:09):

  And as you've noted in your writings and your speaking that there are many things that we could do, but we choose not to do in responding to ecological overshoot. And just to take one case study area of great concern over the past few decades, climate change, how would you frame humanity's action in terms of what you think we should be doing versus what we're actually doing?

  William Rees (00:36:31):

  Well, again, a question that could take our entire two hours, and I'm going to start again by putting it in this bio-evolutionary context. Isolating climate change as a problem is the first indication that we're off the track in my view. It reflects our simplistic approach to complexity. The human mind is capable of dealing really with one thing at a time. So we tend to see all of the world's problems, each of them in isolation from each other. So the conversation about climate change rarely talks about plunging biodiversity or ocean acidification or any of those things. For the most part, it's a separate issue. What I'm arguing is that all of these things, I could give you four pages of symptoms, but they are all co-symptoms of overshoot. The human enterprise is now so large that we are now consuming and depleting irreversibly many of the essential self-producing as well as replenishable resources much faster than they can regenerate.

  (00:37:35):

  That's what we're doing to the world's tropical forests. That's what we're doing to the world's soils. That's what we're doing to oil and gas and other resources. So we are depleting the assets of the planet, certainly in terms of the non-replenishable resources, the non-renewables, faster. They're not going to be replaced in any time at all, but even the renewable resources are being now ruined at a rate far beyond. And then we're dumping wastes. The inevitable byproduct of resource throughput is waste production. In fact, only a small fraction of that which we consume emerges as useful products. Most of it is degraded waste and it's accumulating and poisoning and otherwise upsetting the ecosphere. So we've isolated climate from everything else. And because we've isolated climate, we tend to focus on what can we do to alleviate that singular symptom and we identify fossil fuel emissions as one of the anthropogenic causes of climate change.

  (00:38:35):

  So let's instead substitute some form of alternative energy for fossil fuel. So the vast majority of the emphasis in the climate change domain has been toward the development of so-called green alternative energy, wind towers, solar panels, EVs, and so on and so forth. Now, if you look at the period during which this has gone forward, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change dates from about 1992. That's about as long, three decades now, a little more than that, of emphasis on the climate system involving these technological substitutes for fossil fuel. But the main objective of the framework convention was to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. In that period of time, those atmospheric concentrations have actually increased by 65%. They're at the highest level ever. We've seen now the highest temperatures ever, at least in the last several hundred thousand years. So there's been zero effect of the emphasis on climate change, on fixing the problems driving anthropogenic climate change.

  (00:39:46):

  Moreover, it's easy to see why. For one thing, the various technologies that we're emphasizing here are all produced using fossil fuel. Every single stage of the manufacturing of a wind tower or of a solar panel involves combustion of fossil fuel from mining to refining to transportation to manufacturing and so on and so forth. There's no such thing as an alternative energy source if it can't produce itself plus produce all the excess energy required to run civilization. And so far the only source of energy we know that can do that is fossil fuel. And if you look at the profile of energy use in our culture, it's been additive. It's not really substituted. So today we are using more traditional biofuels - animal dung, wood, and so on - than we did in 1800, but we stacked on top of that the use of coal, oil, natural gas, and more recently we simply stacked alternative so-called green energy on top of that.

  (00:40:47):

  So I've mentioned we've had this 30-year history of attempts to reduce emissions that hasn't worked. Moreover, if you look at the simple statistics of how much energy is being produced by these alternative green sources of electricity, it's true that in some countries we're up to 30, 40% perhaps of electricity production now by alternative energy. Now we're not going to mention the fact that that has also increased the output of carbon dioxide to some extent, but electricity is only 20% of total energy consumption. So what's 20% of 20%? Wind and solar energy currently contribute something on the order of 4% of the world's final energy consumption after decades of development. So the impact has been enormous in terms of its absolute increase, but in relative terms, it's been trivial. We've got a huge way to go before those sources of energy could substitute for fossil fuel.

  (00:41:46):

  In fact, I doubt very much whether they ever will substitute for fossil fuel for some of the reasons I've already mentioned. The fact that they need fossil fuel to produce themselves is one of those reasons. The sheer magnitude of our fossil fuel dependence is another. The world today is still 80 some percent dependent for its primary energy on fossil fuel. That's the same number that was extant in 1992 when the Framework Convention on Climate Change started. Secondly, this massive ecological impact of these alternative technologies made worse by the way with AI because there's now this enormous demand for mineral resources and we're mining more and more sources of resources that have less and less concentration of those resources. So whereas a hundred years ago, you might get a few kilograms of copper out of a metric ton, now it's down to a few grams per several metric tons so that you have to mine unbelievable amounts of mineral ore to get a tiny fraction of useful minerals out of that.

  (00:42:49):

  So as we get more and more into that, the ecological damage increases in proportion. Moreover, and here's the kicker it seems to me, the whole point of the exercise so far has been to maintain the status quo. I refer to this as business as usual by alternative means. So if all you're doing is shifting your growth oriented society from one form of energy that destroys the planet to another form of energy that would destroy the planet if it ever got to the point of displacing fossil fuel, what have you gained? You've still destroyed the planet. You've increased your rate of exploitation of all of those resources upon which we depend at an increasing pace. We've reached the point where we are utterly dependent on abundant cheap energy and yet the use of the only immediately available source of abundant cheap energy is killing us. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

  (00:43:44):

  The point of the matter is our focus on climate change refuses to look at the fundamental cause. It's a focus on a symptom. Let me reiterate, climate change, plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, methane releases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, are all co-symptoms of a single problem called overshoot. Overshoot is the state in which human consumption exceeds the rate of production, of rehabilitation in nature, and we exceed the rate at which nature can assimilate our wastes. That's what overshoot is. And overshoot itself is caused by what I call human gross cultural dysfunction. So if you really want to solve the climate problem, you have to put it in the context that it's merely one co-symptom of overshoot, which is the result of an excessive human scale, which itself is a result of this cultural dysfunction, this notion that we can grow forever on a finite planet.

  (00:44:46):

  We need a new story as many, many philosophers have said. The story of infinite growth on a finite planet is destroying us. We need a whole new story which involves gross contraction of the human economy, a great reduction of human populations, and the reduction of resource throughput to a scale which is compatible with the steady state dynamics of natural ecosystems and the life-producing functions of the ecosphere. And nobody in the mainstream society is yet willing to confront the realities of overshoot, of cultural dysfunction. We're simply treating the symptoms. A very crude analogy that's been used before is that if you've got a massive headache caused by brain cancer, then using aspirins or acetaminophen to ease your headache isn't addressing the major problem and that's what we're doing.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:45:36):

  And I don't know, Bill, if you've seen the latest United Nations Environment Program's report. They've now co-opted the term overshoot to appropriate it for greenhouse gas emissions and the overshoot of that. And so talk about treating the symptom of a headache for the larger issue of a brain cancer. What if you're not even defining the larger issue appropriately here? So that's the one thing is they've completely misunderstood the term. And the second thing is they kind of retain the fixation on greenhouse gas emissions to the detriment of all the other issues that you mentioned that are putting life in peril. And just like a lot of the other UN stuff, the report itself seems to completely skirt the population issue. There's no mention of population, even though the very conservative IPCC has identified population growth and GDP growth as two of its key drivers of climate change.

  (00:46:37):

  So it's just absolutely remarkable how some of these kind of larger institutions still, as you said, are totally reproducing the myth of business as usual.

  William Rees (00:46:49):

  Absolutely. You used the word they're misunderstanding the problem. It's conceivable that they're not misunderstanding the problem, that this is a deliberate attempt to distract people from the problem. Again, the whole report of limiting overshoot from the UN is a reflection of the mainstream perspective. It focuses on a single problem. This is human cognitive incompetence. It's not a singular problem called climate change or global heating. That is a symptom of the big issue. But if you face the big issue, you'd have to face the issue of human overpopulation and of the overextension of human economic activity. But you have to again put that in the context of the United Nations. The United Nations essentially is an organ that reflects the interests of its major participants, the nations of the world, particularly those on the Security Council, none of whom have any interest whatsoever in reducing the scale of the human enterprise.

  (00:47:51):

  Even our own country, Canada, is dedicated to the principle that we've got to grow by exploiting all the mineral and oil and gas resources at our disposal. We're going to make them available to the world. The world needs Canada. So we're all deeply, deeply embedded in this continuous growth paradigm to the extent that it blinds us to the reality that treating the symptoms is really getting us nowhere. The UN report is quite explicit in saying that there's a disaster on the horizon if we exceed one and a half Celsius degrees mean global warming, but it then proposes impossible solutions to not exceeding. In fact, 1.5 degrees Celsius is already in the rear view mirror, as James Hansen has put it. We can't avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius mean global warming. And so all of the catastrophes and disasters that the report suggests may happen will likely happen.

  (00:48:44):

  And we're not going to head them off by any of the means that they suggest, which includes, by the way, the carbon capture and storage they say is necessary, the alternative energy that they say is necessary. But as you say, what they do not talk about is shrinking the economy and shrinking the demand. And the fact of the matter is the global human enterprise exceeds the capacity of the planet to support the global human enterprise. So we are eroding and destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence with the assistance of our major cultural institutions which keep replicating the beliefs, values, and assumptions which have got us into this problem in the first place. Once a system becomes ingrained in a culture, once a way of thinking becomes ingrained in a culture, that system becomes totally self-referencing. So if you think about it, we all prize a university education, but what universities do is really reproduce the very culture that we're embedded in.

  (00:49:45):

  You mentioned the economists you've had on. Every major economics department is reproducing the very growth-based ideology that is destroying the ecosystem upon which we all depend. Our engineering departments, our science departments all assume that better knowledge means a better future for everybody. AI is plunging ahead, and yet even some people on the inside of AI argue that it represents a huge danger to the human future, and yet the system keeps producing itself. The same beliefs, values, and assumptions that got into the mess are being used to try to find solutions to get us out of the mess. And of course, it simply replicates the problems that we've created. So self-reference is a huge difficulty.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:50:32):

  Yeah, I really appreciate the point you made about misunderstanding versus deliberately dodging to suit their own needs and to suit their own reputation. And then you've written at length about why cities, the predominant geographic configuration of MTIs, are uniquely vulnerable in biophysical terms. Why is that?

  William Rees (00:50:55):

  Well, the primary reason is that what we think of as the city is not a system. It's ironic, again, that humans talk about the human ecosystem or the urban ecosystem, but what a city is from a genuine ecological perspective is a massive node of consumption. I've used an analogy that has offended a lot of people. I've argued in several publications that the typical modern city is the human analog of livestock feedlots. It's where we keep a huge number of bodies, but the resources needed, the land needed to feed those bodies is located outside the feedlot. So the first thing we have to think about cities is that they do not produce anything. Now, everybody's going to argue, "oh sure they do. They're the economic engines of national economic growth and so on," but that's producing money. And when you think of what actually is required to sustain the human bodies and the industrial metabolism of cities, all of that stuff is produced outside the city.

  (00:51:54):

  So focus on a city like Hong Kong or Shanghai. Shanghai has what, 27, 28 million people. Tokyo, 38 million people. That's almost the population of Canada in a single city. But if you start looking at the ecological demands made by that human population, it far exceeds by several orders of magnitude, the productivity of the land base of the city itself. So every major city is dependent. This is one of the reasons I developed ecological footprint analysis. How large an area of productive ecosystems is actually required outside of a city to sustain the biological requirements of the population living in that city? And you'd have to put those two together to have a complete ecosystem. So human beings are consumers, but the producers are green plants. We also have to have decomposers, the bacteria and fungi that decompose and recycle the nutrients contained in animal and plant material.

  (00:52:55):

  Well, neither the producers nor the decomposers are located in the cities. So when you start adding up the amount of land and water ecosystems required to produce everything of an urban population consumes and to assimilate its wastes, you wind up with an area of land outside the city that can be several hundred times larger than the built up area of the city itself. So the complete urban ecosystem includes not just the built up area, but the productive area required to sustain the activities of those people in the built up area. And in addition to that, not only is there a biological metabolism generated by the millions of inhabitants of the city, but there's the intense industrial metabolism needed to maintain and produce all of the buildings, the infrastructure, the various systems that comprise the city. And when you add all of this up, you're adding another big chunk to the eco-footprint of cities.

  (00:53:51):

  So the bottom line is this, cities in isolation are dead. I used to teach this in one of my classes. I used to have students who would come in and say, "Dr. Rees, cities only occupy 2% of the world's land surface. We've got lots of room to expand and grow." Well, I'm sorry, it's not 2%. It's over 100%. Once you take into account the flows of energy and material resources, both the consumed resources and the wastes produced and calculate the area of the system needed to sustain it all, every city is vastly larger than its political area. And this means that every city in isolation, I used to say, let's put it in a bell jar. What would happen to your ideal city if it were enclosed in a massive bell jar that was impermeable to energy and matter? And the answer is it would be dead within a couple of days because a typical city has two or three days worth of food within it, a few days of oxygen at best.

  (00:54:48):

  And so cut off from the rest of the world, a city is a dead entity. Cut off from diesel fuel, cities are dead entity. So we have a major problem beginning to appear right now, even President Trump is aware of it, that the world is starving of diesel fuel because of his war in Iran, because of the Russian war on Ukraine and the various responses other countries have had to this. The world runs on diesel fuel. So cities are in a situation, I call it a classic example of a rock and a hard place. Cities are ultimately and utterly so far and for the foreseeable future dependent on the continued use of fossil fuel, particularly diesel fuel. If you cut that off, then those cities cannot be provisioned. You can neither supply them with the food or the other resources they need to sustain themselves and you can't adequately rid them of their waste products.

  (00:55:43):

  So cutting cities off from fossil fuel or abundant cheap energy, if we just leave it at that, would mean that they would implode. Modern cities are the products of fossil fuel, so we can't cut them from fossil fuel. But if we continue using fossil fuel, and this is the dilemma, we're subjecting those cities to the ravages of climate chaos. So again, damned if you do, damned if you don't. This double dilemma, this double-edged sword is precisely the position that the growthist mentality has put us into. So take your choice of poison. And until we begin to realize and size up the problem in this way, we're not going to come up close to solving them.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:56:24):

  Yeah. And definitely not with the reality that billions more people are projected to live in cities in the coming decades and be even more removed from their ecosystems that support them and increasingly become less and less aware of the degradation that they're causing with all of life, right?

  William Rees (00:56:43):

  I don't want to just pass over the point you've just made. I think it's extremely important. Urbanization as a phenomenon has removed people from close contact with the ecosystems upon which they are dependent. So it's a spatial displacement from ecological reality, but as important, it has displaced us psychologically from the ecosystem. People are not psychologically connected to the biophysical systems and the life support services upon which they are ultimately and utterly dependent. So we see ourselves as dependent on the cultural and technological infrastructure, but that simply obscures the fact that those are symbolic abstractions that remove us from the functional reality of our dependence on the ecosphere. And because of that psychological and spatial disconnect, becoming increasingly difficult for people to understand the need for protecting nature, reducing demand and populations.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:57:44):

  Yeah, that comes back to the first question that we asked you about humanity being inherently unsustainable by nature and nurture. And I think this part that you're talking about of being psychologically and physically removed from the very ecosystem that supports you, that's the nurture part, right? That then prevents us from putting in the kind of prohibitions and prescriptions that keep us in check in terms of exercising the maximum power principle. There's not even a chance that we can do that.

  William Rees (00:58:16):

  Absolutely.

  Alan Ware (00:58:18):

  As you've been arguing, the human exceptionalist story is also based on a techno-optimism that through our ingenuity, innovation, we can overcome any material energy constraint. And of course, that's being used in renewable energy, possibly saving us on both the input and the pollution side. And now we've added artificial intelligence to what some think might save us from modern techno-industrial collapse. What would your thinking be on why that's delusional?

  William Rees (00:58:49):

  Well, you see, techno optimism is always based on the assumption that by implementing techno-fixes, we can maintain the current trajectory of the human enterprise. It's always oriented toward continuity. It's not a question of changing the nature of the reality of our relationship with nature. It's simply looking for ways of extending the existing relationship. So I don't care what form of techno-optimism you're talking about. If the orientation is away from doing anything that would actually reduce human impact, let me be really clear about this. One thing and one thing alone will address overshoot, and that is grossly reduced material and energy throughput and smaller populations or some combination of those things. So if your techno fix does not lead to a greatly reduced consumption of resources and smaller populations, it's not a fix. It's simply something that aids and abets the continuity. That's why I call it business as usual by alternative means.

  (00:59:54):

  AI is just the latest of human creations that has a potential to do things beyond our capacity to understand. Not that we could if we tried, it's beyond our capacity to understand. I mean, that is a really important point. It's not that humans are stupid, it's that we've created conditions and situations that are literally beyond the capacity of any human mind to fully comprehend. Keep in mind again, if you go back just 10,000 years, no system was so complex that we didn't cope. So we are the first species to create an environment for which we are totally maladapted to live. And I call this the human maladaptation syndrome. It's not a question of not knowing. It's a question not even being able to know completely that which we have created in ways that can defend us against the feedbacks that are likely to occur.

  (01:00:46):

  We talked earlier about positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks. AI may prove to be the greatest of negative feedbacks. Human intelligence, we're not very intelligent. What we are is smart. We have enormous capacity to manipulate the physical world, but it's gotten out of control. And that's the issue here. We don't have the intelligence to control our own cleverness. I once gave a presentation, which I think I called it too clever for our own good, but not nearly smart enough.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:01:14):

  And Bill, we spoke at length about a couple of UN reports and we want to talk to you about another one. And it falls into these kind of ambitious plans for creating a more socially just, ecological, sustainable future. They've always got the right terminology. And there's a recent one that the United Nations released titled The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. And the primary author of the report is Olivier De Schutter, whom we did have as a guest on the podcast. And you note in your article that the Roadmap has some important and forward thinking elements, but you also raise significant concerns, especially the gap between what the plan says we should do versus how we should actually achieve it. Of course, there's a whole lot of stuff that's missing altogether in the plan, but what do you see as the roadmap's biggest weaknesses and what does it fall short of what is actually required? And I'll also share a little story afterwards.

  William Rees (01:02:19):

  Okay. People should understand that this Roadmap is a massively comprehensive and to many people's way of thinking, the perfect document to solve all of our problems. It requires universal access to education, universal access to food, universal access to housing, universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, universal access to clean energy. I could go on and on. Ecological justice. We want to put caps on resource use, emissions, and pollution. We're going to ration luxury accommodations. We're going to affirm the rights of nature and biodiversity protection and so on and so forth. So these are all exceedingly valuable and idealistic ideas. It would be wonderful if we could achieve any of them. But the reality is simply this, and I see this as the biggest weakness of this report and so many other well-meaning documents and analyses out there. All we need to do, all we need to do is change our lifestyles.

  (01:03:19):

  We have to adopt voluntary simplicity. We have to greatly reduce our personal consumption and share that which we have with everybody else. That would solve all of our problems. Well, actually it wouldn't because even if we shared everything that we have today, we'd be more equal, but we'd still be in overshoot because we haven't addressed the fundamental question of the human enterprise being too large for its own boots at this point. So we have here what I call the what/how conundrum. We know what we need to do. Oh, we just have to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. We just have to redistribute wealth so that everybody has adequacy. Those are what we should do issues, but nobody addresses how. How do you achieve such goals? How do you give universal access to housing in a market-based economy? How do you give universal access to clean energy in a market-based economy?

  (01:04:16):

  How do you do any of these things? The redistribution of wealth, how do you convince the world's billionaires that they're too rich when their primary objective in life is to increase their billionaireness? So we've got, again, this enormous dilemma. We've gone from a situation where the human norm is egalitarianism, but we've created a system which inhibits the implementation and development of egalitarianism precisely because the large scale systems that we have created enable deviant individuals to siphon the wealth of society into their own coffers at ever-increasing rates. Once they gain control, they fix the taxation system, they fix the basic rules of the game so that it favors their further growth and aggrandizement at the expense of the rest of society. Well, how do you change that? Again, my emphasis is on how, how, how. So we know what to do. And I think the roadmap was a wonderful compilation of the things we should be doing as a global culture.

  (01:05:19):

  And by the way, which would be done by a small community of people recognizing the nature of its problem. This is a very important point. If we had a small community of 150 people facing the same issues that we are as a global society today, they'd know exactly what to do and they could pull it off because there's enough people there to understand the problem, to discuss it fully among the group, to come up with reasonable solutions that everybody has to participate in. And by the way, anyone who decides not to would be ostracized. So the problems could be solved, but move that into the kind of eight billion people of fractiously divided competitive nations, competing organizations and so on, all striving to get bigger and better and more and so on. It becomes an impossibility conundrum, an impossibility theorem. It cannot be done. We have not looked at the how question.

  (01:06:13):

  We only know what needs to be done. So again, I congratulate that Roadmap for laying out in such exquisite detail the kinds of things it would make for, not ecologically, but certainly socially more equitable and diverse world. But what they left out was any, it seems to me, idea at all of what would have to happen to change the mindsets and behaviors of the people and the institutions that we have created that have created this problem in the first place. Look, we can't even solve a simple thing like climate change. We can't stop fighting over resources. People in the United States, I'm sorry, but you've had 250 years of constitutional rule and one psychopath has been able to overthrow it in the course of two elections. That's astonishing to me. Looking at it from the outside, it's almost unfathomable that this could happen, and yet it's happened because the society is so fractured that you have the disillusioned people at the bottom who think Trump is going to solve all their problems, at least they did before they elected him.

  (01:07:19):

  Remember I said earlier, we're all entrapped in what Greg would call the entrapment game. Even the senators and congresspeople who should be correcting this problem are so afraid of Trump, so entrapped by the system, so afraid of losing their own seats that they don't act. And so the man gets away, not just the man, he's got this whole coterie of individuals around him who support the same ideology. They're afraid to move. And so the system seems paralyzed by its own internal structures, Greg's psychopathic syndrome writ large.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:07:53):

  Yeah. I appreciate the accolades that you recognize that they are deserving of in terms of the Roadmap to Eradicating Poverty Report. And my own issue with the report was they had an open invitation for organizations, academics, researchers to contribute their own ideas to the report. And because we'd had Olivier De Schutter on the podcast, we also received an invitation to contribute and we submitted a very detailed report of the things we think should be necessary. They did not have a single mention of population growth and its contribution to poverty and intergenerational poverty that results from hundreds of millions of unplanned pregnancies every year, lack of contraceptive access, abortion, and all of the stuff that we've talked about before. And I mean, we had a couple of other ones that also didn't make it in. So even though it's radical in its own ways and it was supported by so many degrowth ambassadors, I have a feeling why our work was not included because as we've talked about in our previous podcast, degrowthers tend to be very allergic to the population question.

  William Rees (01:09:11):

  Yeah, but you see what you're describing, I'm not in the least surprised. Again, De Schutter and the whole report is a UN document. The UN document is a reflection of the beliefs, values and assumptions of the mainstream story. Now the mainstream story is that population planning is anathema. It's a hazard to see countries losing a population because it undermines future economic growth. It undermines the ability of people to pay into their pension plans or just to pay out of their pension plans and so on. So we have this entire story, this narrative that increasing population and increasing economic scale is absolutely important to pay off the increasing debt into which every country seems to be going. So your report is anathema. It completely flies in the face of all of the beliefs, values, and assumptions underlying the mainstream kind of report that Roadmap comes out with. So the population issue, it's actually being promoted now.

  (01:10:11):

  As you're absolutely well aware, most countries are into a pronatalist domain where they're actually encouraging further family growth. Women should be in the kitchen and the bedrooms of the nation. I don't know how this mentality infiltrates, but it's there. And so again, just to summarize, I could have written another report on the ecological failings of this report, but it wouldn't matter because if you believe as they do that we need more people to solve all of our problems, then what you're suggesting is a complete monkey wrench into the issue. But again, you see, all of this speaks to the human incapacity to grasp the entirety of the situation in which we find ourselves. It speaks to the notion that we have stories, right? We act out of our stories, contrary information be damned. So our stories are always simplistic renditions, reductionist halfway houses of some kind or other of the nature of reality.

  (01:11:11):

  They do not include many, many important factors that should be part of any story. But if you act out of your story in preference to contrary data, then those contrary data fall by the wayside and are ignored. And so I hate to tell you, but you're not part of the story.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:11:28):

  I'm realizing more and more it's a waste of time writing these reports, trying to reach the UN.

  William Rees (01:11:34):

  No, I don't think it's a waste of time, but what we're talking about now is so profoundly important, and yet most people are utterly unaware of it. If you went out onto the street in Toronto today and grabbed a hundred people at random and asked them to give the major elements of their worldview, they wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about. Most people don't know what a worldview is. Most people don't know what a developmental paradigm is, and yet every one of those people is operating out of a whole variety of parallel worldviews, all constructed around the notion of human exceptionalism. And they've acquired those worldviews, not through any formal course on worldviews, but simply by growing up day to day in a culture that is living out that worldview. And so a young person growing up in that culture acquires this automatically. Let's put this in an evolutionary context.

  (01:12:30):

  Go back 10,000 or 100,000 years. A young person growing up in that tribal community, automatically learning the beliefs, values, and assumptions of his tribe or her tribe, automatically learning the myths and paradigmatic framing the way they see the world was a huge advantage because it's how people acquire their personal sense of identity. And if we all believe the same things, if we all believe in the same phenomena and the same gods and the same myths and so on, all of these things give us a tribal identity. We have a sense of belonging. And so it was an extremely adaptive behavior 10,000 years ago to automatically acquire the beliefs, values, and assumptions and cultural mythologies of your tribe. And by the way, they must be working or your tribe wouldn't be there. So it's a kind of automatic selection process. Leap forward to the present day.

  (01:13:22):

  People have that same underlying biological predisposition automatically to acquire the beliefs, values, and assumptions, the worldview, the cultural narrative of the dominant society in which we live. However, that narrative is now totally destructive and is taking us down. What I'm calling again, the human maladaptation syndrome comes into play. That which was adaptive 10,000 or 100,000 years ago becomes grotesquely maladaptive today. So the automatic acquisition of your cultural narrative, as it were, was of great survival advantage back then, but it becomes very difficult to dislodge. I mean, something that is working should be difficult to dislodge, right? We still have that predisposition to acquire that cultural narrative, but if it's a maladaptive narrative and difficult to dislodge, you're in the worst of all possible worlds. And that goes right back to our earlier discussions. We all know what we should be doing. You know what you should be doing regard to human population planning, but it doesn't fit the narrative.

  (01:14:30):

  And so since it doesn't fit the narrative, it will be discarded. You'll be respectively received, but you will be ignored because the powerful actors who are creating and reproducing the narrative and who have billions of dollars to do so and gaining more strength by the minute, they're the ones controlling the direction of the system at large, and they are very difficult to dislodge for all the reasons that we've talked about. So it's interesting. A lot of people still don't like to be thought of as animals. And anthropology and sociology for decades, when I was a student, any anthropologists or sociologists who thought that human evolution had anything to do with human social behavior was discarded, those people are nutcases. To them, again, this is part of this exceptionalism. Human beings are completely at their own disposal. We create our own whatever. We are not beholden to any ecological or biophysical laws.

  (01:15:30):

  We are not in any way, shape or form having our behavior determined by biological predispositions. That which we do and how we act is totally a social construct under the control of cultural factors. Well, all of that is nonsense. Most of our discussion today is about the complex interweaving of our biological predispositions and the cultural framework in which those things unfold. You can't separate them. Every question you've asked involves some domain or some factor of biological input interacting with our cultural context, and to try to separate them is a gross error. And the fact that we're even in this problem is, I think, to a very large extent, because we've created this exceptionalist notion that we're not biological entities and therefore can ignore the biological predispositions. And of course, once you ignore them, doesn't mean they go away. They are what is underplaying and driving us to a very large extent, now abetted by our cultural paradigm toward the extinction, or at least the collapse of the existing way of being.

  (01:16:36):

  Every single major society has gone through a similar developmental process of starting simple, of becoming more and more complex. Joseph Tainter has a whole book called The Collapse of Complex Societies based on the notion that human beings are problem- solving entities, but with each problem solved, the society becomes more complex. So you run out of food because you're hunting and gathering skills and tools have become so competent. Well, we invent agriculture, but agriculture creates food surpluses and food surpluses enable the division of labor, the emergence of hierarchies, the emergence of leaders, larger communities. We get into this whole business of moving from small to large, which enables the complete proliferation of cultural artifacts of one kind or another. Well, now you've got agriculture, but you've over-exploited your soil. So now you have to go to war to conquer more landscape, to replenish your food supplies, or you have to develop fertilizers and pesticides, which of course wrecks the soil, but at least it maintains your food supplies.

  (01:17:41):

  So every major advance results in the complexification of the society and culture, and that does two things. The first thing it does, and going back to my maladaptation syndrome, it means that people become less and less capable of understanding even the nature of the society in which they find themselves, but it also leads to what Joseph Tainter calls diminishing returns. When the next big problem comes along, you put a lot of resources into it, but you don't get as much out of it as you got out of putting a similar amount of resources into the last problem. So if you look at every domain of modern human endeavor, whether it's health science or biological science or energy science, we're seeing diminishing returns. In the energy thing, we say there's lower and lower energy return on energy invested. We have to dig deeper and use more and more energy to get out a little bit more energy from the system.

  (01:18:32):

  So every culture goes through this whole sequence of getting more and more complex so it becomes less and less understandable, and we're getting less and less gain for each unit invested in its maintenance. Moreover, at the social side, what's happening is that the society is becoming more and more divided. There are elites at the top. They see the crunch coming and accumulate more and more wealth for themselves at the expense of the underlings. Well, this means that the underlings begin to lose confidence in the leadership. So when the next big crisis comes along, there's not so much support for the political solution and the society implodes. And are we not reaching those kinds of situations in our current even global culture? Because we're not responding appropriately to the major crises confronting us. We're getting diminishing returns from every investment we make. People are becoming less and less confident in their leadership.

  (01:19:22):

  Disenchantment is setting in. And so we in the United States, it's obvious with the emergence of the proletariat underground, the people who've been ignored by the enormous acquisition of wealth, 40% of the US people haven't experienced any income growth, significant income growth in the last several decades. So all the manifestations and symptoms that Joseph Tainter describes for the complex of previous cultures is now occurring on a global scale in our culture, and the point will be reached where it begins to slide. Now, collapse is an ambiguous term. It could be a very long, slow decline, or it could come very rapidly if there's a major international conflagration involving nuclear weapons, for example. But I have personally no doubt that as the negative feedbacks begin to impinge upon our society, and we're seeing them increasingly in the form of climate change and political decomposition of a global order, these negative feedbacks will take us down one way or another. And so we've got to start preparing for that.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:20:25):

  And though, Bill, you have a number of potential things that, as you've talked about, we need to do, but we're not going to do, we won't necessarily ask you to list them here. We'll put a link to your posts about it. But from a more personal perspective, confronting these forces can often make one feel like a snowflake in an avalanche, which is the title of an article that you wrote. And how might we as individuals cultivate and maintain a life-affirming perspective even as life all around us as declining precipitously?

  William Rees (01:21:05):

  Well, the question is can we? And again, I think we go back to this notion that in a sense, we're all trapped in the system we've created. Look, none of us, certainly not you, nor I, nor Alan, we're not sustainable. We're not living sustainable lifestyles. I have a car. I live in a single family house. I have a motorcycle. So the question really is, can anybody be sustainable in today's world and still participate in society in ways that we would want to? Now let me be clear. I'm speaking now as a first world individual. There's lots of people living sustainable lifestyles in Zimbabwe and other places that we would consider from a North American perspective to be at levels of abject poverty. But if you were to really get serious about this, there's a couple of ways in which we can address this question. On Earth today, there are about 12 billion hectares of ecologically productive land and water sufficiently productive to sustain human activities.

  (01:22:03):

  There are about eight billion people. So there's about a hectare and a half of ecologically productive landscape per person out there. So the first question of sustainable human ecology on a world of eight billion people is what kind of lifestyle could be sustained in perpetuity on the biological productivity, that is to say the output and assimilative capacity of a hectare and a half of biologically productive land and waterscape? Now, that's an answerable question, but let's put another dimension on this. If we actually look at the lifestyle of a typical European, it may be four or five global average hectares. So they're two or three times above the carrying capacity as it were of the environment if we each lived on one and a half hectares. North Americans need seven hectares of bioproductive landscape and waterscape. So we're what, five times larger than we ought to be, which is where I get the number.

  (01:22:58):

  If everybody lived like North Americans, bring on the four or five additional planets because that's what you would need to sustain our level of consumption and pollution for the whole eight billion people. But what that really means on the real world is that each of us in North America on average would have to reduce our throughput, our consumption and pollution by about 80%. Now, how many people confronted with that fact are going to go out voluntarily and change their lifestyles so that they're only using about 20% of what they currently function on? And the answer is not very many. There's wonderful books on voluntary simplicity and a few people do it because they have such inordinate personal commitment, but the vast majority of people will not do it. And as far as I'm aware, there's never been a major society that has voluntarily shrunk itself down to the point where it lives compatibly with its ecosystems.

  (01:23:53):

  So that's the dilemma it seems to me that we find ourselves in. We are not predisposed to giving up those things once we have acquired them. It's one thing to deny people who haven't got those things from getting them. We're quite willing to do that, but we will not give it up on our own. So we're left with a real dilemma here. What we should be doing is reducing our lifestyles to the point where we're using a tiny fraction of the resources and material. Now, I think if we did this collectively, it's even possible. There's a couple of books by von Weizsäcker et al called Factor 10, I believe, where they shown that with existing technologies, using them vastly more efficiently and with much greater personal control, we could actually reduce our personal consumption by 80% or so without terribly damaging our quality of life.

  (01:24:43):

  But to do that, you need to create ecological tax reform. You need to create the incentives within society to move the production system toward those greater efficiencies. We should be making everything that lasts a hundred years, not 15 years, not 10 years. Listen, I just retired a stove that was over 35 years old and I went out saying, I want a new stove that'll last me or my descendants 35 years. And every dealer I went to laughed. He said, "You'll be lucky to get 10 years out of anything we produce today." And by the way, it's the same with washing machines and everything else. So we produce stuff that we just throw away. Half the world gets a new iPhone every year or so because there's a new gadget or widget or whatever. My phone, by the way, is 15 years old. So I try to minimize my impact.

  (01:25:32):

  But my point is the whole system is geared toward throughput, throughput, throughput, throughput, not toward reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce. And so we're in that kind of dilemma. I argue we should, if we were smart as individuals, stop trying to maintain the existing system. It's killing us. Accept that it's going to implode either quickly or slowly and begin to organize into neighborhood groups to confront the downturn together. Again, it's kind of going back to our tribal roots and creating groups of people that are large enough where we can come to some kind of mutual agreement about how we can efface this conundrum together and share the available resource base. Now, ideally, we could migrate to an area of landscape and establish ecoregion or a bioregion small settlements with sufficient land base to maintain an adequate local supply of basic food stuffs, for example. We should be re-localizing our basic manufacturing, our basic food processing and all of that sort of thing so that when the crunch comes, remember earlier we said how dependent we are on refrigeration, on transportation, all of these things provided by fossil fuel.

  (01:26:46):

  Well, what are you going to do when that's gone? So what can you do as a community group to begin to rethink the kind of society you can live in once the main props of our global techno-industrial society have begun to erode? I mean, they're already beginning to erode. And so far, nobody's taking us up on these kinds of ideals. By the way, we've got a huge infrastructure of legal impediments to doing so. Just something as simple as in land rights. How does a colony establish itself on somebody else's owned land rights? Property rights are a huge impediment to the equitable distribution of the basic means of human survival. So again, we seem to be trapped by our culture. We know what we should be doing, planning small, regionally based or ecologically based communities that learn to live off their local ecosystems as much as possible.

  (01:27:40):

  And by the way, it doesn't mean there should be no trade, but let's look at trade. I would argue that globalization and trade has been one of the greatest modern destroyers of ecosystems. We talked about this in relation to cities, but we can think of it in terms of whole nations. Suppose a country were confined to living on its own productive capacity of its own landscape, you would very quickly have population planning as part of the national directive, because once you reach the carrying capacity of your landscape, people start dying. You can't provide for them all. So a small community living on a particular land base, very conscious of their dependence on the productivity of the land base, begins to protect it. But once you relieve them of that responsibility by trading, then the incentive of that community, Well, hell, I can always import whatever I need from somewhere else.

  (01:28:33):

  They lose the incentive to protect and husband the biophysical assets within their territory because now they can draw down the assets of somewhere else. And that's what's happening all over the world. What globalization does is establish linkages between the most consumptive, rich, wealthy consuming populations to the last remaining pockets of resources wherever they may be on the planet. China, for example, prides itself on being the world's greatest pork producer. But if you look at the dynamics of pork production in China, those pigs are raised on soybeans and other fodder imported from Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere, occupying vast quantities of land base outside of China, but it's also destroying the Amazon rainforest and drawing down the soil base in the United States and so on. So through globalization, you have what I call a short circuiting of the global battery. It enables the human enterprise to drain every major source of resources much more quickly than it would otherwise be drained, were people confined to living on their own resources.

  (01:29:43):

  Every city is a parasite on its landscape, but now many whole countries have become similarly parasitic on their landscape. And something like 80% of the world's people are now dependent for a good proportion of their food resources on somebody else's productivity, and global trade satisfies that dimension. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with trade, but you see, it has to be regulated. I would argue that trade is fine if you're dealing with true ecological surpluses. So if I'm producing some commodity in this country in excess of my national demands, and I'm not destroying the soil and the process, then by all means share it with somebody else because we can trade that for something we don't produce here, wheat for bananas, canola for papayas, whatever. That's a fair exchange. But as soon as you begin to get greedy and use your resource base to increase your money wealth in the process, destroy your forests, your soils, and so on, all you're doing is converting bioresources into financial resources or into money wealth.

  (01:30:46):

  But in the process, you're destroying the biocapacity, the future carrying capacity of planet Earth. So in the absence of any ecological regulatory regime in control of global trade flows, they've become, as I say, this great drain on the biological assets of the planet. And what happens is that we all reach planetary limits simultaneously. Instead of any particular country reaching its own domestic limits and learning to control them, we have the entire global population crashing up against global limits at the same time. And yet we're such a divided, fractious, warring, competitive population at that global level. Again, contrast this with at the community level. At the global level, we can't come together in any meaningful way to control the impact of our own trading relationships. In fact, we decline to do so. And that again is what I call the human maladaptation syndrome. The shift from local, immediately connected relationships with your ecosystems to a global system that alienates us psychologically and physically from the ecosystems that support us, the whole system falls apart.

  (01:31:55):

  Populations expand beyond the domestic carrying capacity. Going back to our city example, Tokyo, Japan is only about a quarter of the Japanese population, but Japan could not support Tokyo alone on its own domestic biocapacity. It's utterly dependent on trade from elsewhere. So that's the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. And it's a paralytic relationship because none of us seems to be able to either recognize the nature of that reality and therefore we can't act sensibly in response to it because we're so completely at odds.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:32:29):

  And as you've talked about, the impact of this global destruction is not being felt equally, right? It's so disproportionate. The people from the countries from whom a lot of the resources are being extracted are also the countries that are experiencing some of the effects of overshoot the hardest. And so that human aspect, even if we only look at it from a human exceptionalist perspective, there's so much lacking in terms of equality within just our human sphere and then what we do to the rest of the planet just follows.

  William Rees (01:33:05):

  Absolutely. And you've indirectly raised another important point that has a very profound biological element to it. Human beings are by nature, spatial, temporal, and cultural or social discounters. So again, if you go back 10,000 years ago, it made a great deal of sense to be most concerned about your immediate relatives and your best friends. It made a great deal of sense to be immediately concerned about your local space, your local place. It made a great deal of sense to be concerned about right now. You didn't have to worry about 50 years from now because nothing changed anyway. So we are natural discounters. And if we leap forward to the present day, this makes it relatively easy for us not to give a damn about what happens to somebody half a planet away. Climate change, oh, well, that's going to mostly affect those people over there at some indefinite time in the future.

  (01:34:00):

  So there's all three elements of our discounting coming into play. So it means that the politicians and decision makers in northern highly developed countries would much sooner risk imposing harm on total strangers in distant countries that may or may not happen sometime in the future. And that's how we discount climate, right? They'd much rather do that than impose certain problems today on their own communities and electorate. So as long as you favor your own community, you're not going to act, even though it's going to impose future harm on people a half a planet away. As long as you favor your own place, you're not going to be too concerned about the major floods that are going to wipe out parts of Brazil or wherever it might be. As soon as you're concerned about the here and now, you don't really care about a future problem that may or may not happen somewhere else.

  (01:34:53):

  So the notion of discounting, even economists recognize it, is an inherent predisposition of the human mindset that evolved perfectly rationally. When I say rationally, I mean there's good reasons for it in biophysical terms and evolutionary terms. Again, it becomes maladaptive today because it enables those who have to write off people far away, other people and other places. It's an amazing oversight that we don't really recognize the extent to which we're being driven by these innate predispositions.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:35:26):

  You're probably familiar with the planetary solvency report that came out last year. It was by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter. And the report estimates the risk of three degrees Celsius between 2070 and 2090. And they're also estimating that four billion people are going to die and there's going to be a 50% loss in GDP. And this information appears in the appendix of the report.

  William Rees (01:35:58):

  Of course. This was a report to the UK government, right?

  Nandita Bajaj (01:36:02):

  Yep. And it has not been really picked up. And I think we all think this is probably even an underestimation of how much displacement and death there is actually going to be. And there's that discounting factor acting out right in plain sight. Of course, the 50% GDP loss was probably where they were more focused on and the other one was more of a footnote.

  William Rees (01:36:27):

  But again, I think it's a perfectly good illustration of how the story, the dominant story deflects and marginalizes contrary information. So you put it in the footnotes or in the appendix, you don't want to mention it up front in the main report. And by the way, that was called out by I think a couple of academics who wrote articles saying that this is an alarming report, but the main report, the one that supports that which was released publicly, is far more damaging and alarming than anything that reached the mainstream populace. We are in gross cultural denial. There's no other way of putting it that we simply don't want to contemplate what's coming down the pipe and we're automatically predisposed not to consider it because it does not conform to the existing cultural narrative. And by the way, it raises another interesting irony, and that is the people who are best able to withstand the coming contraction are those who are already impoverished and who are living close to the land, the people that we kind of dismiss as underdeveloped and so on.

  (01:37:30):

  So it won't be we sophisticated urban dwellers with all of our fancy cell phones and computer technologies and all of that. It won't be those versed in the ins and outs of AI that best survive the coming implosion. It'll be people who in fact are living close to the land, who understand the relationships between their own survival and maintenance of the landscape. It'll be indigenous cultures here and there who've learned the lesson the hard way in previous times. So there's a biblical saying, I'm totally areligious. I'm an atheist to the extreme, but the notion that meek shall inherit the Earth does come screaming through to me in the course of this discussion because it's those who are best capable of getting along with the least amount of aid and abetment from technological cultural prosthetics. We are all utterly dependent on our cultural prosthetics. And to the extent that there are still peoples out there who do not have those prosthetics and who are able to survive by their labors on the landscape and have access to it, they'll make it. The rest of us will have a much harder time.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:38:38):

  Well, Bill, this was a really powerful conversation. Your message about recognizing that the future is going to be local and doing what we can within our own spheres of influence while recognizing the degree of the predicament that is out of our control, the understanding of that reality is a gift. And we're really grateful to you for imparting that gift in such steadfast ways. You're constantly educating others through your writing and thinking and you're a really great example of someone who's doing that work. And so thank you so much for your time. We appreciate you so much.

  William Rees (01:39:19):

  Well, thank you, Nandita. I really appreciate your comments.

  Alan Ware (01:39:22):

  Yes. Thanks again, Bill. That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:39:52):

  Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.

More like this