Earth Overshoot Day: Overdrafting the World's Ecosystems
“Humankind is using up the biophysical basis of its own existence.” That’s the bottom line of this Earth Overshoot Day conversation with William Rees, the father of ecological footprint analysis. According to Rees, “the only way out of overshoot is less production and less consumption, so it means a much smaller economy and far fewer people.”
Earth Overshoot Day in 2021 is July 29. At this point in the year, we've already demanded a year's worth of the Earth's sustainable regenerative capacity.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Dave Gardner 0:00
Nandita, can you hold your breath until the new year, 2022, begins?
Nandita Bajaj 0:04
What? No, don't be ridiculous Dave. That's about a hundred and fifty days.
Dave Gardner 0:10
It is, isn't it? But did you know that as of July 29th, we have already, this year, burned through the renewable resources that will take the earth all year to regenerate. So we do kinda need to make time stand still for the rest of the year.
Nandita Bajaj 0:25
Right. Earth Overshoot Day is July 29th this year. One of the world's top authorities on the subject is William Rees, and we'll get his take on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Dave Gardner 0:46
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, the podcast that's all about right sizing the scale of the human enterprise at a level in sustainable balance with nature. I'm your co-host, Dave Gardner, fellow at World Population Balance.
Nandita Bajaj 0:59
And I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and Executive Director of World Population Balance, an organization that boldly takes a stand on why human overpopulation is devastating our planet, and the many positive ways in which we can help address it.
Dave Gardner 1:14
Learn more at worldpopulationbalanced.org. Nandita, as you know, in this episode, we'll visit with Bill Rees, the co-originator of Ecological Footprint Analysis about overshoot. But first, I want to really congratulate you for the webinar that you did just a little bit earlier this week as we record this. Pronatalism and Overpopulation: Challenging the Social Pressures to Procreate. Great job on that.
Nandita Bajaj 1:38
Thank you, Dave. It was really heartening. It was a great event. It was attended by people from all around the world. We had audience members from the US, Canada, Finland, India, Sweden, Greece, England, Germany, South Africa, and even Australia where it was in the middle of the night.
Dave Gardner 2:00
That says something.
Nandita Bajaj 2:01
Yeah, it was nice to see that it is an issue that no one really is talking about, and yet it's one of the most personal decisions we make - the decision to have children. And I'm hoping to keep broadening that conversation.
Dave Gardner 2:17
Well, please do, keep it up. And I understand that that was recorded and so we'll be able to put a link in the show notes so that people who missed it will be able to watch that.
Nandita Bajaj 2:25
Absolutely.
Dave Gardner 2:26
Great. Great. Number two on the preliminaries is, you've got some news about a lawsuit, don't you?
Nandita Bajaj 2:31
Yeah. So World Population Balance has just joined dozens of other organizations to file an amicus curiae, which is a term that I just recently learned, it means friend of the court. And it's in support of a groundbreaking lawsuit that's being filed against the federal government to take action on climate change. The lawsuit's actually being filed by two organizations, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which is an animal law advocacy organization, and Ceding Sovereignty, which is an Indigenous, women-led collective/nonprofit. And it's a lawsuit that's based on the constitutional right to nature and wilderness. And the premise of the lawsuit is that the US Constitution protects an individual's right to freedom and self-determination, and the right to wilderness is an essential part of what it means to be free. So the second part of the lawsuit is that the government commonly prioritizes harmful but lucrative industries, such as fossil fuels and factory farming, over the best interests of Americans. So it's really compelling the government to prioritize the needs of its people by restoring and preserving our wild spaces for us and for future generations.
Dave Gardner 3:55
Wow. That's fascinating. I'm guessing it's going to be a long wait, we're probably not going to be hearing lots of news about this over the coming weeks or even months, maybe.
Nandita Bajaj 4:04
Exactly. Yeah, it could take a long time. And our role really in it is more we're supporters, as I said, friends of the court, so if we do get called we are going in to support the case and provide evidence for why this is necessary.
Dave Gardner 4:20
Very cool. Good work.
Nandita Bajaj 4:21
Thank you.
Dave Gardner 4:22
We always like to share a little bit of listener feedback, so turning to the inbox, we got a nice email the other day from Joshua Spodek in New York City. Joshua hosts the podcast This Sustainable Life, which is pretty fascinating, and I would recommend it. After listening to episode 62 of the Overpopulation Podcast, which was untucking overpopulation with Alexandra Paul, Josh sent this email to me and that episode's guest, actress and activist Alexandra Paul - he would have included you, Nandita, I'm sure, except I hadn't introduced you two and he didn't have your email address. So we've got to definitely correct that, you two are gonna be big fans of each other I know. But anyway, here's what Joshua wrote. Hi Dave and Alexandra. I loved listening to your conversation on World Population Balance, two friends I haven't met yet in person. I keep learning more and more through both of you. Thank you. Alexandra, I also watched your San Diego talk at last. I thought it was one of the best treatments of population I've seen. Are you or they going to make it more publicly available? I think more people seeing it would benefit everyone. And I know you saw that presentation and were pretty impressed with it, too, weren't you?
Nandita Bajaj 5:35
Yeah, I second Joshua's comment that it really was one of the more impressive, measured talks that I've seen on overpopulation. And the fact that it was being done at a university campus, to me, is is really impressive.
Dave Gardner 5:50
Yeah. So I know the link is a little bit obscure, but we'll put that in the show notes so it is available to the public. So thanks, Joshua.
Nandita Bajaj 5:57
And I'm looking forward to making a new friend.
Dave Gardner 5:59
We will make that happen.
Nandita Bajaj 6:01
And we're always up for feedback or topic requests, send an email to podcast@populationbalance.org.
Dave Gardner 6:08
All right, so that takes care of the preliminaries. Are you ready for Bill Rees?
Nandita Bajaj 6:11
Let's do it.
Dave Gardner 6:12
William Rees is a bioecologist, ecological economist, former Director and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, but best known as the originator and co-developer, with his graduate students, of Ecological Footprint Analysis. He and one of his former grad students, Mathis Wackernagel, wrote a book about it - Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Wackernagelwent on to found the Global Footprint Network in 2003. That organization annually estimates the biocapacity of each nation as well as its ecological footprint. And based on that data analysis each year, they tell us the date of Earth Overshoot Day, the day that we've already exhausted a year's worth of the Earth's renewable resource regenerative capacity. Rees has written and spoken extensively over the years about sustainability, science, and policy. In fact, he's probably sick of it by now. But but he gets it. And he explains it better than anyone I know. So I can't think of a better guest for the podcast as we approach Earth Overshoot Day for 2021, which is July 29th. Thanks for joining us, Bill.
William Rees 7:26
I'm delighted to be here, too.
Dave Gardner 7:27
So let's give people the basics. We may have some listeners who are just discovering some of this information, so I don't want to assume too much knowledge on the part of the listener, but at the same time, we're going to screen through this pretty quickly so that the advanced class doesn't get too bored. They probably know where the fast forward button is, too. So Earth Overshoot Day, it's earlier this year than last year. Last year, actually, it was delayed because the COVID shutdown around the world actually caused everybody to be a little bit lighter on the planet - we flew a whole lot less, our carbon emissions were down, our Amazon ordering was up but apparently not enough. Not enough to make up for that. But what do you two have to say about, what people need to know about Earth Overshoot Day?
William Rees 8:12
Well, it's a very critical day in the calendar, although hardly anyone outside of our kind of circle notices it. If you think that the planet Earth, the ecosphere, the living component of the planet, as a bank account, it produces itself so that every year you're getting a little bit of interest. And if you live on that interest, you can live sustainably indefinitely because you're not destroying the capital basis of your wealth. So if we think of the ecosphere as our fundamental wealth, it's the biological basis of our wellbeing, it produces a certain amount every year. And so long as human beings harvest their fair share of that, and the wealth remains intact, then we're sustainable. But overshoot implies that we are not only consuming what the Earth produces and can assimilate each year, but that we are overconsuming, so that fish stocks are falling, forests are declining, soils are being degraded, deserts are getting larger, and so on and so forth. So here we are growing the human enterprise by depleting the biophysical basis of our own existence and survival. That's what overshoot is. And I would say it's the fundamental definition of an unsustainable state.
Dave Gardner 9:28
Yeah, and that's kind of based on, well, the calculations especially that help Global Footprint Network determine Earth Overshoot Day each year are based on this concept of ecological footprint and carrying capacity. And let's give everybody a quick primer on that why don't we?
William Rees 9:43
Okay, well, first of all, the ecological footprint it's an idea actually I came up with as a ten-year-old. I was extremely fortunate as a youngster, not many get this-
Dave Gardner 9:54
You were a nerd!
William Rees 9:56
Well, no! I grew up in a farm, at least, in my early days. I had much of my youth spent on my grandparents farm along with several cousins. And we worked in the fields every day. And one day, during a grand country lunch, they were all grand country lunches, because we worked our butts off. But we would feed eight or ten or fourteen people in my grandmother's country porch. And we were sitting waiting for my grandfather to come in. I was just staring idly at my plate. And I realized, as a kid, that every single thing on that plate I had had some hand in growing. Okay, so I was weeding these vegetables or do whatever. And I don't know why it was, I guess it was what you call an epiphany. But that feeling hit me like nothing I'd ever experienced in life before. It was as if somebody pulled the chair out from under me. And I suddenly, as a ten-year-old, felt intimately connected to Earth. And we all know the old expression you are what you eat. Well, it's absolutely utterly true, of course. I mean, when we consume food, we convert it into us. And anyway, that experience was the foundation of my going on through university, right to my PhD in ecology, trying to understand the connection between humans and the planet. And at one point, I started reading a bit about economics and came across this concept of unlimited growth. And I just couldn't understand how anyone who had any sense of connectivity to the ecosphere could believe that we can have unlimited growth. So I set about to come up with a method by which we could compare human demand for the, what we would now call, I don't like the term, but the goods and services of nature, as if nature is there just for us, but how can we compare human demand for those goods and services with the available supply? And the idea was that if I could just measure the main basket of goodies that everybody consumes in a year, and trace all of those things back to their origins in the landscape, so clearly our food and fiber like the cotton shirt, and so on, we can go right back to the landscape. So if you told me how much food of different qualities and characteristics you use, and how much fiber you use every year, we can follow that through the production system, and we use a kind of input/output analysis framework, right back to the land base necessary to produce it. And then there's the waste flows. Now, this is very complicated. And the major one we've traced is carbon dioxide. But in ecosystems, everything recycles, so that the waste stream is just as important as the resource stream. And the one thing we decided to look at, because it was readily available, was carbon dioxide, which by the way, is the single greatest waste product by weight of industrial economies, most people aren't aware of that. And we're gonna make a long story short, we then could add all of these things together, and answer what I call the first question of human ecology. And this was really the one my ten-year-old self started pondering, and that is, how much of the Earth's surface is dedicated to supporting just me in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed? So every person, whether you are conscious of it or not, is connected to the earth, now through commerce, by a flow of goods and services and waste products to a fixed amount of area entirely dedicated to supporting just you. Nobody else can eat the rice, or the wheat, or the grain, or whatever it is that you consume. Nobody else can use the same carbon sink that you do. So everyone is competing with everyone else for the limited biocapacity on the planet. So to make a long story short, we can now measure human demand. And we convert this all into what we call global average hectares, the number of hectares of global average productivity needed to support any population, an individual, a town, a country or the world. And we can compare that to available supplies. So just for example, most countries today live on imports. They have their domestic carrying capacity, or biocapacity, but because of globalization and trade, we've been allowed to vastly exceed domestic biocapacity. Even the European Commission a few years ago, admitted after one of our studies, that Europe uses probably three times as much productive land and water outside its own domestic territories, as is contained within Europe. And that's the nature of the ecological footprint. We can compare demand with supply. And when we raise that to the global scale, this is where the overshoot onset comes in. Because human demand right now is something like twenty billion average hectares, whereas the Earth only has about twelve or thirteen billion average hectares, so we're sixty to 70% over the top.
Dave Gardner 14:55
So it's a good thing we're importing the rest of that from Mars, right?
William Rees 14:58
Well, that's, clearly, if we were looking at a nation, that's what we would say. But Earth doesn't trade with other planets. So the way we can continue to exist, once we're in a state of overshoot, is simply by drawing down the accumulated natural capital. So fish stocks have built up over hundreds or thousands of years, forests have soils that have taken tens of thousands of years to develop. So there's a huge, if you like, natural capital bank out there, and we now far exceed our withdrawals of the interest and we're now using the capital. And you can do that for a long time. Look, if you had a million dollars in the bank at 5% say, that that's an unheard of interest rate today, but nonetheless, it's $50,000 a year. And if you were content to live on fifty thousand a year, you could do so indefinitely because your bank will keep producing that amount. But as soon as you take sixty thousand, or seventy thousand, or eighty thousand, well, you can do that for a number of years. But every year, your capital is producing less and less real interest. And at some point, you come up NSF and that's it. Game over. And I think that's the track we are on globally, right now. Humankind is using up the biophysical basis of its own existence, we're destroying the natural capital upon which we depend, we can do that right up until the point that we can't. And then you're in big trouble.
Nandita Bajaj 16:27
Wow. Thank you for that fantastic explanation. I can tell you are a teacher, and also that you've studied both economics and ecology, because you manage to translate ecological footprint in terms of economic terms that made it so easy to grasp. I've known about the ecological footprint for a really long time, but I don't think I've heard such a wonderful explanation before.
William Rees 16:56
Can I just add one point that you had raised? And I think it's really important that people understand that right now, we're running the world, essentially using an economic model called neoliberal economics. And this is a model of reality that, listen very carefully, contains zero useful information about the ecosystems or even the social systems with which the real economy interacts in the real world. So it's a stunner that neoliberal economics can't even recognize overshoot, because one of the fundamental underpinnings of neoliberal economics is something called the near perfect substitutability. The near perfect substitutability of the factors of production. So if you think that to produce anything in the economy, you need labor, you need capital investment, you need machinery, you need knowledge, then the idea is that knowledge can substitute for machinery, we get better and better a more efficiently, or that manmade capital, manufactured things, can substitute for natural capital, the goods and services provided by nature. And so if you believe those kinds of things, you'll also believe another point about neoliberal economics, the economy is essentially a separate system from the ecosphere, then you've got two conditions that enable you to believe growth can continue indefinitely. So there's no connection that's important between the two systems, because human ingenuity can substitute for nature, therefore, and several economists have said this, the overuse of nature is of no consequence. Incredible. But that's the world in which we live right now.
Dave Gardner 18:42
So unfortunately, more journalists and policymakers are paying attention to the neoliberal economists than they are to people like you, Bill. So I think it begs an important question, maybe are we in overshoot on neoliberal economists or are they making those faster than we're losing them? Because I'm thinking do we need, you know, we may need to wait for them to die off before we can have some real intelligent guidance going?
William Rees 19:06
Well, I forget who it was, but a famous physicist said that new ideas don't take hold because they are better ideas. They take hold because the old generation dies out, and the new generation rises to replace them. So our conceptual models become stuck. And once they're embedded, and people have a stake in in defending them, and so on and so forth, they become exceedingly difficult to get rid of. And that's a major problem confronting us. Herman Daly, one of our most outstanding in fact, I would say, the father of ecological economics, has said that, it may be that we're in a dire strait. We have a circumstance in which most of the economics departments in the world are simply reproducing exactly the same quality of economists that have helped us create the problem in the first place. And by the way, I don't want to blame economists entirely here or even economic models, human beings are an evolved species. A lot of people don't want to hear this. But it's true. And we are survivors. And one of the ways, well, two of the ways that we've learned to survive, is by occupying all accessible habitats, every species will do this. If we discovered a big new island off the coast of North America, do you think we'd all stand up and say, you know, we've really screwed up everywhere else. So let's just leave that one alone. Not a chance, you'd be in there, planting flags, and companies would be establishing their rights to the mineral resources, and so on, and so forth. So humans have a natural propensity to expand to fill all available habitats. And we just happen to have the biggest geographic range of any species on the planet except maybe for the rats and mice that follow us around. And we also have a tendency to use up all available resources. But again, we have a leg up over other species because of technology, we do have technological ingenuity, which means that availability in terms of resources is constantly being upgraded or redefined. So that mineral resources that twenty years ago were considered completely uneconomic, today are accessible because we have new technologies that can get at them. So right now, as we're confronting a major mineral crisis on the planet, with the increase in electric vehicles, and wind and solar, and so on, which make huge demands on our mining capacity, people are saying, "No problem, we'll we'll go for the nodules at the bottom of the sea. We'll start mining the salts that are spewed out by volcanoes." So we're scraping the bottom of the Earthly barrel in a desperate attempt to keep the machinery of the neoliberal capitalistic economy going. So in a sense, we live in the worst of all possible worlds from the perspective of sustainability because we have a natural survival instinct, this propensity to expand and to use what resources we have, combined with an ideological mindset that reinforces rather than counteracts this natural tendency. And that's our problem.
Nandita Bajaj 22:14
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 22:15
By the way, I want to mention that we're going to be talking about a lot of interesting things and some great data sources, etc. So we'll put links in the show notes to all of this. I'm sure you'll want to follow up on some of those if you're listening. If we set aside this too large subset of economists that are in the neoliberal camp, and take the rest of us, is there any serious debate or doubt about whether we're in overshoot? I think Global Footprint Network tells us we're making about 1.7 times the demands that the planet can renewably cover. How sure are we have that?
William Rees 22:49
Oh, I think it depends on what you look at, Dave, because there are a huge array of resources out there. And some are over-exploited, some are not, some are almost extinct. So that 70% figure is a kind of an aggregate, a lot of it is the waste capacity that is clearly overshot in terms of carbon dioxide assimilation. But the bigger question is, who has ever heard of overshoot? I'd be willing to guess half your audience is not familiar with the term. In fact, I don't think of a single economist, or rather, a politician, who's ever mentioned the term. So it's not out there at all. And this is kind of a reflection of the limited capacity of the human mind to cope with complexity. And notice how in the last couple of years, we went from where climate change was a big deal, everybody was focusing on climate change, and then the pandemic came along and bingo, everybody focused on on the pandemic. And now we're getting back to climate change a bit because of the huge heat wave that just ran through my part of the world. And we we've seen temperatures around here, unheard of in the recorded record, and apparently going back to hundreds, if not thousands of years. So the human mind is fixed, in a sense, on very simple things. And there's a good reason for that. We evolved in small groups, small tribes in small areas, where we didn't have to deal with anything much more complex than where the next meal was coming from. So that's where our brains are in terms of this capacity to cope with extreme complexity. And yet, we now live in a world, instead of a tribe of fifty or sixty people, we live in cities of fifty million people, for goodness sakes, at least on the extreme side. We live in a world of overlapping complex systems, each of which is so large and incomprehensible that no person can really get a mind around it. I mean, who understands how the internet really works, or the global economy, or the transportation system, or the climate, or the ecosphere. And yet these things are all overlapping and interacting in ways that are beyond the human capacity to comprehend what's going on. And yet we keep thinking in these reductionist, limited terms, one variable at a time. So let me emphasize here that climate change is not the problem. The pandemic is not the problem, fisheries collapses are not the problem, desertification is not the problem. They are all symptoms of overshoot. Overshoot is the, I call it the metaproblem. And everything else is a subsystem or a subset of the problem of overshoot. You cannot solve climate change without dealing with overshoot. And just underscore that, if you think of all the ways we're attempting to approach it, through wind power, solar power, electric vehicles, carbon capture and storage, all of these things are designed, basically to keep the machinery going. In other words, to maintain the current state of overshoot. Each of them involves massive capital investment, you can go online and find any number of websites saying that the future is worth trillions of dollars in new investment into new technologies to defeat climate change, and so on and so forth. And yet, this is completely self-defeating, because even if they were successful, and by the way, none of those things can be successful in beating climate change, but even if they were, we'd simply be in a situation where we would have more and more people consuming more and more of everything else, and overshoot would persist, and we'd still go down. You've got to handle all of these things through overshoot, not through each of them individually.
William Rees 22:50
I mean, it's brilliant, number one, that you've tied it all together and addressed one of the main arguments that comes up, that climate change is, you know, the most important thing going on for us, or desertification, or some of the other things. And I appreciate that you are talking about them all being a subset of a much larger problem, which with that being overshoot. You've also expressed that to really save ourselves, that we have to adopt an ecocentric lens. How are we to get out of the overshoot condition?
William Rees 27:06
Well, if you think of the definition of overshoot, it means that humans are consuming more than nature produces and dumping more wastes way above the capacity of natural things to assimilate and recycle that. The only way out of overshoot is less production and less consumption. So it means a much smaller economy and far fewer people. I suppose you could have reduced the economy completely, but with this many people, there wouldn't be sufficiency for any of them. I think you've got two issues at stake here, the ecological footprint, the global footprint, is a product of population times average per capita consumption. Now, the simple reality is that maybe 20-25% of the world's people already occupy most of the ecological space on Earth. So we have to face the egregiously inappropriately wide range in our consumption here, the rich take most of it, and the poor are just groveling in the dirt. That's an unacceptable, completely immoral a circumstance. So we've got to talk about redistribution of income and wealth and the capacity to access access the world's resources. But we have to also talk about reducing the total population. Because, for example, Western material standards, if everybody on Earth lived like North Americans do, then we would need the ecological equivalent of at least four additional planet Earths. And that's simply not in the cards. So you cannot deal with the situation and have everybody living at a reasonably high-end material lifestyle on the single planet that we've got, particularly considering that we've already greatly reduced its long-term carrying capacity. People forget that we've got fewer than, less than half the soil we used to have in North America, okay? In just a hundred or so years of commercial agriculture, we've lost the most of the nutrients, most of the natural organic matter, and much of our agricultural today is really field hydroponics. We fertilize the hell out of the landscape. And that's what keeps the plants or crops going. Human beings ten thousand years ago comprised less than 1% of the total mammalian biomass, biomass of mammals on Earth. Today, and even though the biomass is increased because of human productivity, humans are about thirty-two or 33% of the total biomass, but our domestic stock, the cattle, sheep, horses, and so on, pigs, that we use comprise another sixty-two or three percent. So that humans plus their domestic animals now comprise ninty-five to 98% of the mammalian biomass on the planet, leaving all of wild nature with only, you know, two or three or 4% at most. And it doesn't matter where we look, that's what we're seeing. I call this the competitive displacement of nonhuman life from the planet, because of the continuous growth in human numbers, because of the continuous demand by people for the energy flows through ecosystems, which we should be sharing with millions of other species, and the occupation of habitat. Every additional human being means less of nature. So when you hear a politician say, and I've heard it from every significant Canadian politician, that there's no conflict between the maintenance of the environment and the growth of the economy, it's sheer, utter, ignorant nonsense. Every growth in the material economy means less available for the rest of the natural world. There is an inherent and unavoidable conflict between the growth of the human enterprise and the conservation of nature. That's what overshoot means.
Dave Gardner 30:58
Come on, tell us how you really feel. Now, I know you said it but I want to make sure it didn't get lost in the fire hose that you just delivered information and perspective to us by, if someone's uncomfortable, if someone really likes their three houses and their private jet and they don't really want to scale that back, they want to say, let's just work on the population part of the problem, or if somebody is really uncomfortable talking about birth rates and overpopulation, and so they just want to get everybody to scale back their overconsumption, is that even an option for us to just pick one?
William Rees 31:32
Not in this world. You know, way back in the early nineties, I was part of the what were called the Prep Comm Meetings in Canada, preparing the national, I guess, position paper to be taken forward to the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development back in 1992. And there's been a couple since then, of course. And I presented some of our early ecofootprint findings. And people were quite astonished at what we were showing at this meeting. But I was taken aside by the organizers afterwards and said, "You know, that's very impressive. But you're raising the question of population and consumption here. And what you've got to understand is that we can't talk about population or consumption at this meeting, not in direct terms, okay?" Because apparently, there was a kind of under the table agreement at the UN, that if the first world countries didn't point to the third world countries because of their high levels of population growth, then the developing nations wouldn't point out that the first world nations were vastly overconsuming, taking vastly more than their fair share of the planet's resources. So here was the first major conference, and by the way, the same thing was repeated ten years later, I had exactly the same kind of experience. Here we had the first major international conference set up to talk about the relationship between environment and development. And the two drivers were not even on the table, not directly, you could kind of bring them in indirectly through the back door. But you could not directly talk about the need for population control, you could not directly talk about the need to reduce consumption and focus on redistribution in the first world. You see, we've got to understand something very simple here. I think I mentioned earlier that Earth has perhaps thirteen billion or twelve billion rather, twelve billion hectares of ecologically productive land and water. Well, it's almost eight billion people. So there's just a little over one and a half hectare per capita, if you were going to live on your fair, what I call the fair Earth share. Some people hate this term, because it implies political things they don't want to talk about. But if you were to live on your fair Earth share, you'd be entitled to the productivity and assimilative capacity of just a hectare and a half. So that's a little over what, about four acres. Okay? Now, each North American today needs somewhere around six or eight hectares, in that range. So we in North America use four or five times our fair share of the Earth's output and assimilative capacity. Europeans use two or three times their fair share, three times I suppose is closer to the mark. So again, I think the president of the Canadian Population Institute and Madeline Weld, if I'm not mistaken, once said, "The only way you can ignore the population problem in the context of sustainability is for the poor to remain poor. Because if everybody rose to even average material living standards, which are inadequate by our standards, we'd need two additional planets." Okay, so right now, the average footprint on Earth is about 2.8 hectares, something like that. All you've got to go on is about 1.7, 1.8. So we're in a situation where you've got to focus, not only on gross overconsumption by the already wealthy, those three houses, that's an absurdity when there's other people who live in the dirt. If you have three cars, that's an absurdity when there's other people who don't have a bicycle. We've got a situation in which we simply cannot, if you wish to survive, I mean, we can if you want to just carry on the way we are, but it means the whole system comes down. But if you want to survive, we have to focus on redistribution, we have to focus on what I call the absolute reduction in energy and material throughput in the economy, it has to come down by fifty or sixty or 70%. And we have to talk about redistributing wealth and reducing population. That's that's our solution. And it's all possible, we could do these things - we choose not to.
William Rees 31:54
I didn't ask about a third possible solution, technology, so I want to give you a chance to address that. But let's keep that brief because you brought up population, and this is the Overpopulation Podcast, so I know we want to return to that subject.
William Rees 36:00
Well, I mean, again, if you believe in the one of the primary underpinnings of neoliberal economics and technologies is primary, that's it. Primary technology is how we have achieved our level of dominance on Earth. Look at it this way, Dave, it took about three-hundred thousand years of human existence to get to one billion people in about 1820 thereabouts. Since then, in one fifteen-hundredths as much time, we added another seven billion to where we are now. So that's the nature of exponential growth, it's absolutely explosive. 350,000 years, one billion, two hundred years, bang, another seven billion or so. How come? Because of technology and fossil fuel. Fossil fuel gave us the means by which we access all the other resources and produce all the food necessary to support this explosive growth of human people, of human population. Keep in mind that humans are like other species capable of exponential growth. But through 99.9% of human history, our populations have been maintained in check by natural negative feedback in our ecosystems: disease, famine, resource shortages, and so on and so forth. So with technology, we've been able to relieve the human population from the negative feedback, allowing it to express fully its capacity for exponential growth. And hence, we've seen a two hundred year explosion of human numbers. Now, oddly, only ten generations of people have experienced sufficient growth and sufficient technological change even to notice. So thousands of generations, you know, if you grew up eight hundred years ago and lived to be a hundred, nothing happened. You probably didn't even move from your own village, right? You died within twenty kilometers of where you were born, you were using the same technology at death as you your parents were when you were born. Well, that's the norm. Yet we, our generation and two or three before us, it's only since 1950 that growth became a preoccupation of governments, oddly. So it's only been about seventy years where we've made a fetish of growth as the solution to all of our problems, right? So that's only three generations of people which consider it to be a policy initiative. But the point is, what we take to be normal is really the single most anomalous or abnormal period in human history. Think about it, what we take to be normal, the two or 3% per year growth, which the economist would think is minimal to keep things happy, is abnormal in the extreme. That's a doubling of every, in any twenty-three to thirty-five years. So if the world is now overfull, and we want to keep growing at the same two or 3% per year, in the next half century, we will have blown it. The Earth simply cannot sustain, because more consumption will take place in the next doubling, than in all previous doubling since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Think about that. That's what exponential growth means. It's a constant doubling time. But whatever happens in the course of each doubling time is greater than the sum of whatever happened in all previous doubling times.
Dave Gardner 39:20
So you're saying since technology kind of unleashed that, that rather than being our friend, it really is a big part of the problem.
William Rees 39:26
It absolutely is part of the problem. And yet, we have all of our major environmental groups and governments talking about technological efficiency, we have to get more efficient in using resources. But what history shows is, the more efficient we get at using resources, the more we consume, because prices go down, salaries go up. People have more money chasing cheaper goods and services and consumption rises. So the last fifty years, listen to this, I mean, these numbers are stunning to many people who don't understand exponential growth. One half of all the fossil fuel ever used by humankind has been used since 1990. Thirty years! Did you hear me? One half of all the consumption of fossil fuels since 1990. I was born in 1943 - 90% of the fossil fuel ever used by human beings was consumed in my lifetime. And if we double it again, then more fossil fuel would be used. Now there's not enough to go around, but if you could keep this going, more would be used in the next forty years than we've used to date. So this is a situation which simply cannot biophysically continue. So I've recently written that humankind is currently in what I call the plague phase of a one off population outburst. Now, in nature, many species have exactly the same biological predisposition to expand as humans, so if they happen to encounter an exceptionally rich environment, or there's an unusually productive season, they'll go through a population outburst. But then, negative feedback sets in, they destroy the food source or predators start nailing them because there's so many of them around, or disease spreads through the population and they crash. So when there is a population outbreak in nature, inevitably negative feedback kicks in and slams that population back into quote, unquote, normal conditions. Well, why are humans any different? Does anybody really think that on a planet that's already 70% in overshoot we can continue to grow at the rate that we have, that have brought us to this point? I think not. So I think that within the next, well certainly within this century, we will either come to grips with her biophysical reality, and engineer a controlled, planned economic contraction and population reduction, or nature will simply impose the inevitable negative feedbacks. And that's what's happening. That's what climate change is. That's what the pandemic is. These are negative feedbacks, symptomatic of overshoot, of nature starting to get upset, and I don't mean it in an emotional sense, that nature will come at us. I just read a report yesterday suggesting that at current rates of change, we can expect one billion climate and environmental refugees by mid-century. What is the world going to be like? Right now we're coping with a few hundred thousand people coming into the US or Europe from South America and Africa, respectively, and we're having conniptions over it. But wait til there's a billion people fleeing parts of the world that have become uninhabitable because of climate change, or collapsed ecosystems, or whatever it might be. And that's only the beginning. There will be sea level rise, some I'll say as much as two or three meters by the end of this century. Right away, you've lost most of our coastal cities, and many of them, like Shanghai, are cities of twenty-six, thirty million people. So it's not hard to imagine more than a billion, two billion people, three, fleeing disaster zones, by the end of the century. This is a recipe for geopolitical catastrophe. And once you have that, then food supplies are disrupted, normal economic production is disrupted, and the whole system goes into a chaotic slump. So we really have to think through what we're about here.
William Rees 43:29
Yeah, I think what you're illuminating here, you know, in terms of the social justice issues that are bound to unleash in the next ten, fifteen years, not that they don't already exist.
William Rees 43:29
Yeah, they sure do.
Nandita Bajaj 43:42
Yeah. It adds to the frustration in terms of the number of people, progressive, environmental conservationists who deny that overpopulation is an issue, and that we should not be talking about it and perpetuate the taboo. Because it fails to understand that overpopulation currently, in combination with our consumption patterns, is a major social justice issue. And like you were quoting Madeline Weld, it means in order for us to keep going at this rate, we must have the poor remain poor. And that is a completely unreasonable, unjust expectation to not have other people rise to our level of standard. So you know, I appreciate the science that you're bringing to this and also the sociological issue that you're tying to the issue. How do you get past the taboo of speaking about this dichotomy between population and consumption?
William Rees 44:52
Well you don't get past it, you just keep butting your head against it. So I've never been shy about this, but I have had my share of nasty commentators, and I gave a talk or a week ago, and I've been nailed over the internet privately, just in emails, telling me I'm a fascist or a racist, or whatever it might be. And that's always the fear of anyone who raises population as an issue, because the largest growth rates are among people in non-white countries. And hence, if you raise the issue, you're labeled a racist. But we have a huge problem here, because it again, it's that kind of political correctness-
Nandita Bajaj 44:52
Yeah.
William Rees 44:53
That forces us to deny the existence of a real problem. Most mainstream environmental organizations have, frankly copped out. They've been purchased by the corporate sector that provides them with the funds to keep going. And they support something like the Green New Deal, or even threefifty.org. It's all about wind power, and solar power, and any other technology that you can come up with, to keep the system going in more or less in its present state. They're not talking about redistribution, or more equitable lifestyles in any serious way. Unless it's through growth. I mean, let's face it, you see, growth is our big excuse. If I'm rich, I'm quite happy to say, "Let the economy grow and that gives wealth to other people." Unfortunately, as the economy grows, I think if you look at the United States, I don't remember the number for Canada, but in the United States, I've read recently that something like 80% of the increase in national wealth goes to the top 1%, it might be the top 10%, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is that the benefits of growth are not trickling down to the poor people, they're accumulating at the top among those who already have it. So the whole system is rigged to increase the egregious and rapidly increasing income gap between the wealthy and the poor. And if you read carefully in this domain, you will come across a book such as The Spirit Level by who was it, Richard Wilkinson, and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. And what it argues and shows with marvelous statistical analyses and diagrams, is that the greatest, I suppose, indicator of population health is equity. So if we take a group of relatively poor countries, which nevertheless have a very small gap between rich and poor, the average level of health, of social wellbeing, even of expressed wellbeing, is much higher than in much richer countries where there's a big income gap. Okay. So what makes people unhappy is the sense that they're being cheated in some way, that somebody else has rigged the system and managed to get way ahead of the game and are suppressing the rest of us. So equity is an extremely important thing. And if you look just for one little bit of evidence, the United States is one of the most inequitable countries in the OECD countries. But it also has one of the worst rates of murder and suicide and drug addiction and alcoholism, and so on and so forth. So that it just indicative, the major indicators of population health correlate positively with equity and negatively with inequity. So the more unequal a country is, the worse the quality of life is, and the worse their population health indicators are. So this is by no means a trivial issue. Social equity, social justice, is a primary constituent of achieving a sustainable, steady-state economy, in which those people who are in that economy and can live more or less equally, not totally equally, but more or less equally, within the carrying capacity of the planet, within the productive capacity of nature. And that's what we've got to strive for.
Dave Gardner 49:05
Although if someone just listens to the last two minutes of this, they're going to think, okay, it's the inequity so let's ignore overpopulation and focus on that. So if you just tuned in, you need to go back and listen to the rest of the podcast.
William Rees 49:17
Yeah, exactly. No, we're overpopulated, we're overconsuming, and we're grossly inequitable. And you can't solve any of these without solving the others. Again, it goes back to our statement that climate change is not the fundamental issue today. Climate change is a symptom of an issue called overshoot. If you want to fix climate change, you address overshoot, you reduce consumption, you reduce population, you reduce carbon emissions in the process. What we're doing now, everything we're doing now increases carbon emissions. Okay, so I just read a report this morning, as a matter of fact, talking about how by 2040, a little more than half the new cars on the road will be EVs. Well, fair enough. That means half of the new cars on the road in 2040 will be internal combustion cars. But then all the cars that have been built in the previous ten years will also be mostly internal combustion engines. So in the end, there's more carbon going into the atmosphere than ever before from vehicle production because all the mining, refining, and so on, of the rare metals required for EVs increases emissions. It takes more fossil fuel to build the battery of an EV than the entire car if it's an internal combustion engine car. Plus you could drive the internal combustion engine car for a couple of years before the EV catches up. So a world full of EVs is no better than a world full of internal combustion engine cars, especially since we have to use fossil fuel to build the damn things. By the way, we also have to use fossil fuel to make wind turbines and solar panels, and all of that. All the mining, all of the transportation, all the refining, all the manufacturing is done with fossil fuels. And many of those processes use high heat technologies, which electricity cannot provide. So it's a loop. And by the way, wind turbines typically last, in reality, about fifteen years. You're very lucky if it goes twenty, then they all have to be replaced. So there's nothing renewable about this. It's simply replaceable. Same with solar panels. They may last twenty-five or thirty years, but by then their productivity is down, they're becoming a major part of the waste train. So we've got technologies that are supposedly saving us that are having to be replaced every twenty or thirty years using fossil fuels, and aren't really addressing the major issue. They can produce electricity, but most of the major uses of fossil fuel in our economy don't use electricity. Aircraft transportation is an example, but so is highway transportation, so is marine transportation. So is, as I mentioned, industrial high heat. So these are no solutions at all, they're just digging the hole that we've created for ourselves a little bit deeper.
Dave Gardner 52:07
Well, crap.
William Rees 52:08
Well, crap.
Dave Gardner 52:08
It's just a good thing it's Friday and close to happy hour.
William Rees 52:12
Well, listen, as I said, the simple solution is to reduce. If you're overfilling the bucket, stop filling the bucket.
Nandita Bajaj 52:20
I want to take you on a on a side tangent, if you don't mind, since you've you've brought up the fossil fuel industry and you also mentioned that the carbon footprint takes a giant share of the ecological footprint.
William Rees 52:34
It does.
Nandita Bajaj 52:35
And so there's, I don't know if you're aware, but there's a new narrative emerging that the term carbon footprint is a bad word, and that reducing our individual footprint is basically buying into a propaganda that was created by British Petroleum to distract people from the real problem, which is the industry. So I would, of course, I don't believe that. I am very much about individual action. You know, a lot of what we do starts with individual action, as far as I'm concerned. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this propaganda.
William Rees 53:12
Well, look here. This is a world so full of conspiracy theories of one kind or another, it's a little hard to dig your way through it. But look, every one of us is part of this big machine. It's not fossil fuel companies. It's not the automobile companies. Sure they propagandize us with advertising, but you can choose not to go out and buy this car, or you could get a smaller one, or you whatever. The point is, we're all part of this gambit. So yes, individual actions are extremely important. But I will say this, and there's been some studies to prove this, if individuals took all the steps they could as individuals, it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference. Somewhere between two and 10% of our carbon emissions would be reduced, okay?
Dave Gardner 53:57
Oh, no, really?
William Rees 53:58
Yeah, no, well, because showering with a friend, or using a car one day less a week, the kind of thing that you hear don't make that big a difference. The heavy lifting is stuff like huge carbon taxes that inhibit people from using fossil fuels. The heavy lifting is from massive investment in public transit, so people abandon their vehicles.
Nandita Bajaj 54:25
Right.
William Rees 54:26
Heavy lifting means massive retrofits of our buildings, and so on, to ensure that they're not overusing energy for either heating or cooling. Look, we know how to build, go online and learn about passive house construction. It's 80% more energy efficient than what we're doing on average in North America, even with some of our green building technologies of one kind or another. So we know how to do these things. But the incentives aren't there to force us to doing them. Okay? So, yes, again, let me just reiterate. What you do as an individual counts, but not nearly as much as what we do as a collective. This is a collective problem. It's a manifestation of a fundamental worldview that is articulated through the economic and political processes of which we are all a part. And while we can change our own little niche in that, the real change has to come at that macro level, where the circumstances in which society operates prohibits the kinds of behaviors that are destroying the planet for all of us. And that can't be done except through collective action by governments on our behalf. I'm sorry to say, because they're certainly not on our side. Most governments today are in the pockets of the industrial sector. That part of your earlier question I can endorse. I mean, the fossil fuel companies knew decades ago that fossil fuels were going to change the climate. But they suppress the information.
Nandita Bajaj 55:57
Right.
Dave Gardner 55:58
Well, I hate to end on that note.
Nandita Bajaj 55:59
Is there anything you feel, Bill, that we haven't asked you that you'd love to share?
William Rees 56:05
Oh, not really, except look. People say, "You're just doomsday!" I've been called Dr. Doom, Dr. Gloom, a whole bunch of other nastier terms. All I ask people to do is to self-inform, okay? If I'm wrong about the kinds of statements I make, there's plenty of data out there to support it, you can discover that for yourself. Don't give up, take your individual actions, they are important because they serve as examples for others. But we need to become politically engaged in ways that we never have been before. This is the future of our species, and of many thousands of other species on the planet that we're talking about here. And if, I suppose if you look back through history, the major social changes take place. I mean, where we're talking about a major shift in the way things are done come when there are literally millions of people in the street indicating dissatisfaction with the current status quo. Sometimes it's out and out revolution. But certainly civil disobedience is really important. If you're in a situation that is life threatening, and that's the kind of situation we are in, and the people who are supposedly acting on our behalves, our governments, are simply not taking full advantage of the information at their disposal, or they're ignoring it because they're actually serving the interests of the corporate elites, for example. Just be politically aware and act accordingly.
William Rees 57:15
And being politically aware and voting is an individual action.
William Rees 57:38
That is, of course.
Nandita Bajaj 57:39
We vote with our values. And so, if there is enough of a critical mass that starts to believe that this is a problem, we ideally will be able to dictate the terms of our policies.
William Rees 57:52
I think that's exactly right. But there's a huge if there.
Nandita Bajaj 57:55
Right.
William Rees 57:55
That is, if we can get enough critical mass going. I think it was Churchill who once said, "The worst thing you can learn about democracy is to speak for five minutes with the average voter," because what we're talking about isn't penetrating. This isn't a mainstream vehicle that you and I are speaking on right now.
Nandita Bajaj 58:15
Yeah.
William Rees 58:15
And until this kind of discussion goes mainstream, the vast majority of people will be getting their information from sources that are dedicated to distorting reality. People simply aren't aware yet. Are you familiar with the term the social construction of reality?
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:21
Yeah.
William Rees 58:32
See human beings are kind of unique in that we don't live in the world as it comes. We socially construct lenses through which we view reality. And then we act out of those lenses as if it were reality. So most people today who are embedded in this belief in growth and economic wellbeing and the individualism, you know, that's a big deal. The problem with individualism, per se, is that it offloads all of responsibility on individuals, when in fact, it's up higher up that really has to get into play. Both have to work together. It's a top-up, bottoms-down situation. But we're now locked into a situation. And since nineteen, roughly 1970, there's been an active force afoot in the world, whereby the vested interests have been socially constructing a new dialogue, which dismisses the concept of the public good, the common good. It's a kind of Ayn Randian world in which we're all just individuals pounding our way through, and damn everything else. I'm sorry, that's the path to destruction. So we have to understand that when you talk about creating a sufficient, critical mass to move forward, we're really talking about creating a new social construction of our perception of reality and then we act from that. How different would things be if in our schools today from kindergarten on, every child was taught that you are a part of the ecosystem, you depend for your survival on the health of other organisms in that ecosystem. You should not destroy any element of that ecosystem needlessly. Take what you need for self-preservation, of course, every species does that. But beyond that, you become a problem. Instead, children are taught today that humans aren't part of nature. That's this notion of human exceptionalism. That technology has mastery over all things. Our religions teach us that we are supposed to produce and multiply and subdue the earth. That's the worldview from which we operate. And once you are operating from that notion of human exceptionalism and human dominance, it's the dominance of men over nature, of men over other men, of men over women, and so on and so forth. That intellectual mindset is completely self-destructive over the longer term, especially if you're starting from a position of overshoot. Overshoot started back in about 1960s, seventy, in that range. And that's when this new social construction of the corporate age took hold. Eisenhower warned the United States of the military industrial complex, and just about everything he warned about has come to pass. And that's what we're caught up in right now.
Dave Gardner 1:01:22
Brilliant perspective.
William Rees 1:01:22
Be self-aware.
Dave Gardner 1:01:24
Really appreciate it.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:25
I know you've retired from teaching ten years ago, but I just felt like I was sitting in your university class and it was a humbling experience.
William Rees 1:01:33
Well, I thank you for that.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:35
We usually close with an inspirational quote, and it's my turn for this episode. And I've chosen this quote from Majora Carter, and American urban revitalization strategist and public radio host from the South Bronx area of New York City. Carter fights to quote unquote, green the ghetto, encouraging urban renewal, green collar jobs, and environmental justice. Majora Carter's TED Talk was one of the first six publicly released talks to launch the ted.com website in 2006. And she's child-free. So here's the quote, poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy, we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change, is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.
Dave Gardner 1:02:34
That's a good one. That is good. And Majora is maybe not a stranger to the listeners of this podcast because she was a guest on the Overpopulation Podcast not too far back. We'll include a link in the show notes to that, too. Was this from a recent talk? Or is this an older quote?
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:50
I think it was one of the more recent ones, I just find it's so fitting given what Bill Rees was speaking about today in terms of why our overshoot condition is such a major social justice issue. And this is something that often gets left out of the picture, is what we are doing in terms of environmental justice to marginalized communities now and of the future. And I completely agree with what she's saying and what Bill was trying to say, is that our economy is so premised on the wrong kind of variables.
Dave Gardner 1:03:27
Yep, really important point that there is no way we can right the injustices the way they need to be righted if we don't do something about getting our population in check. And thank you for that quote, Majora. Well, that's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Thanks as always, Nandita, for the planet saving work that you're doing at World Population Balance.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:49
Thank you, Dave. And don't forget to recommend this podcast to friends, family, colleagues, journalists, and elected representatives.
Dave Gardner 1:03:57
Great idea, I believe I will. And visit worldpopulationbalance.org to learn more about how we can solve world overpopulation. And while you're there, click on that donate button and make sure World Population Balance can keep up the great webinars, this podcast, lawsuits, and other fine sustainable population initiatives.
Nandita Bajaj 1:04:18
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj reminding you that we can all make a dent in this movement by choosing small footprint families, whatever family means to you.
