Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism

We chat with population ecologist, co-creator of the ecological footprint analysis, and one of the world’s best big-picture ecological thinkers, Dr. Bill Rees. Bill explains how our blind faith in human exceptionalism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics fooled us into disregarding ecological limits and brought us into a state of extreme overshoot. These same false stories enabled humans to use cheap abundant energy to convert nature and nonhumans into human artifacts, and rich nations to exploit the resources of other countries, while degrading the biophysical basis of existence.

Continuing on this trajectory but with green-tinted glasses will be catastrophic. Nothing short of a co-operative, well-planned, orderly contraction of the human enterprise – economic activity, production, consumption, and population – is needed to align with Earth’s productive and assimilative capacity. But, as Bill concludes – that which is “ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, while the politically feasible is ecologically catastrophic”. Can communities like ours, rooted in ecological wisdom and natural limits, act as lifeboats paddling strongly away from the eddies of the sinking Titanic to prepare for a post-industrial world?

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• William Rees

• Canadian Society for Ecological Economics

• Post Carbon Institute

• The REAL Green New Deal

• University of Nottingham Rights Lab

• William Rees Articles

• Testimonials

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• TRANSCRIPT

  William Rees 0:00

  I think it's really interesting to look historically at this whole question of growth, because for all intents and purposes, there was none for 250,000 years. In just the last 200 years, we've seen more change than in the previous entire history of human beings. Only 10 generations of human beings out of thousands have experienced this phenomenon of growth - growth in population, growth in technology - in sufficient quantity so that they would notice in the course of their lifetimes. And so it's really a very, very recent phenomenon. But because all of us alive today and for the past few generations have been embedded within this growth dynamic, we take it to be the norm. And therefore we project ourselves into the future as if it can continue forever. But the fact is that this is the single most abnormal period in human history. It's completely unprecedented, never occurred before, and can never occur again.

  Alan Ware 1:00

  That was Dr. Bill Rees, population ecologist, ecological economist and originator and co-developer of ecological footprint analysis. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast we'll get an in-depth explanation of our ecological predicament from one of the world's best big picture ecological thinkers.

  Nandita Bajaj 1:28

  Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.

  Alan Ware 1:51

  And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. Dr. Rees is a population 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 prerequisites for sustainability. He is best known as the originator and co-developer of ecological footprint analysis, a quantitative tool that shows definitively that the human enterprise is in dysfunctional overshoot. Frustrated by political unresponsiveness to worsening indicators, Dr. Rees also studies the bio-behavioral and psycho-cognitive barriers to environmentally rational political policies and programs. He's a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, a founding director of the One Earth Initiative, and a director of the Real Green New Deal. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Dr. Rees' international awards include the Boulding Memorial Award in ecological economics, the Herman Daly Award in ecological economics, and a Blue Planet Prize jointly shared with Dr. Mathis Wackernagel. And here's today's interview.

  Nandita Bajaj 3:24

  Hi Bill, we were wondering how do we even begin to introduce you. Not only are you one of the very few people who deeply understands the relationship between population, ecology and economics, but you're able to communicate so profoundly the seriousness of our predicament of ecological overshoot to such a broad audience.

  William Rees 3:26

  Well, thank you very much. That's a high compliment indeed. I'm not sure I justify it. But we'll see.

  Alan Ware 3:53

  So much of our understanding of the global predicament has been informed by the dozens of articles you've written over the years, the many hours of presentations that I know we've heard of yours over the years, and we really appreciate your being on Population Balance's Board of Advisors, and we're honored to have you on the podcast today. Thanks, Bill.

  William Rees 4:15

  I'm delighted to be here.

  Nandita Bajaj 4:16

  And Bill since we've had you on a couple of years ago, it would be great to start with a review of some of the ecological basics. So, a key ideology that you expose in your study of ecological overshoot is human exceptionalism, something we also take a hard stand against in our work. And as an ecologist, you've noted that even though we're an evolved animal species like any other humans don't consider themselves as part of ecosystems. And, as such, we see ourselves as exempt from natural limits of carrying capacity and ecological overshoot. Can you describe these two concepts and also how they are similar and different when applied to us versus non-human animals?

  William Rees 5:08

  Sure, I think it's really important to emphasize something that you've alluded to here. And that is, human beings are storytellers. We don't live in reality, the way other species do. We make up stories, and then we live out of those confections as if they were the real thing. And exceptionalism, the word you used, is one of those stories. So it's a philosophical concept, I suppose, with deep roots in religion, but it subscribes to the belief that human beings are outside of nature. We're not like other organisms. Many people don't like to think of themselves as animals, for example. And once you've developed a story that puts you outside of nature, and then clearly you are, I suppose, liberated from the laws of nature, biophysics, physics, and so on, and so forth. So here we are - a species that is unique in the world, as far as we know, in that it considers itself to be not part of the system of which it is deeply a part. So the story deviates enormously from the reality. And I think that's a major source of many of our problems. So we get down to the issue you've raised of carrying capacity and overshoot. The carrying capacity is an ecological term. I'll define it this way - as the average maximum population, it's always a population number, that a particular habitat can sustain indefinitely without that species endangering or disturbing irreversibly that habitat. But it's not a constant number. Carrying capacity is constantly fluctuating with climate. So if there's a period of droughts, the average maximum number of animals that can be sustained in a habitat will decline. As the environment improves, the population will rise. So in nature, populations rise and fall as the habitat quality changes. Every species - and this is really important because humans are included here - are capable of exponential population growth, every species. And when conditions are favorable, they will exhibit exponential population growth. But in nature, most species are held back. They never realize that potential for long because of so-called negative feedback. So as the population rises, they become subject to higher predation, a greater spread of disease. There's more competition for resources in space so the population is held in check. Now, if we look at human beings, things are somewhat different. Because humans, for 99.9% of our evolutionary history, we're pretty much like every other species. We have the potential for exponential population growth. But we're held in check by negative feedback - local scarcities, food shortages, disease. Look at Europe. A third of the population, or a half of the population of many villages, was wiped out by plague disease in the Middle Ages, several times as a matter of fact. So, basically, we've been the same as other species until just the last couple of hundred years. And what we've managed to do with the scientific and industrial revolutions is to eliminate or at least reduce many of the negative feedbacks on human beings. So as population health increased, as we got a handle on disease, as we tapped into fossil fuels as a way of acquiring resources and improving food production, we've eliminated many of the forms of negative feedback. But for most of that period of time, we did nothing about the positive feedback. So for the first time in human evolutionary history, just in the last 200 years, we've been able to realize our full potential for exponential growth. So it took, what, 250-300,000 years to reach 1 billion, and then in a mere 200 years, we got up to 8 billion. So that huge explosion was the period during which humans controlled negative feedback, but didn't do much about the positive feedback. So our population problem is the result of an imbalance between those positive and negative feedback forces. So humans have essentially exploded, not only in numbers, but through economic activity as well. In the period that our population increased by a factor of seven the economy has gone up by a factor of 100, 104, something like that. Average per capita consumption has increased by 13 or 14 fold. Fossil energy use has increased by well over 1000 fold in the last couple of hundred years. So we're in a situation now where we have overshot the long term carrying capacity of the planet and are degrading the biophysical basis of our own existence. So that's the difference. That's what exceptionalism has done. For a brief period in history we did seem to liberate ourselves from nature's controls, but it's very rapidly catching up to us as we undermine the life support functions of Earth. And climate change is simply one symptom of a much bigger problem called human overshoot. And many people aren't aware of it. What we're seeing happening globally now has happened regionally many times in history. So, in the post-agricultural period, that was the first period during which humans really acquired some control on the amount of energy flowing into the human system. As hunter gatherers, we were just dependent on the natural productivity of our habitats. But with agriculture, we were able to bump up that productivity, make food more available, and that was the first bump in human population growth wasn't it? Just about 10,000 years ago. So in that intervening period, the last 10,000 years, there's been many local civilizations - Greek, Rome, Mesopotamia, and so on and so forth. And they've all gone through a cycle of explosion accompanied by the degradation of their local and regional habitats, followed by a collapse. So the standard cycle of human civilizations has been a rise to great levels of even philosophical understanding and economic progress and division of labor and all of the accoutrements of civilization but followed by ignominious collapse as the system ran its course. And there's no reason to think that on a global scale, that same process, which has happened many times regionally, that it can't happen now globally. And perhaps that's something we should be contemplating.

  Alan Ware 11:30

  And you've been a co-founder of ecological footprint analysis that helped us understand the level of global overshoot, and measuring that by the amount of renewable resources like freshwater, topsoil, forest, fish, and the capacity of the land and water to absorb our wastes. And right now that's showing that we're using 1.75 Earths of renewable resources and absorption capacity. And as you mentioned, that's based on the average consumption of the 8 billion of us on the planet, which is about $11,000, World Bank purchasing power parity, and the US is somewhere in the sixty thousand dollars purchasing power parity. That shows you how unequal that is. But even if we shared it equally, that's how much of an overshoot we're in. So we and our listeners are well aware that overpopulation and overconsumption are primary drivers of ecological overshoot. And yet we constantly bump up against environmental organizations, environmentally-minded media commentators that focus very exclusively on overconsumption in the overdeveloped countries. And they leave out any role that population plays in either the overdeveloped or the undeveloped countries. So having you here is a real treat for our listeners. And we'd love some helpful arguments that you could give us to push back against that perennially unproductive debate of population versus consumption.

  William Rees 12:58

  Yeah, it is an unproductive debate. And it's rather a fruitless argument in many ways. I think the first thing that people have to understand is that overshoot, most of the symptoms are in fact, the result of what I would call excess economic throughput. So the human enterprise as a whole is consuming too many resources far beyond the regenerative capacity of ecosystems. And we're dumping wastes far in excess of the assimilative capacity of natural systems. Climate change is a waste management problem, an excess waste problem, for example. Okay, so let's clear it up. Consumption is an issue here. But the reality is, every human being is a consumer. And you can't exclude two thirds of the world's people as consumers, because they happen to be less wealthy than the other third or a quarter of the world's people. In fact, we can show using ecofootprint analysis, in fact others have shown using just carbon dioxide emissions analysis, that if you look at income increases, which is associated with consumption increases versus population growth, population growth now is the larger contributor to the growth of the human footprint and carbon emissions, for example, than is income growth. But again, we can't separate these two things. Because one of the reasons population growth in every income category is more important is because as the population is growing, so is per capita income, particularly in middle and lower income countries. So the two are lockstep. You have a situation in which overall throughput is increasing as a result of a combination of rising incomes and population. But right now, population growth is the greater contributor. And if you think about it, that's true in all income categories, because among the very wealthy adding one person is like adding 12 people say in a very poor country. That's because of the greater income. But as population grows in middle income countries, their ecofootprints are increasing as the population grows so that every increment of population adds substantially more than would otherwise be the case to the overall problem. So again, it's ridiculous to separate these two issues. They are one in the same. And we've made a bit of a taboo here. I mean, I've been called a neomalthusian, an ecofascist, and all sorts of things because I try to point out that population is a core part of this problem. We have to recognize that that's a reality. And Alan, you said a moment ago, something that is extremely important. One of the reasons people focus on the income disparity, and again, it's true that I guess the richest quarter of people on the planet are historically responsible for about 75% of the overshoot. But the fact of the matter is that we're in overshoot. And that means that at even average material standards we're over the top. So even if there were total equity, it wouldn't be sufficient. Please underscore this - that even if we were totally equal, the world would still be in overshoot. And the reality is that that may require as much as a 50% reduction in economic throughput in order to re-equilibriate the human enterprise with the productive capacity of the planet. And that's going to require a huge focus on both income redistribution, economic throughput, and of course, the population issue. We cannot ignore the population issue as we go forward. In fact, you might make the argument that the only way we can get by by ignoring population is for the poor to remain poor, and the rich people to join the poor if we hope to remain sustainable at current or anticipated population levels. We say Earth supports 8 billion people, but it's not. The Earth is not today supporting 8 billion people. Again, we have to understand this carrying capacity equation. Natural ecosystems produce an annual increment to the fish stocks, or forests, the standing stock of forests, or the amount of soil produced every year. And if human beings live on the annual increment, if you like the interest of our natural capital, then we're in a sustainable situation. Think of it as the same way as you would a bank account. If you had a million dollars in the bank, or in some investment at 5%, it would return $50,000 a year. And if you're satisfied to live on $50,000 a year, you can do so indefinitely, because you're not touching your capital. But as soon as you decide to spend $60,000 and $70,000 and $80,000 a year, you're not only extending the annual productivity or increment, the interest as it were, but you're biting into your capital. So that each year the interest is declining. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the earth today. When we say we're 70% in overshoot, we're acting as if the earth was about 70% bigger than it is. And it means much of our current growth and consumption is based not on the annual interest from our ecosystems, but rather by depleting not only that, but also a significant proportion of the natural capital. Deserts are increasing, forests are disappearing, biodiversity loss is accelerating, and so on, and so forth. So the growth of the human enterprise can only occur by consuming the rest of the natural system. We're literally converting nature into more human bodies and the artifacts of our society. But at some point, there will be insufficient natural capital left to sustain or even maintain the capital growth of the human economy, let alone to grow it any further. And that's the direction we are headed. We're moving toward the point where most of the production of natural systems will be needed just to maintain, let alone to grow the system. And of course, we're still growing. So that's not a very comfortable solution.

  Alan Ware 18:42

  And as you mentioned, the ecological overshoot of 1.75 just looks at renewable resources and the ability of forests to absorb our carbon emissions, but we're using I think in the US, 95% of all resources are non-renewable resources.

  William Rees 18:59

  That's the other side of things. Of course, I'm a biologist. I tend to focus on the so-called renewables. You know, it's interesting. Because we call them renewables, people think there's no problem. Well sure we can eliminate the non-renewables, but surely we can't eliminate the renewables. But in fact, we're running out of renewable resources faster than the non-renewables because of the advances in technology. In fact, it may well be that the pollution sink fills up. In fact, it's already overflowing, and puts a stop to many, many kinds of human operations before anything else. And that's part of a renewable resource capacity, because nature has a limited capacity to assimilate and process our organic waste and no capacity at all for some toxic and other kinds of wastes. So, yes, the renewable and biophysical assets are every bit as depletable as are the so-called non-renewables.

  Nandita Bajaj 19:52

  You've described human civilization as a dissipative structure. Can you explain that in simple terms?

  William Rees 20:02

  Yeah, well, I'm not sure I can do it in simple terms. It's a complex issue. It's something that I borrowed from physics. But dissipative structures are structures that self organize spontaneously in nature in response to steep gradients, or steep concentrations of energy or some other potential resource. So if you even look at a coffee cup of hot coffee, if you look very carefully, and if there's particles in it, you'll see them circulating around within that coffee cup. That's an example of a dissipative structure. The coffee represents a heat source, and it's much warmer than the adjacent environment. And it self organizes in ways that dissipates the heat out of the coffee into the environment. It's a Bernoulli cycle. Have you ever experienced a situation in which a cold cup of coffee gets hotter over time? And the answer is no, because steep gradients and concentrations tend naturally to dissipate, and to disperse, and to establish equilibrium. So really, what we're seeing here in dissipative structures is a response to a disequilibrium situation where there's a concentration here, relative to something over there. And the tendency in nature is to eliminate those in equilibria. So we go from concentrated to dispersed. We say that the entropy of the system increases as it loses structure. Now, if you think of a hurricane, a hurricane is a dissipative structure. It organizes, self organizes, the humans aren't in there doing anything to manipulate the hurricane. It just happened spontaneously, as a result of very high temperatures of the ocean. So there's a huge thermal gradient there, which represents a source of energy. And the hurricane self organizes and dissipates that energy. And once it dissipates energy, it dies. If you think of photosynthesis, green plants evolved in response to a high intensity energy source called solar energy. Solar energy enabled the evolution of a process called photosynthesis. It's a self-organizing evolutionary system, or a system that self organized because of the availability of an external source of energy from the sun. Absent the solar source, no photosynthesis. But once photosynthesis got underway, it created biomass plant material, which represents another steep concentration of energy and material. And therefore it made it possible for the spontaneous emergence of animal life that consumes the plant material. And so wherever we look in nature, we see the self organization or spontaneous organization of something to dissipate the gradients or concentrations of energy and matter. You may have heard the expression, nature abhors a vacuum. So if there is such a gradient, something will evolve to dissipate it. So what we see then is a tendency in the universe to, in a sense, dissipate any form of disequilibrium. Entropy will increase indefinitely. So if you think of human beings, human beings and their whole enterprise, are the human enterprise. That's all of human bodies, the population plus all of the industrial activities and our artifacts. These things have evolved spontaneously on Earth in response to steep gradients of energy and material. The first, of course, was photosynthesis. And for the first 250,000 years of human life, that's all we used. We then learn how to cultivate plants and increase the amount of energy available. In other words, we increase the steepness of the gradient that gave us more to dissipate and that enabled us to grow our population.Y You see what we do is convert the disequilibrium out there into more human bodies and artifacts. Then the big thing happened. In the 19th century in particular, we began to exploit fossil fuels. So fossil fuels represents an enormous concentration of potential energy that accumulated over hundreds of millions of years. And we are dissipating that energy in just a couple of hundred years. But the real point I'm getting at here is that the whole of human civilization, or at least what I call modern techno-industrial civilization, is the spontaneous self organization of a human cultural system based on the availability of abundant cheap energy. But we are dissipating that abundant cheap energy both to produce and maintain the infrastructure of our own system. So if you think about it, I'm gonna put this in somewhat physical terms, entropy represents a state of disorder, negentropy represents highly ordered, highly structured functional systems. So that huge deposit of fossil fuel is a huge concentration of energy - of negentropy. Humans tap into it to create negentropy called civilization. It's highly ordered, highly structured, highly functional, but highly dependent on this external source of negentropy to maintain itself. So as we dissipate that external source of negentropy, that is to say fossil fuels, to create ourselves, the human enterprise, we are literally undermining and dissipating the biophysical basis of our own existence, because we know we are dissipating the fossil fuel. But we use fossil fuel as the means by which we overfish the seas, overexploit the soils, overharvest our forests, and so on and so forth. So the inordinate growth of the human enterprise, in just the past couple of hundred years, is the result of the human capacity to use an external source - or what we call exosomatic source of energy, of negentropy - to create of ourselves a huge agglomeration of neg entropy called the human enterprise. But we do it by dissipating the rest of the ecosphere. And ultimately, we need to maintain, and listen this is extremely important - just to maintain the current scale of the human enterprise as a far from equilibrium dissipative structure - requires an enormous continuous input of energy and material. Once that energy and material runs out, you can't maintain let alone grow the human enterprise, because to maintain that huge bulk of negentropy requires dissipation of neg entropy somewhere else. So to create a little bit over here, the little bit being the human enterprise compared to the universe, to create the human enterprise requires the dissipation of much of the available energy and material out there. And by the way, you know, the whole renewable energy game is an attempt to replace this vast storehouse of fossil energy with a solar source just to keep the system going. Then the question is, is that bio physically possible? So when I say the human enterprise is a dissipative structure I mean that, in a literal sense, to maintain for the human enterprise to self produce, and to maintain itself, however fair or inequitable it may be, requires this constant throughput of vast quantities of available energy. And everything we make wears out. It dissipates. My computer's dissipating as I speak to you. At some point, I'm going to have to replace it. And so we have to continually maintain this flow of energy just to maintain and keep our system functional. But of course, if that energy source is running down as fossil fuels are, we're kind of in a rock and a hard place here. Because if we continue using fossil fuels, we destroy the planet. If we don't use them, we destroy the economy, because, you see what I'm getting at, we're just in this terrible place. This is really the conundrum, the difficulty we find ourselves in.

  Nandita Bajaj 28:22

  Yeah, I mean, is it fair to say that over the last couple of hundred years then we've entered into a state of accelerating disequilibrium. There's no chance for us to reach equilibrium because we keep adding new sources of cheap energy without giving nature a break to even handle that dissipation?

  William Rees 28:45

  Absolutely, I think you've put your finger on something extremely important here. You know, when we add an energy source, it doesn't substitute for something else. It simply adds to what we've already got. So coal was added to natural biomass, but we're still using enormous quantities of natural biomass. If you think of the modern world, 82% of the primary energy used on planet Earth today by the human enterprise is still fossil fuels. But that hasn't diminished the total quantity. It has diminished the percentage but not the quantity of biomass energy of wood burning, for example. In fact, the United States and Canada export vast quantities of wood chips and pellets to European wood-burning enterprises, energy producers, okay. So wind and solar are the same. They've added incrementally to the previous kinds of energy sources. And people may not believe this, but wind and solar, which I think attract something like 90% of new investment in alternative green energy and have been growing spectacularly for the last couple of decades, nevertheless, they produce electricity and electricity is 19% of the world's total energy and of that wind and solar produced 12%. So 12% of 19% is what 2.3%? So last year, after decades of spectacular growth, wind and solar energy gave us only 2.3% of the world's total final energy consumption - what people actually use when they turn on their heaters, or stoves, or whatever it might be. So there's just a huge way to go if you think you can replace, in a climate friendly manner, the huge quantities of fossil fuel that we still require to keep the system going, using something that after 30 years of rapid growth amounts to just two and a third percent or so of the total energy, it's not gonna happen.

  Alan Ware 30:47

  Yeah, and despite those facts, we've got standard neoliberal growth economists and mainstream thinkers thinking that any resource scarcity, pollution, we can get over through technological innovation, because market prices will increase, and that'll induce people to innovate, and we'll substitute cheaper and cleaner for dirtier and more expensive. So that social construct of infinite growth by alternative means as I think you've termed it, they have this strong faith that technology can expand our carrying capacity. We can push back against that dissipative quality of techno-industrial civilization. What would be your arguments for why those techno-optimists' belief in growth-everlasting is such a fallacy?

  William Rees 31:32

  Okay, well, there's some truth in this, of course. Human beings are extremely inventive. I mean, even discovering how to use fossil fuel is an example of exactly what they're talking about. But I think we have to look very carefully at two things here. First of all, I want to go back to something I said right at the beginning. Human beings are storytellers. And one of the stories we tell ourselves is that the greatest resource, this I think has been repeated many, many times, is human ingenuity, that human beings have the capacity through our intellectual abilities and our analytic abilities to really substitute for any product of nature that we may require. And therefore, if you believe in technological substitution, either through the development of alternatives to natural products or through increasing efficiency gains, then you believe in the capacity for the economy to grow indefinitely, free of all material bonds. But there are two things here. And by the way, that shows up in a number of arguments. There's a discussion going on, among economists and others around dematerialization - the economy is decoupling from nature. So I'm going to back up a little bit because this is really an important point. It's all part of our story. If you look at standard economic models and textbooks, the economy is considered to be a separate system from the ecosphere. It's considered to be what's called a self-perpetuating circular flow of exchange of values between households and firms. Households provide money to firms in exchange for goods and services. And they sell labor and capital to firms in exchange for income and dividends and that sort of thing. And as long as the self-perpetuating circular flows continues, economists think, we're okay. But the model is not connected to anything outside of itself. So, profoundly embedded in this model is the sense, again, of exceptionalism. Humans are not part of nature. So we have to recognize that the economy does draw on the natural world for some resources and uses it as our waste sink. But again, if you believe in human capacity to substitute for resources and to use pricing mechanisms, as you've mentioned, to let the market operate to fix the pollution problem, for example, pollution charges, then those problems will solve themselves. And now you have a mental model, which enables the economy to grow indefinitely, because there are no biophysical constraints. So on the one hand, the human enterprise operates from a mental model, which separates the economy from nature and enables it to grow forever. But I would argue that the entire model is based on completely false accounting, because it doesn't look at the important material and energy flows. Think of it this way. Human beings, by virtue of our technology, have become the single largest consumer species in every single ecosystem that is accessible on planet Earth. We harvest more forests. We harvest more grass. There's no ecosystem to which we have access that we aren't the largest consumer organism. There's many studies that demonstrate this. As a partial result of that, we are engaged in an absolutely explosive process of what I call the competitive exclusion of nonhuman species, because there's only a limited amount of photosynthetic flow through the planet. I mentioned back a while ago that humans just like all other species are dependent on photosynthesis of green plants. But that's limited. And it's limited, in fact one could argue even falling because of the destruction of ecosystems, but we'll leave that aside. The more humans take, the less is available for nonhuman species. You see, humans are a spontaneous dissipative structure as are all other species. But we're all dissipating the same sources of energy and matter. So in the last 10,000 years, if you go back 10,000 years to the beginning of agriculture, humans were about 1% of the total biomass of mammals on Earth. I mean, these are crude estimates, but let's take them for what they are. Today, we have much better estimates. And I think science shows today that humans are about 34% of the biomass of mammals on Earth. And if we add our domestic animals, the creatures we depend on for meat and so on - all our cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, whatnot - they're another 62-63%, of mammalian biomass. So the human enterprise, just in terms of mammals, represents something like 97% of the biomass of mammals on Earth, which leaves wild nature a mere 3%, at the margins. So those great herds we used to see in, you know, in Africa, and still some remaining, are just a fraction of what used to be there. Consider North America. We forget there used to be 60 million, maybe 40 million, but somewhere in the 10s of millions of bison, and also millions of pronghorn antelopes and other large animals on the Great Plains. So where are they now? Well they're sitting in our seats, because we've simply taken over the ecological productivity of the prairie ecosystems that used to sustain all of that biomass. And it's now used to sustain the population of North America and, indeed, many other people that we export food to. We did a study a few years ago, one of my last PhD students, and showed that in effect, Canada exports something like 63% of its prairie farmland in the form of exports to sustain people in other countries where populations are vastly in overshoot of domestic carrying capacities. So we've got a Ponzi scheme going here, big time, in which the growth of the human enterprise is displacing nonhuman species from ecosystems. And by the way, increasingly displacing poorer humans from ecosystems, right, as the rich get richer, and more and more people acquire economic power. The globalization evolved precisely as a way for countries that have exceeded their domestic carrying capacities to use legitimate, and I put that in quotes, legal trade, to exploit the excess capacity in other countries. So this is one of the great inequities that exists on earth today. Wealthy nations, all of Europe, virtually every country in Europe is vastly in excess of their local carrying capacities, but survives by importing from the global commons and from other countries where there are surplus carrying capacities. The wealth of Europe was generated by the colonial exploitation of resources elsewhere. So something like 80% of people on the planet today live in countries that are running ecological deficits. And by that I mean if they were to close their borders, they could not sustain themselves on their domestic biocapacity. These countries are dependent on the imports of food and fiber produced by ecosystems in other countries. But of course, this gets so complicated. Once you don't even recognize absolute dependence on ecosystems, you're not conscious of the damage that you're doing elsewhere. Right? So urbanization together with globalization has had the effect of both psychologically and physically displacing people from the ecosystems that support them. What a dilemma to be in. And that's the dilemma confronting Earth today.

  Alan Ware 39:12

  Yeah, and the techno-optimist belief that we can engineer our way out of these solutions.

  William Rees 39:18

  Now, if you look at the last 50 years, the last 50 years has been a period of unprecedented growth and economic and technological efficiency and just pure technology. Okay, what has been the ecological consequence? In the last 50 years the worth, every measure that we take virtually of biohealth, the ecological health, is in decline. And this is a period of exponential growth in just about everything. Exponential growth is really important. Most people haven't a clue what it means, but it means this. There's a constant doubling time. That's all exponential growth is. So that if you have a population growing at, say 2% per year, it will double every 35 years or so. The economy is growing at 3% per year, it's going to double in, what, 23 years or so. So that's just a constant. Now, the interesting thing about that kind of growth is that during any one doubling time, more consumption takes place than in all previous doubling times combined. So since 1990, what's that about 32 years, we have used more fossil fuel than in all previous history. Now, okay, do you understand we've used more in the last 30 years than in all previous history. By the way I was born in 1943. We have used, since 1943, 98%, of all fossil fuel ever used. So we've just seen a couple of doublings and there's the effect. Now we expect the economy to double again in the next 35 years or so, or less if economists get their way. And this will be a period of intense exploitation of the Earth's resources, because we will use more of many minerals and metals, in an attempt for example to transition to renewable energy, than ever used in the whole of human history prior to this period of time. But this is a world already in overshoot. So the question is, is it even bio physically possible without the total destruction of the biocapacity of Earth to contemplate a doubling of economic activity, and therefore an increase in economic throughput in many areas, not every area, but in many areas equilavent to everything that's ever happened in the course of industrial civilization and even before that.

  Nandita Bajaj 41:49

  Your emphasis on this false story that we've created. To give you an example, we spoke to a guest from Japan recently who studies pronatalism there, and we were asking her about the general tone about declining birth rates in Japan. And despite the fact that Japan's ecological footprint is nearly eight times its biocapacity. And the only reason is because of what you just mentioned, it's importing 60% of its food calories to sustain that population. The only narrative encircling not just Japan, and the entire globe has an opinion on Japan, is a panic about its depopulation. It's that to maintain that story of constant economic growth as being the only sign of success and domination is very much, you know, alive and well.

  William Rees 42:42

  It's alive and well and totally false. I think, at least one recent study I've seen shows, you know, there's 20, or 30 countries that are in population decline, and many of them have declined by a remarkable 10-20% even. But for the average person life has got better. Their material standard has increased., They feel more economically secure. Employment has increased and so on. So again, we have this contrast between the mythic construct promoted by the corporate sector and standard growth economists that we absolutely need population growth to maintain the growth of the economy. That's not the point of the exercise. The economy should serve people. It's not that people serve the economy. And if we can show that people are better off with a declining population, as they are in Japan by the way. It is still has one of the highest material standards. In fact, on just about every indicator in the human development index and population health, Japan stands way at the top of the heap. The United States is pretty far down at the bottom. If it's not last, it's pretty close to the bottom of the OECD countries on most measures of population health. I did a study for the Japanese government some years ago to show how much Japan depends on the rest of the world to sustain itself. And by the way, the student who did this study was a Japanese civil servant that joined my group to undertake this study of the ecofootprint of Japan. And his study showed that Japan was, as I say, very much dependent on the rest of the world. His study was suppressed by the Japanese Department of Environment because of its political implications. Again, when economists talk, they're always talking about money flows, not material flows. Perfect illustration, one of the first studies I did was of the Netherlands. And this goes way back to the late 1980s, early 90s, I can't remember. And we showed that the Netherlands is about, I think, at the time seven or eight times more dependent on other land than is contained within the Netherlands. So I was invited to present these results at a conference sponsored by the Dutch government in Amsterdam. And by sheer juxtaposition, the person on the podium ahead of me was an economist. By the way, the audience was largely invitees from developing countries in Africa and Asia. So this goes back a few years. And the idea was to, at least the economist thought, was to set Holland up as an example for the rest of the world to follow. So he made this marvelous economic argument that here was Holland, the most densely populated country in Europe, no population problem at all, because it continued to enjoy one of the highest material standards in Europe, because of human ingenuity. The Dutch were so efficient at using their land and resources that it was obviously an example for everybody to follow. The Dutch economy could grow beyond any imagined limit and could do so sustainably forever. And so let's extend this model to the rest of the world. Well, I set up right behind him, and was able to show that the Dutch economy grew because of imports from elsewhere. In fact, if you looked at food production in Holland, this economist talked about Holland not only produces enough food to sustain itself, but exports things like canned meats, and cheeses, and chickens, and so on and so forth. All very true. So you could show that Holland had a net positive trade flow in foodstuffs, but measured in monetary terms. So you import very cheap fodder from the rest of the world, convert it to high value added products such as meat and cheese, and export those at high prices into global markets, and your current accounts will balance. But what we showed was that Holland is using three to five times as much agricultural land outside of Holland to grow the food in Holland. And therefore, Holland, the Dutch people don't live in Holland. They live, yes, in Holland. That's where they keep their bodies. But their bodies are sustained by these flows of resources from elsewhere in the world. So if you change the accounting system, from a monetary base to a materials flows base, you get a completely different picture the nature of reality because the monetary flows tell us nothing about the actual biophysical relationships necessary to sustain those economic differences, that not everybody can be a net importer. There has to be somebody out there exporting. This is a zero sum game in that limited sense. So to the extent that Holland is surviving and growing economically on imports from elsewhere, it's not a model for the rest of the world to follow because the Earth isn't trading with any other planets at the present time. See, globalization is a form of neocolonialism. It's simply an extension of the colonial mentality by legal means. When we tell countries you're gonna get better off if you trade with us. And then it's a huge money pump that sucks, well, from poor countries into the already rich countries. And we don't want to recognize that publicly, because then we would have to own up to the sources of our own well being in many countries. So the beginning of salvation is to rewrite the story. If your story does not conform to reality, you are doomed. And our current story does not conform to the biophysical and social realities within which we find ourselves.

  Nandita Bajaj 48:12

  You know, your incredible example of Holland, the Netherlands fallacy, contrasted with the story that you share about growing up on a family farm, and being completely aware of everything that you're eating, being so in touch with the land and the food that you've grown that you're then consuming, and being so aware of the limits to your own growth, was a perfect encapsulation of that separation that we've had from our land.

  William Rees 48:44

  That was a transformational, a formative experience, my earlier youth on my grandparents' farm. I wasn't aware of it at the time but it was. And that insight I had, I guess I was eight years old, sitting at a table just waiting for my grandfather to come in and say grace, looking at the food on my plate, and oh, we did those tomatoes and planted those lettuces and milked that cow and whatever it might be. I had had a hand in growing every single thing on that plate. And that hit me like a ton of bricks. I literally felt rooted in the soil of that landscape. Because the expression you are what you eat. I didn't think of it in quite those terms. But that's what I was thinking subliminally. And by the way, this is where the ecofootprint concept came from. My early farm experience planted that seed so that later when I encountered this economist notions of decoupling, I said, what the hell, this cannot be. This notion that we're not part of nature, that we're etcetera, just cannot be. How much of the Earth's productive surface is needed to support just me in the style to which I am accustomed whatever that style might be? There's the first question of human ecology. Now that's a variable answer. But it's an answerable question. And that's what I set about to do with ecological footprint analysis. And by the way, again, I can't emphasize that experience is not available to 99% of youth today who grew up in the city and who have no idea of their connectivity. It's still there. You see, the connectivity exists in real time. But it's invisible to the urban individual who is both psychologically and spatially displaced, from the ecosystems scattered all over the world now that support them, which, by the way, is a call for relocalization. That family farm in the 50s was totally self sufficient, or at least everything we ate grew on the premises and nothing came from anywhere.

  Nandita Bajaj 50:46

  And speaking about mythic realities and false stories. What are your thoughts on the so-called green energy to help maintain this expectation of constant economic growth? If you can elaborate on that fallacy a bit?

  William Rees 51:03

  Yeah, I guess my starting point in this kind of discussion would be that it's the wrong questio in many respects. We shouldn't be asking, Can alternative green energies replace fossil fuel? We should be asking what would be the consequences if alternative energy replace fossil fuel? And I think that would be catastrophic. And I recently wrote, and somebody picked up on this, that the only thing worse than the failure of the energy transition would be the success of the energy transition. Because again, keep in mind that the way we have used fossil energy is to increase the rate at which we exploit all other natural resources. So fisheries couldn't have collapsed in the absence of factory freezer trawlers and diesel power ships, and so on and so forth. Deforestation would be virtually impossible without the heavy fossil fuel powered equipment, and so on and so forth. So if we simply substitute, say, electrical chips, and electrical deforesters and all the rest of it, we're no further ahead. It's what I call business as usual, by alternative means. Business, as usual, is destroying the planet. Let's get that clear. So doing business as usual, in a different way, is still going to continue the exploitation of the planet. And in the short term, it wouldn't even necessarily address the question of climate change, which, as I say, is merely symptomatic is not the real issue here. Because if you think about it, the major components of the green energy alternatives are solar and wind. And by the way, wind power wouldn't exist in the absence of massive government subsidies. You can go online in five minutes and find out that, if not most, certainly, a very large percentage of the major wind turbine producers and utilities that are using wind power are on the verge of bankruptcy, because of rising costs because of unexpected failures of the equipment because, because, because. So, that industry some would say, is in its death throes. Solar may be a little different, but that's neither here nor there. The point of the matter is that both wind turbines and all the infrastructure required to produce wind turbines and solar panels and all the mining, refining, transportation, installation and maintenance of these kinds of facilities are still undertaken using fossil fuels. So, at least in the short term, there'll be a bump in the production of carbon dioxide as we make the transition, should we attempt to make this transition to alternative green energy. But in the meantime, you're going to see several hundred percent increases in the demand for various rare earths in metals from copper, all the way down to molybdenum and cobalt, so on and so forth, and other rare earths that I can't even pronounce. But to get a gram or two of these things requires the movement of several tons of material. And to refine it requires the use of toxic chemicals, which requires the pollution of groundwater and freshwater streams and the destructions of communities. So the ecological costs of this transition are quite astronomical. There's another issue here, and that is that we're talking about the electrification of everything. And in order to do this, and this is the number from the International Energy Agency, a quote, "in order to achieve climate goals set by global governments more than 80 million kilometers, that's 49 point 7 million miles of electric grids will have to be added or refurbished by 2040." That's only what 17 years from now. And that's the equivalent of the entire current global electric grid. These are impossible numbers. It cannot be done. It certainly cannot be done without massive ecological destruction in the mining and so on, not to mention the destruction of community, the over- exploitation of child labor, so on and so forth that occurs in many of the areas providing some of these minerals. So this is an enterprise the scale of which has never before been attempted. We've mentioned several things in passing here about the scale of the human enterprise, but this goes beyond anything we've spoken of thus far. And so when I said some time ago, that doubling of the economy means that more throughput of energy and material than has occurred in previous history, particularly the history of industrial economies, this dwarfs even that, because some of these minerals weren't even heard of 30 years ago, and we'll be mining billions of tons of rock to get at them in order to sustain this growth trajectory. So I'm very pessimistic that it can happen. And I hope it doesn't happen. I think we have much better ways of saving the human enterprise. Keep in mind that the whole exercise here of the energy transition is to maintain the status quo. And we have to ask, do we really want to maintain the status quo, which is what has got us into the problems that we're creating in the first place? So we've got, again, to face the reality of that there are limits to growth, and we're bound to confront them. Which reminds me, everyone should download the study Limits to Growth. It's now available free on the internet. It was published in 1972, as an exercise sponsored by the Club of Rome, undertaken by scientists at MIT, very crude computer modeling, but the first two major global models. And they looked at several scenarios, several reasonable ways of looking at how the future might unfold. But I think it's the base case scenario, most likely outcome was suggested that there'd be major overpopulation by the middle of this century, that we'd see major pollution problems by the middle of the century, that we'd see such a confluence of resource scarcities and demand and pollution that, in fact, society would begin to implode by the middle of this century. Now, at the time of its publication, this is almost exactly 50 years ago. By the way, I was just starting my academic career at that time. I had a stack of papers two feet high on my desk, written by economists trashing the Limits to Growth study. And they trashed it on grounds that these people are fools who don't understand human technological progress. They don't understand our capacity to invent our way around any of these crises. These things simply cannot happen. And so within a very few weeks of turbulent discussion, Limits to Growth was so vilified by the economics profession that it fell out of favor by policy analysts, and so on and so forth. Well, since then, there's been several independent studies comparing the output of this very crude Limits to Growth computer model with what's actually happened in the course of the last 50 years. And it turns out that the base case analysis of the Limits to Growth study is unfolding as we speak. So the world is basically on track for the overpopulation, overpollution, resource scarcity and collapse outcome, or at least implosion outcome, that the limits to growth mode suggested might well happen by the middle of this century. So perhaps the 50 year old rejection of Limits to Growth was just, you know, a half century premature.

  Alan Ware 58:11

  Well, and there was some awareness in the 70s more of the ecological limits and the 1970 Earth Day, and more conversation about population and then the neoliberal turn of the 80s in the developed countries and what we've seen decades hence. You've described our predicament in this quote that 'the ecologically necessary is politically infeasible. But the politically feasible is ecologically ineffective, if not catastrophic'. And we kind of know what you mean, but we'd love to hear your unvarnished thoughts on that.

  William Rees 58:46

  That was sort of a quip I made at a meeting somewhere and decided, hey, you know, that actually makes some sense. Let me try to justify it. If we're serious here, and recognize that overshoot is the problem, rather than climate change, rather than biodiversity loss, rather than any of the other symptom, these are all just symptoms of a much greater crisis. And that crisis is the crisis of overshoot. Now the only way to reduce overshoot and all of its co- symptoms is to reduce throughput. We have to reduce the consumption by the human enterprise to levels that are compatible with productivity of nature and the assimilative capacities of nature. So that means contemplating reductions in economic activity. There's never been a time in which we've actually voluntarily reduced our consumption. So are human beings capable of biting the bullet and reducing economic throughput to the point where, here's our goal, human beings if we wish to live sustainably on Earth, must acquire the capacity to design and implement, what Herman Daly one of the great fathers of ecological economics describes as a steady state economy. Your body is a steady state, assuming you're not gaining weight at an inordinate rate or anything. You have a constant weight. You have a constant body temperature, a constant level of material balance within your system of chemicals and pH and all of that kind of stuff, and a constant throughput. Every day you eat something like 2000 calories and you dissipate those calories you intake in the form of food, you're radiating heat off into the ecosphere, and you attend to your bodily functions every now and then in the washroom, but you maintain yourself in a steady state. Now, the human enterprise is just the combination of all human beings plus our biological plus industrial metabolism. So what we have to do here is to design a human system in which the combined biological and industrial metabolisms are compatible with the productivity and assimilative capacity of nature. And once we do that we are in a steady state. Now it can be a fluctuating steady state, obviously, because the conditions of the ecosphere change from time to time. And right now, that means reducing total consumption by roughly globally, we're 70% in overshoot or 75. But that means a 50% reduction, more or less, in throughput as a rough estimate. But to get to that point, you need to implement some pretty serious kinds of policies. For example, most of the prices we see in the marketplace, and this is something you mentioned earlier Alan, don't tell the truth. Because economists use the term externalities. The ecological costs of production, the social costs of production are not included in the price that people pay at the cash register, we can adjust those prices so that they more accurately reflect the damage costs in nature. So we have rough estimates of what it costs to dump a ton of carbon into the atmosphere. Why not attribute that to the price of goods and services? And if you did that, I think we'd find that most people could not afford most of the goods that we take for granted. Today. private automobiles would probably be extinct, cell phones, or computers, and so on and so forth. So there's just so damn many of these things out there that are so underpriced that the damage costs, if we tried to internalize them, would mean we'd change everything. By the way, if we had far fewer people, we wouldn't need so many of these things, and we'd all be better off. But the bottom line is this. One major move that governments could make to reduce consumption inordinately would be to devise a tax system or a pricing system that moved us closer to full social cost pricing of goods and services. Now, in some areas, that's not too difficult to do. Scientists tell us roughly what the carbon budget remaining is. So why not put a global cap on the amount of fossil fuel that is mined and used every year? Then you can let the market determine what the price of that is. So if we said, look, you're only allowed so many million tons of oil production every year. what's that worth? Well, the market will tell us very quickly. And of course, the price would be astronomically higher than we're currently paying. And so the price of goods and services would rise. And we've done this with fisheries. For example, one way in which we've saved some fisheries is to put a cap on the total catch, and then distribute allowable catch among fishers in some way or another that may or may not be fair. But the point is, these things are possible. We could do them. But they're politically infeasible. There's a US election coming up. I can guarantee you that not one of the candidates is going to campaign on trying to compel people to accept a 50, or in a case of the US perhaps 80% reduction, in material throughput. Because you see, our story is completely at odds with the nature of the reality that we're confronting here.

  Alan Ware 1:03:56

  We have seen some encouraging signs with the degrowth movement in Europe and the conference they had that was sponsored by the EU Parliament, and the well being economies of which Canada is now the sixth. But I don't hear them advocating degrowth, those six well being economies.

  William Rees 1:04:16

  Degrowth, I think, is a wonderful idea. But even the degrowthists eschew the population question. So it's all about trying to redistribute income and wealth so that we have a more equitable system. And by the way, we're going to shrink the economy. There's no question about that. But so far, they're loath to address the population side of that equation, which I think is a great shame because, as the economy shrinks, if there are fewer people over the long run then on average, the remaining population can be better off on a per capita basis. That's a trivial way of putting it, but it's absolutely the case. The population question is just abhorrent to some people and it's a political and social abhorrence that is not really justified in the circumstances.

  Nandita Bajaj 1:05:04

  And to that point, I wanted to put a plug in for the most recent paper that I had the honor of co-authoring with you and a bunch of other wonderful authors was the behavioral crisis driving ecological overshoot, in which we recognize that the maladaptive behaviors we're talking about are actually economic growth, marketing and then the third one being pronatalism. All of which are encouraging unnecessary and thoughtless consumption, and reproduction, which have brought us into the state of ecological overshoot. But the fact that degrowthers, they're afraid to talk about population. In fact, you know, many of them say it's a red herring issue. It's not even a real issue. I do believe there's some level of anthropocentrism that's at play there. Because even if they believed that for our own species, it was possible, which as you've made very clear, with 75% overshoot, it's not possible even with, you know, redistribution of wealth, etc. That's one thing. And the second thing is to add a bit about this pronatalism piece is we often think of reproductive decision making as a largely personal choice that's free from the constraints of cultural and institutional norms and the stories and narratives we've created, right? It's part of the mental model that we've created as a truth that any kind of family making has to involve a very traditional, dominant narrative of biological reproduction. And pronatalism and population growth narratives that are really coming from these neoliberal economists, religion of course perennial, ethnocentrism, and all of the traditions that we've spoken about, that also push human exceptionalism as an ideology, they all stand to benefit from population growth. So to me, it's counterproductive for degrowthers that I see as justice-oriented folks, you know, who really care about justice and equality, to not wake up to the fact that pronatalism is the oldest form of population control. It is the one thing that's driving population growth, and by not taking population into account that we are really allowing different kinds of injustice to continue to take place,

  William Rees 1:07:34

  You've raised some extremely important points. And I think it's really interesting, again, to look historically at this whole question of growth, because for all intents and purposes, there was none for 250,000 years. if you went back to the Middle Ages, some people lived to be 90 years old, but the population at the end of your life might have been even less than it was at the beginning of your life, depending on whether a plague had gone through or whatever. And certainly there's been no technological change to speak of. The same technologies in play at the beginning of life would have been the same 90 years later, more or less. That's all changed. In just the last 200 years, we've seen more change than in the previous entire history of human beings. Only 10 generations of human beings out of thousands have experienced this phenomenon of growth, growth in population, growth in technology in sufficient quantity so that they would notice in the course of their lifetimes. As I mentioned earlier, I mean, almost all of fossil fuels ever used has been used up since I was born. Most of the technologies that we take to be commonplace today didn't exist when I was born. And so it's really a very, very recent phenomenon. But because all of us alive today, and for the past few generations, have been embedded within this growth dynamic, we take it to be the norm. And therefore we project ourselves into the future as if it can continue forever. But the fact is that this is the single most abnormal period in human history. It's completely unprecedented, never occurred before and can never occur again. That's really very important to understand here. The preindustrial environment was the environment which enabled the emergence of human life and civilization on earth. But we are rapidly changing the very environment that made our life possible. So you have to adapt to that changing environment. A species which is incapable of responding to changes in its environment will go extinct. Just as other species are subject to natural selection, human beings are subject to natural selection. Humans are really cognitively obsolete. We evolved in very simple times, very simple social circumstances. We lived in limited ecosystems or home ranges. The environment may have been challenging but relative to today's environment, it posed very little major challenges to the evolution of the human nervous system. So we tend to think in simplistic terms, one thing at a time, or in terms of simple cause effect relationships, and so on. We don't naturally think systemically. We don't connect the dots. And so if you just look at the news, any given evening, there's a big item on climate change, climate change, climate change. And then maybe next week, it's the war in the Middle East, the war in the Middle East, the war in the Middle East. And then it's about the pandemic, the pandemic, the pandemic. And nobody bothers to sit down on a newscast and say, and well, folks, here's how all of these things are connected together as part of the same problem. It's not in the human mindset, to think systemically about these kinds of things. So the environment is changing rapidly around us. And we can't be cognitively conscious of it. Nobody really understands how the global economy works, or how the internet works for that matter. We have a crude idea here and there, but comprehensively, no. Do we understand the climate system? Not really. We have some computer models that take care of bits and pieces of it. By no means is the whole climate system included in those models. And it's the same about any system. So human beings in just the past 200 years, have created an environment - a socio-economic, political, ecological environment, of overlapping complex systems. And the whole is so utterly complex that it's far beyond the capacity of any human brain to grasp what those linkages and interactions are. But think it through. If you are maladapted to the environment that you have created, and that environment changes rapidly, you may well be selected out. We're not capable of surviving massive climate change, let alone the loss of biodiversity and all the rest of it. So let's just look at climate change for a moment. The 1.5 degree target, the favorable target of the IPCC, is gone. We will exceed one and a half degrees by the end of this decade. We're likely to pass two and perhaps even get to three celsius degrees warming. If that happens, it's potentially catastrophic. For one thing, it would render much of the earth uninhabitable by human beings, areas occupied by perhaps 2 billion people. So what do you do during this century, if we create an environment in which there are 2 billion migrants moving from places that are no longer habitable in even parts of the southern United States, Australia, India, parts of Africa, Saudi Arabia is going right through the roof in terms of temperature right now. So we've got a huge problem that's unfolding before our eyes, where the environment is selecting out regional populations, but then they migrate to other places. Look at the problems Europe's happening with a few tens of thousands of people trying to cross the Mediterranean. Look at the US trying to block its border to the South. We will see those minor skirmishes of migration completely overwhelmed if we manage to render significant swaths of the planet uninhabitable by people and create millions of displaced migrants. And there are papers to show that there may be as many as 2 billion people displaced by the end of this century. So these are enormous issues, of human beings so transforming the biophysical state of their environments that we are maladapted and will be selected out. I'm not saying people will go extinct. But it may be that we have made it impossible for an advanced industrial civilization to continue, if we carry on this track. If we maintain, even business as usual by alternative means, so that it's so discombobulates to the biophysical systems that support us, we may make it impossible for our system to continue. And that means putting a clamp on economic growth and population growth before we reach tipping points, which make it impossible to withdraw from the circumstances that we ourselves have created. That's a lot of, a big way of saying, look, we made an environment that are beyond our capacities to understand. So the safest approach is really to back off, before we cross tipping points. Let's back off. Let's get a grip on ourselves. What is really materially necessary for a happy fulfilling life in which we are socially supported and feel love and companionship and all of the things that are important without destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence?

  Alan Ware 1:14:46

  Yeah, I think that hunger for simplicity and connection to other humans and nature is expressing itself now partly through a fascination with indigenous culture and indigenous wisdom. And I've heard you speak knowingly and intelligently about the fact that a lot of those indigenous groups moved into undisturbed natural environments and then proceeded to degrade them pretty severely, and then kind of learned the hard way how to be sustainable, right, once they had to figure out how to live within that degraded environment. Can we pre-learn the hard lesson that indigenous people learned? Or how do we just bolt on indigenous wisdom without having to go through crisis and learning the hard way? Or do you think it's possible?

  William Rees 1:15:32

  Yeah, that's a huge question, Alan. I think it's really important to understand a couple of things about indigeneity. Human beings are large energy demanding animals. And we know from many experiments in ecology that the introduction or removal of any large energy demanding animal from an ecosystem completely changes the structure of that ecosystem. So human beings, when they invade a new ecosystem, and you know, humans, basically, the growth of population in the last 50,000 years has mainly been the expansion of human beings over the entire surface of the earth. If you take in aggregate terms, that's where the main population growth occurred. In any given environment populations fluctuated within the carrying capacity of those environments. So when we enter into a new ecosystem, almost invariably, there's a huge change in the structure of that ecosystem. For one thing, it's pretty clear that the megafauna - the large, easily captured and hunted animals - disappeared over the next few centuries as human populations grow. Even within historical times, New Zealand was only populated by Polynesians around 800, or something like that. But within a few decades or centuries of their arrival, many species of large moa, I guess they're called, collapsed because of overharvesting. Many other indigenous species collapsed. The entire megafauna of Australia disappeared as the aboriginals and migrated across the country. North America, it looks as if many of the large megafauna of North America and elsewhere on the planet, I'm just making the point over and over again, that you introduce human beings, large energy demanding carnivorous, largely animals, whether we like it or not, that's what we are. We have huge impacts on the populations of other nonhuman species. So what happens then is that, if you look, there's a wonderful book, Tim Flannery, I think, called The Future Eaters, which describes the sequence mainly for Australian and Australasia. But once the population of humans has adjusted to its habitat, it may acquire a cultural affinity with the remnant ecosystem within which it finds itself. In fact, if it's going to survive, it has to do this. And so what we see today as indigenous cultures is often the result of many centuries of having adapted to a much diminished or reduced ecosystem after humans first arrived there. And these may be profoundly important adaptations. I don't for a moment wish to put them down. But I think we have to understand that people got there, after they essentially depleted much of their local habitats up to the ability of their technology. Technology improves, the level of exploitation increases even with indigenous peoples in many cases. So I think we're seeing the same thing occurring on a global scale today. Human beings are repeating, on a global scale, the dissipation of other life forms, the dissipation of other large stocks of resources - forests, fisheries, soils, and so on - from overuse. And it's perfectly natural for human beings to do that, without restraint. That's what it is to have evolved successfully on Earth. So again, the creation of the human enterprise, out very complicated, highly structured system of negentropic entities requires the dissipation of the rest of the ecosphere. So we're increasing global entropy, the disordering of the natural system to create ourselves. And once that has happened, then we too will become dissipated. Because the laws of thermodynamics are irrevocable and apply equally to human beings. As I said, you and I are all wearing out as we speak. We dissipate back into nature, and our equipment will dissipate back into nature. And, at some point, nothing's left if we don't have that external source of energy to maintain at all.

  Alan Ware 1:19:38

  So not likely that we'll change our cultural story and evolve quickly in a cultural sense to avoid having to learn the hard way?

  William Rees 1:19:47

  There's another problem here I think. I've mentioned that human beings are storytellers. We socially construct a version of reality, and then we live out of that reality as if it were real. So when you think of religious doctrines, economic paradigms, political ideologies, these things don't exist in nature. These are all products of the human mind. And yet, we take these products of the human mind extremely seriously. And we act out of them as if they were real, as if they represented the real biophysical world. Now, change the model. It's not that simple. Because there's another glitch in the human cognitive realm that we have to consider here. What neuroscience shows us is that repeated experiences or repeated thought patterns tend to imprint in the human brain. So as a human being is developing, we are pre-programmed in a sense, to adopt the social norms, habits, customs, and mythology of our tribes. This is a huge selective advantage, because you can imagine, again, going back to Paleolithic times, what was gained by a young person growing up having imprinted on his developing nervous system, all the cultural norms and myths and ways of thinking, and so on. It not only conferred a sense of personal identity on that individual, because this was their cultural identity, but it also gave them a group identity. So it created group cohesion, which was important because there were hostile tribes living, you know, across the river, or whatever it might be. So we developed a means by which we acquired the stories, the narratives of our society. And, obviously, if the society existed, they must have been successful. And so there was a selective advantage to this ability to quickly acquire, without a whole lot of instruction, just by growing up in a society, the ways of thinking of that society. But the problem is, in those days, nothing changed very much. So the cultural norms that you adopted weren't that different from those of your father, weren't that different from those that the granddad, and it didn't matter, because you all lived in the same basic circumstances and environment. Leap ahead 10,000 or 100,000 years. Today, we still acquire sets of religious beliefs, economic assumptions, so powerful, if you take religion, people are willing to go to the wall, you know, blow themselves up because of their religious beliefs of one kind or another. So our mythic constructs are extremely powerful and extremely important, and very difficult to abandon. And I am afraid we're kind of in that situation globally, as well. When you confront the economic growth narrative that is being reproduced - all of our universities, our whole university system, our whole educational system, is dedicated to reproducing the same cultural norms, beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviors, as we wrote about in that paper that have resulted in this problem in the first place. So there's no university in North America with a department of ecological economics or a department of degrowth. They're all oriented toward producing and reproducing the neoliberal concept, which, by the way, was introduced maybe 100 years ago, but really got underway in the post war boom period. In some respects, it was a purposeful social construct. You can go online and download an essay, the Lewis Powell memorandum. Okay, so Lewis Powell back in, I guess, 1970, 1971, a corporate lawyer, getting very concerned with the rise of environmentalism, of civil rights, of female liberation in the United States. He saw all of these things as a threat to the corporate values that had made America great. So he wrote a memorandum. You can download it, Lewis Powell memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, the US Chamber of Commerce, saying, look, if we don't guard against the emergent ideas here, it's going to erode the corporate grip on American reality. So we have an obligation to counteract this view. We have to fund economics departments in universities. And if that doesn't work, we have to create think tanks of independent scholars who continue to promulgate corporate values, and the values of individualism, of economic growth, and so on and so forth. In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act was passed. We saw the Clean Air Act and all of these things were happening in response to increasing awareness of ecological problems. We saw great advances in civil rights and women's liberation. That now had to be suppressed. As a result of not only this memo, but it was a certainly a very important point, hundreds of think tanks emerged in the United States dedicated to right wing propaganda, specifically oriented to appropriating the political dialogue, of changing the nature of the language. So concepts such as the community interest, the common good, the popular interest have simply dropped off the table. What became fair game was personal aggrandizement, personal freedom, the capacity of the individual to rise to the top. Again, it reinforced this idea that family and community and other important relationships don't exist, and are mere impediments to the forward movement of the corporate enterprise. So what I'm really trying to underscore here is that billions of dollars have been spent on the propagandization of the current way of being. And so we have big think tanks that are dedicated to promoting anti-science, to denying climate change, to promoting the corporate ethic and the growth narrative. It's such a huge problem. When you try to come up with ideas like degrowth, with no money, it's been an academic fantasy, when you're up against literally billions of dollars spent every year on advertising the way of life that we've created. It's a mug's game and to my mind and extremely, extremely difficult problem. And our neuroscience is against it, because people now have the social norms of growth and individualism embedded in their brain cells as in their synaptic circuitry.

  Alan Ware 1:26:15

  There is some hope in the sense that, we were talking about the crisis, do you have to pre-learn or like indigenous do we have to go through the crisis? And it reminded me of Milton Friedman talking about during the crisis, real or perceived it's the ideas laying around. And they had created those for Reagan in the 70s at Cato, and they had the ideas laying around and Reagan picked them up and ran with it, and so did Thatcher. And I guess FDR picked up a lot of Progressive Era ideas that were laying around that that were fallow during the Go Go 1920s where they weren't concerned with that. So hopefully degrowth, wellbeing economy, some of these, although, like you mentioned, they're much less funded. They're puny compared to the ideas laying around waiting for the next crisis among the neoliberal groups, right?

  William Rees 1:27:03

  I think you're right. I mean, I'm very encouraged by, as limited as they are, the degrowth movement, and so on. I think I've referred to these as lifeboats in the sense that the Titanic is the mainstream and various communities are spawning ideas that are counter veiled. They may be incomplete. They may be inadequate, but at least they're stimulating some thought, in a different direction. And that's extremely important. And the question is, will they survive should the main ship go down? Will the eddies and chaos that results when the main ship goes down, be sufficient to take them with it? Or will they hang on and survive? There will be a crisis. I mean, if we go back to that neurological research, once a person is addicted to particular ideas or ways of thinking or just didn't, you know, addicts. Addicts have to hit rock bottom before they acknowledge that they have a problem and begin to take the necessary steps to cure themselves. So it may well be, and in fact the science suggests, that one of the things that shakes people out of a particular mindset is a crisis. So yes, a crisis may be necessary for the mainstream to wake up. Then they start paying attention to the lifeboats. How do we get out of this? And this is where the lifeboats, if they're out there and paddling strongly, begin to be models for the rest of us. And I think that's the main hope that I have. When I see these lifeboats emerging, they are people who have, if you like, pre-digested the nature of the problem, and have come up with some partial solutions, and an aggregate of these partial solutions may be what we need in the mainstream to get us through. But all of those lifeboats are dedicated to recognition of, although they don't use the terminology, a steady state. They're non growth. They're not pronatalist. They understand the necessity to balance population to the resource base, with some exceptions, but at least it's implicit in what they're doing. By the way, I think the whole notion of human colonization of other planets, the Moon and Mars, is a fantasy of the most dangerous kind because it gives false hope to millions. And I think that's an exceedingly undercutting thing to be doing right now. This planet evolved perfectly. We are the product of its perfect function. And to think that we've wrecked it, so we better go to a dead rock like Mars, is an extreme example of this most incredible hubris and it's not gonna work. Nobody in this audience is ever gonna set foot on another planet.

  Nandita Bajaj 1:29:38

  We got through some really good stuff, Bill. This was excellent. Whatever time we spend with you, it never feels enough. You know, we could have easily gone for four more hours chatting with you. You're such a fountain of wisdom and ecological groundedness and it's such an honor.

  William Rees 1:29:53

  I really appreciate the chance to speak to you guys again. You're doing such important work.

  Alan Ware 1:29:59

  That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.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 at population balance.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 that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.

  Nandita Bajaj 1:30:29

  Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.

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