Periodic contributor to CACOR, Dr.. William Rees recently wrote this article.
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable.
School of Community and Regional Planning, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada
World 2023, 4(3), 509-527; https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032
Submission received: 15 June 2023 / Revised: 7 August 2023 / Accepted: 8 August 2023 / Published: 11 August 2023
[Following are extracts from near the end of the paper. Ed.]
Summary and Conclusions: It’s Really Quite Simple
“Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense… If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone” (Vaclav Smil, [102]).
H. sapiens, like all other species, are naturally predisposed to grow, reproduce, and expand into all suitable accessible habitat. Physical growth is natural, but is only an early phase in the development of individual organisms; growth in sheer scale, including population growth, is characteristic of early phases of complex living systems, including human societies. However, both material and population growth in finite habitats are ultimately limited by the availability of essential ‘inputs,’ by the capacity of the system’s environment to assimilate (often toxic) outputs, or by various forms of negative feedback as previously listed. Growth will cease, either by “design or disaster.”
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It is crucial to remember that, right or wrong, conventional projections ignore the fact that the ecosphere is not actually now ‘supporting’ even the present eight billion people. The human enterprise is growing and maintaining itself by liquidating and polluting essential ecosystems and material assets. In short, even average material living standards are corrosively excessive, yet, in 2019, ‘almost a quarter of the global population…lived below the US$3.65 per day poverty line, and almost half, 47 percent, lived below the US$6.85 poverty line’ and the world considers sheer material growth as the means to address this problem. Following this path, eco-destruction will ramp up, increasing the probability of a self-induced simplification and contraction of the human enterprise.
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Bottom line: Any reasonable interpretation of previous histories, current trends, and complex systems dynamics would hold that global MTI culture is beginning to unravel and that the one-off human population boom is destined to bust. H. sapiens’ innate expansionist tendencies have become maladaptive. However, far from acknowledging and overriding our disadvantageous natural predispositions, contemporary cultural norms reinforce them. Arguably, in these circumstances, wide-spread societal collapse cannot be averted—collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be endured. Global civilizational collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by a major human population ‘correction’. In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its own predicament.