Too Much? Too Little? Too Late?
Where humanity is headed in an overcrowded, over-consuming world
This is a video panel discussion and to help spread the information (mostly not misinformation and disinformation as usual), I made a readable transcript so AI can read it and your comments too.
Transcript:
Zuade Kaufman 0:00
You’re all concerned about the industrial way of life and its negative impact on the natural world. As we weigh in on the consequences of our actions, and whether or not industrialism has a sustainable future, our discussion today is aptly titled ‘Too Much Too Little Too Late’. I’m Zuade Kaufman, publisher of Truthdig. Welcome to our event. In this discussion, moderated by Christopher Ketchum, the curator of our Truthdig series, green tinted glasses, we will explore the challenges of economic and population growth as they relate to renewable energy sources. Chris is no stranger to Truthdig. He is a self described roving journalist, essayist, poet and amateur naturalist who covers public lands and environmental issues, and has written extensively on the conflict between the industrial way of life and the natural world. As an author, he wrote the book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West. Joining him our panelists who span the worlds of math, physics and chemistry, Dr. William Rees is a human ecologist, and an ecological economist. He is the former Director and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia School of Community and Regional Planning. Nandita Bajaj is the executive director of the advocacy group Population Balance, and she’s an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she teaches about the perils of pronatalism, human supremacy and human growth ism. Rex Weyler is the co founder of Greenpeace International. He is a writer, an ecologist who advocates for degrowth. We’d like to thank the panelists for sharing their expertise on these critical and alarming issues. And thank you Truthdig audience for your continued support of our thought provoking events. As we discussed the significant matters of our time. I’ll hand it over to Chris.
Christopher Ketcham 2:31
Okay. Hey, great to be here. Bill, Rex, Nandita, so this is a subject dear to my heart, as you know, something I’ve written about many times, the question of whether industrial civilization can be made green, quote, unquote, sustainable. Ecologically sane. And it seems to me that the the evidence to date suggests the answer is no. But what do I know maybe I’m a cynical journalist, and, and maybe there are hopeful signs out there that we could alter the seemingly suicidal trajectory of a techno industrial society. The Iroquois didn’t seem to think so. I want to read to you guys from a little passage from the 1977 Basic Call to Consciousness from the Iroquois address to the Western world. And part of it reads, “today the species of man is facing a question of its very survival. The way of life known as Western civilization is on a death path. — death path, on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness they can only go forward into areas of more efficient destruction.” So my first question is for you, Bill, are we on a death path?
William Rees 4:05
Are we on a death path? Well, yeah, we are obviously I think if current trends continue, there’s very little contradiction to that fact, we’re in a state of overshoot. Overshoot means that human beings are using even renewable resources faster than natural systems can regenerate. And we’re dumping wastes far in excess of the capacity of the natural systems to assimilate and circulate that waste. And if you think about it, we’re essentially turning the ecosphere, the living film, on the surface of this earth into more human bodies, and human infrastructure, our artifacts of civilization. This is frankly, a terminal process if it continues indefinitely. So that’s the technical answer to your simple question.
Christopher Ketcham 4:54
Yeah. Okay, so what about the Green New Deal? That’s supposed to be I save this whole system and make it renewable and sustainable. I mean, we talk about the green transition. But the green transition seems to ignore that we’re already using 1.75 Earth’s of renewable resources every year that’s based on the average consumption of 8 million human beings. So obviously, a green transition would require reducing our total ecological material footprint. Yet mainstream environmentalism doesn’t talk about that mainstream environmentalism instead focuses solely on climate change. Without situating it in the broader perspective of it being just one aspect of ecological overshoot. So why are we fixed obsessively on on carbon emissions and climate change? Rather than looking broadly at overshoot?
William Rees 6:05
Well, I, think the simplest answer is that humans don’t think broadly at all, we tend to forget that we are an evolved species, that in fact, the human brain evolved in a period of relative simplicity. We lived in very simple societies, you met relatively few people, you lived in a restricted home range, which could become very familiar, and over the course of an individual lifetime, not much changed. So you could argue that, in effect, the environment poses relatively few real challenges to the developing human brain. Yeah, we’ve got a big brain. Yeah, we can think in analytic terms, and so on and so forth. But we do not think in systems terms, we tend to think simplistically, we looked at one problem at a time, we tend to look at simple cause effect relationships. So when you put us in that context of global change, climate change is an obvious symptom of overshoot, but it’s one of many problems. It’s what I call a co-symptom of a meta problem, the meta problem being overshoot, but there’s something that’s manageable to the average human being. So that we think we can deal with this problem, the symptoms are obvious, perhaps the causes are equally obvious. So we jump on to a simplistic solution to a very complex problem. And the problem is that if we succeeded in doing a green energy transition, nothing else would change. You see, energy is the means by which humans have appropriated all of the other resources needed to explode the human enterprise in just the past 200 years. So if we shift energy sources without changing our habits, or values, that will simply continue down this path of devouring the planet and converting it to human artifacts and human bodies. So it’s no solution at all. Besides which is biophysically impossible. So that’s a whole other answer to your question.
Christopher Ketcham 8:08
You’ve written a lot about that, about the biophysical and possibilities of a renewable energy being able to power this energy ravenous, dynamic civilization, can you just briefly tell us about, about that about the limits, renew the limits to renewable energy in the context of, of, you know, in a civilization in which we all want lots and lots of power, and always more power in terms of energy, in which we want to travel and eat meat and become affluent, and and et cetera, et cetera?
William Rees 8:46
Yeah, well, you’ve described, you know, again, some fundamental dimensions of evil human nature, we are acquisitive, we are consumers. By nature, we want stuff and we want it now. Of course, that’s all reinforced by a cultural paradigm, which has really trained us to be hyper consumers, consumers on I don’t know whatever drug you want to think about. But look, the impossibility is simple. First of all, we’re on a very serious timeframe here. Right now, despite everything we’ve heard about the explosion of renewable energy, particularly wind and solar power, these are the two major forms of alternative green energy, so called in which investment is going. In 2022, that’s last year, the best the last year for which we have complete data, wind and solar provided about 11 and a half or 12% of the world’s electricity. But electricity is only what 18 or 19% of final energy consumption. So wind and solar gave us 2.5%, maybe 2.3% of our total energy supply. Now, that’s after 30 years. rapid growth and development. If you thought of that, in the terms that we’re speaking here, when we need to de, you know, carbonised by 2050, or whatever people are saying these, it’s an Impossibility Theorem, it can’t happen in that timeframe. In any case, in order to do it requires massive several 100% increase in the mining activity for several rare earths and minerals. This causes massive ecological damage, not only at the mine site, but because of the refining, transportation, manufacturing, and so on, of all of this infrastructure, think of replacing most of our currently fossil fuel based infrastructure with a comparable quantity of material running on electricity, and it becomes a problem of astronomical proportions. You’d be recreating industrial civilization in the next two or three decades. Again, it’s not going to happen. And if it did, it would be a disaster. In fact, I’ve sometimes said that the only thing worse than the failure of the green energy transition on a finite planet would be the success of the green energy transition, because we’d simply enable the behemoth human system to overwhelm the planet.
Christopher Ketcham 11:13
To the what human system?
William Rees 11:15
We’re a behemoth organism.
Christopher Ketcham 11:19
Yeah, yeah.
William Rees 11:20
It’s just a word that came to mind as I was thinking.
Christopher Ketcham 11:39
It’s a good word, it.s a juggernaut, it’s Lewis Mumford’s mega machine, or Homo colossus, as William Catton described it, it’s
William Rees 11:38
One other thing is important here, and that is, people think, simplistically, and we think we can handle the climate situation. If we were to shift to thinking about overshoot, it becomes impossible to imagine that we can change that, it would mean real change. You see, the beauty about the climate focus, is that because we have such a technology fix, and romance with this notion that the greatest resources, the human mind, the capacity for technology, continuously to replace any entity provided by nature, then the climate thing seems solvable. Whereas if you switch to overshoot, it would mean we’d actually have to change things, we didn’t like to do something very differently. I mean, you mentioned at the outset, we’d have to shrink our ecological footprint. Listen, the only real solution to overshoot, by definition, is a large reduction [in population and], a massive reduction, in fact, in what we call economic throughput, the consumption of energy and material, and it sends all of it goes through the system and emerges as entropic waste, a huge reduction in the production of waste materials as well. That means a contraction of the human enterprise, which is why Rex is very much well, all of us, I think, here are concerned about degrowth, we cannot sustain the current human enterprise, which is a energy and material consuming, I’ll use the word behemoth.
Christopher Ketcham 13:14
So So Rex, Nandita, you know, the issue here is growth, right and the system that prioritizes growth, and that can only function through further growth. So for example, now that you your your expertise is population and population ecology and demographics. You know, some people have reported that the population growth dynamic in which we’re embedded and which which so many people say is a wonderful thing more people means a bigger economy has means more consumers means more dynamism, more creativity from the human brain. And I know from personal experience of the human brain isn’t very, isn’t that great, right. So why aren’t we talking about population is a key driver in the growth dynamic that is fast leading us towards this cliff?
Nandita Bajaj 14:15
So I think one of you mentioned, one of the key reasons why we’re not talking about population is is because population growth benefits, a lot of power structures, who can rely on the growth of people and yet, you know, population over the last three, four or five decades has become extremely controversial as a subject. There’s been a real silencing of the population factor. Even though people are generally, some people are okay to talk about the reduction in our the need for reduction in our consumption. The top the very word population, brings up the history of course of population pop policies for a lot of people like the China’s one child policy. But that is not the full story. Like you mentioned, Chris, if you look deeply at who is served by the silencing of the population discourse, you see its true roots, deeply entrenched, entrenched. pronatalism. Pronatalism is a combination of patriarchal, religious, nationalistic. economic pressures, that are placed generally on women to bear children in order to grow these power structures. A growing population ensures you have a steady supply of cheap labor, more consumers, more religious followers, more taxpayers, a larger military, a bigger tribe, and so on. And, you know, pronatal ism has been around for as long as we’ve had patriarchy, at least 10,000 years. And it has flourished completely unchecked for millennia. But it’s really what Bill was talking about the growth in the human enterprise that’s happened over the last 200 years on, you know, fossil fueled industrialization, that we’ve really expanded our population from a billion to 8 billion in literally just 200 years when we’ve had hardly any growth in our population for 250,000 years. So that’s a massive, massive expansion. And of course, we’ve had a huge consumption increase during that time. So unequally distributed, you know, there’s a lot of socio economic issues and equity issues there. But that aside, population is still not talked about. But when we did, you know, in the 70s, when we did start talking about population as a real core issue that needed to be addressed in order to address poverty, in order to address ecological degradation, there were a lot of bodies, the UN, NGOs, international, you know, governmental support, to institute family planning programs, that had incredible effect in empowering girls and women to have greater reproductive choice to take control over their own reproduction. And we saw a rapid decline in fertility rate. You know, and yet there were some of policies, some of the policies that used coercive measures because people lacked imagination, in what was really needed to, you know, cause a decline in fertility, which was to confront patriarchy. But interestingly, what I want to say is around that same time, due to the rise and feminism, the rise in ecological movement, it already started to threaten a lot of the power structures that were in place. And in response to that there was a rise in this free market fundamentalism and religious conservatism that started to push back against these these, you know, population policies, because they were not to benefit from the population growth that they had for so long. And free market fundamentalism was really premised on this idea that population growth is necessary for economic growth, especially it allowed rich countries like the US to exploit the resources and labor in poor countries. And these family planning programs were having the opposite effect. And then religious fundamentalism, you know, especially with huge interference from the Vatican, opposed birth control abortion, and similarly vilified these programs. And they’ve been extremely successful in kind of using this broad brush of labeling all population policies as coercive, and ironically, you know, they were the ones who popularized the term Neo Malthusian, which is now being thrown around by a lot of liberal left media, who has also bought into this growth mantra to shut down…
Christopher Ketcham 19:09
I’ve been called the Neo Malthusian.
Nandita Bajaj 19:12
I think we all on this call have probably been called…. And you can see the UN has bought into this, the UN under its sustainable development, the most oxymoronic phrase, you know, has adopted this growth mantra where it’s now pushing for more industrialization, more green tech, more green, you know, agricultural revolution without recognizing that it’s eating right out of the hands of the very people who you know, subjugate the reproductive rights and the the feminism that they were trying to fight for.
Christopher Ketcham 19:51
So so on the note of on the question of why population is addressed in in the major media and even the minor alt media in the US It states. Why is it that folks like me, and so many editors I deal with, right, are loath to talk about populations, not that we’re I mean, I don’t if let’s say I’m a typical journalist working in the field or a typical editor, and I’m like, Nope, can’t go there? Well, okay, why can’t we go there? Because I don’t stand to benefit or as the average editor doesn’t stand to benefit in any way from from not talking about population or facilitating more population growth. So what is it? What is it? What was the subject forgotten?
Nandita Bajaj 20:39
I think, again, this pro growth economic growth model that was pushed forth by market fundamentalists entered demography, and that conversation that somehow countries need economic development and industrialization, the kind that we’ve had in Western countries in order to develop, and then automatically when countries develop, their fertility rates start declining. Well, that’s completely false, because data, recent data actually shows that fertility decline wherever it has happened has happened as a direct result of family planning programs, of empowering people to make autonomous reproductive decisions, not because suddenly, they’ve got refrigerators and cars, so they’re gonna have fewer kids. People have fewer kids when they have the power to choose.
Christopher Ketcham 21:38
And when you say, frankly, we’re talking about women.
Nandita Bajaj 21:42
Again, exactly. I’m talking generally women who, you know, I mean, you look at countries that still have the highest fertility rates. Same countries have the highest rates of child marriage, same country’s highest rates of unmet need for contraceptives, because of patriarchal and religious barriers. Same countries have the highest rates of child labor exploitation, of, you know, lots of other subjugation like sexual subjugation of women and girls. So this idea that somehow more development is needed is a Western ideology, really a form of neocolonialism, that allows countries rich countries to continue to just read, you know, steal, land, grab and steal the resources and labor from these countries. And I think the left has liberal media, commentators have, unfortunately bought into that same growth mentality and bought into this idea that somehow talking about population means we’re targeting people to reduce their fertility when they don’t want to, or like you to, to use coercion somehow to reduce fertility rates, instead of the very opposite thing. All contemporary population rights advocates are really talking about, exactly the opposite is confronting patriarchal norms. So girls and women actually have a say, on what they do with their lives and their bodies.
Christopher Ketcham 23:25
And you know, in terms of that history of cohesion isn’t it doesn’t really come down to two examples of sterilization briefly in India and the one child policy that you mentioned earlier in China, but for the large part, or in large part, the population stabilization programs all across the world that began in the 60s and sort of had their high points, I guess, the 70s and 80s. These are not coercive, and they were largely successful. And they were, in many ways embraced by the broad population of these countries, where were population or fertility reductions were achieved. Is that
Nandita Bajaj 24:05
Yeah, I think you’re very right, Chris. Yeah, I think it’s more than maybe those two examples. There were, you know, few other examples where coercion was used. But your point about the vast majority of population policies being voluntary, non coercive, empowering, and having seen a rapid decline in the empowerment of girls and women, and a decline in fertility was a result of these voluntary programs. But most people just remember the China’s one child policy that’s and guess who popularized that notion? The people who benefit from population growth market fundamentalist religious conservatives, if you Google, the phrase, “overpopulation is a myth”. And I encourage viewers to do that. Look at what are the top recent search searches like Come up, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Breakthrough Institute, all these libertarian think tanks, you know, Catholics, etc, the Catholic anti choice Institute, all of the same bodies that have popularized the notion that free market economy is what’s needed for the globe to succeed. loathe the idea of population reduction.
Christopher Ketcham 25:29
So, years ago, when I was working on my book about the American West, I interviewed a wonderful bear biologist and David Matson, and he and I were just we had wide ranging discussions. And one thing he said was, he was so disgusted with how the environmental movement had begun to embrace market fundamentalism, and that he got into environmentalism really got into ecology, because he believed that it signaled a path forward towards an actual transformation of our politics, the transformation of our politics away from capitalist growthism and human supremacy and the just in the just the the ambition that we shall dominate and subjugate the entire natural world for the benefit of the one holy chosen species on Earth. So Rex, I want to ask you what, how, I mean, is this an act is my friend, David Madison’s portrait of how environmentalism has gone astray accurate?
Rex Weyler 26:44
Yeah, unfortunately, it’s at least partially accurate. It’s, it’s essentially accurate. Yes. There are still some serious ecologists in the world. But I think the environmental movement overall is kind of lost the thread of really ecology. And part of it is because what you alluded to which I call human exceptionalism, which is this, this notion that, you know, human needs are always trumped any ecological need, we need to build more homes, we need to grow more food, we need to create more gadgets, More comfort, more, more pleasure for 8 billion humans, which will soon enough be 9 billion, 10 billion. And there’s no limit. And, I mean, nobody likes limits put on themselves. So I understand this, psychologically, it goes back to what Bill was saying about how simplistically, we typically think we don’t think in complex systems. So we, we don’t, we don’t want to set limits on ourselves. We don’t want to say there’s anything we can’t do if we want to. But in fact, from an ecological point of view, there’s lots of limits on every living creature on Earth, and ecology is filled with limits, and all creatures have to deal with those limits. Part of the part of the reasons I think that environmentalism lost the thread and as drifted toward sort of market fundamentalism is well, it’s part of the natural evolution of, of new and creative and important ideas, if you look at human liquid the Catholic Church did to the teachings of Jesus, you know, look, you know, if you look at what how the status quo eats everything, so, you know, look, look at what happened to the idea, simple idea of, of sharing are the resources, which was the idea of socialism and communism, of course, that turned into giant bureaucracies, ideologies, violence, and horror shows. So it’s not it’s not just a right wing capitalist problem. It’s also, you know, left wing ideologies, too, because they, they’re both ideologies that embrace human exceptionalism, and industrialism. And, you know, II call environmental groups feel like well, they’ve got to raise money, they got to, you know, they’ve got to keep their constituents happy. They don’t want to raise issues like population because there’ll be a sector of their constituencies that will interpret that as being anti human anti people. If we talk about population, we’re setting limits on people and that sounds like an anti liberal idea. So you have liberal ideologies that won’t talk about populate that we know why the conservative ideologies won’t talk about population because population growth, they think that’s the road to more wealth. The liberal ideologies don’t want to talk about population, because they’re mostly it’s because people are afraid that they’re going to be accused of being anti human, or blaming the poor. That’s one thing I hear a lot, oh, you’re you’re blaming the poor for our problems. It’s just the rich people’s consumption. That’s the real problem. And that’s partially true. That’s the problem. Yeah, it is partially true that, that the consumption of the wealthy nations is, is a huge issue. But sheer number 8 billion humans on the planet is also an issue.
Christopher Ketcham 30:54
Well, Bill,
William Rees 30:56
I’d really like to add to that, because if you think of the 8 billion, about a quarter of humanity right now has caused most of the so called environmental problems that we’re confronting, they’re not really environmental problems. They’re cultural problems. They stem from a set of beliefs, values and assumptions that I think we’ve all alluded to. The growth ethic is embedded in the western mindset. And we know from neurological experiments that once ideas are repeated over and over and over again, they literally form synaptic circuits in the human brain, which causes people to seek out reinforcing of those same ideas. So we’ve got a situation which is self reinforcing here. And we tend to deny or forget any kind of contrary information, so that it’s a cultural problem, not really an environmental problem. When we’re concerned about the so called environment, we have to recognize that there is no environment, that human beings are part of a matrix of a living film on the surface of the Earth, each of us on this panel, it contain atoms or molecules once that roamed the prairies of North America, or Asia, in the bodies of dinosaurs, that the fabric of life is continuously recycling, we are part of this entity called the the ecosphere, if you want the technical term. But the point of the matter is that humans are just one of 1000s of so called consumer species on a finite planet. And the simple fact of the matter is that all of that life depends on a finite throughput of photosynthetic energy captured by green plants. Most of it, there’s a bit of chemosynthesis going on as well. But it’s mostly photosynthesis. And the more humans there are, the higher our life’s standards, the higher we’d on the food chain, and so on, the more of that photosynthetic throughput humans appropriate for themselves. And the less is available for the rest of nature. So we are literally competitively displacing non human life, from the fabric that sustains us, which is an insane situation. But that’s that’s what we’re doing. And we have to recognize that, in natural systems, a balance is maintained between the growth of any one population, species population, and the negative feedbacks that hold it in check. So every species, including humans is capable of exponential growth. But in nature, were kept in a fluctuating equilibrium with changing ecological circumstances. So in times, when resources are abundant, we grow a bit then we’re slammed down when resources get scarce, or disease kicks in or we become attractive because of our numbers to predators or whatever it might be. But something unique happened with human beings in the early 19th century. And that was the discovery of how to use fossil fuel. I think we forget this in our culture, our utter dependence of fossil fuel. So Nandita dimension that we’ve expanded from, what 1 billion to 8 billion in just 200 years. Well, that’s one, two thousand one over 2000, no, 1/1,250 times faster than the first billion. So in just a fraction of human history, we expand it to 8 billion people. Ten generations if humans have experienced sufficient continuous growth to notice it, that’s 10 generations out of 1000s and yet our culture has taken this to be the norm. When this period of consumptive growth consumptive meaning that we’re growing but we’re consuming the rest of the planet, is the single most abnormal period in human history and It resembles what I call a one off population plague phase of growth, other species go through a fluctuating populations in nature, humans have done this now on a global scale, we are eroding. Look, we’re up there at 8 billion with all of our infrastructure and cultural artifacts. But it’s also stained on a fountain of fossil fuel. So if you were to cut that fossil fuel immediately, say, in 10 years, the entire system would collapse on itself, it is being sustained by this enormous throughput of energy, a one time gift in the form of fossil fuel, which is why we’re struggling to try to find a substitute to maintain that system up there. But it can’t really happen on a finite planet. And I think that’s the simplest message we can bring to you. It’s, in fact, it’s shrinking, because of the consumption of humans are inhibiting the capacity of the planet, to maintain its historic levels of bio productivity. And pollution is destroying much of the remaining productivity. Most people don’t think of it. But climate change is a waste management issue. Because carbon dioxide is the single largest waste product by weight of industrial economies. And it’s simply symbolic of the incapacity of the natural system any longer to assimilate the full volume of our wastes. So it really is an insane situation that we are in denial of absolute denial of.
Christopher Ketcham 36:31
So what you’re describing the what you’re describing, though, it seems to be an intractable problem, without certainly without any easy solution. And to Rex’s point about about where environmentalism is gone astray, what I’ve noticed in interviewing folks from mainstream environmental NGOs, as they want to have some sort of effect, they want to feel like they’ve got donors giving them money. And so they want to show that they’ve done something. And they’ve, they’ve, they’ve made some sort of beneficial change to the world that then justifies all the money coming in from the donor. And I, as a journalist, as investigative journalist, I can guarantee you that, from my work, as a reporter, I have changed nothing. Zip. My articles have had zero effect on the broad trajectory of society, maybe I’ve changed a couple of hearts and minds here and there. But you know, so I recognize that almost the futility of fighting against a mega machine against this juggernaut that is fueled by fossil fuels and absent fossil fuels, what do you have, you have a catastrophic contraction of economies and populations, that will be of course, politically unacceptable. And it’s Bill, you had a great line, one of your essays that goes something like this, the politically expedient, or the politically feasible, is ecologically irrelevant. And correct me if I’m getting this wrong, and ecologically relevant is politically impossible. And it seems that we’re, that’s where we’re stuck, really, when you get to the heart of it. And you look honestly, at at, at, at the ecological world problematic, right. So Bill, talk a little bit about that about the politically feasible being ecologically relevant. And again, maybe I got the phrase wrong.
William Rees 38:20
No, but you’re, you’re basically correct. We know what we should be doing to solve this problem. But we can’t possibly grasp for that needle, or that nettle, because it would require massive changes to our population policies, to the industrial infrastructure, and so on, and so forth. So what is ecologically necessary, simply infeasible, politically, I can’t get a good discussion on these issues going on any of the major CBC channel that Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channels that I communicate with with some regularity, they won’t touch it, it’s just not politically expedient for them to do so as a public broadcaster, so we’re in that kind of trap. But look, it’s really important to understand that what you’re dealing with here is, again, a problem of the human of human cognition. We don’t live in reality. One of the characteristics that really distinguishes humans from other species is that we socially construct stories, paradigms, cultural narratives, and then we live out of those narratives as if they were true. And so once we’re embedded in one of these narratives, anything that contradicts the directions the narrative is taking it is simply ignored. And that’s why you and I and Rex and Nandita are having virtually no influence on what’s going on out there in the mainstream. Because there are billions of dollars being spent every year to reinforce the mainstream narrative that growth is good that more is better that we’re all in a game here and the best way to solve the poverty problem in developing nations is to further economic growth. because we wouldn’t want to share. But you know, even if you’ve a very slim sliver of the economic pie, if that pie gets bigger and bigger, that little wedge gets wider and wider at the margin. And so if we grow the economy big enough, everybody’s going to have more than sufficiency. It’s a wonderful story. And as I said, humans live out of their stories, they do not live out of the contrary reality. So as long as you can tell comfortable people, and I’m speaking now, the consuming populations of the West, that they don’t have to do anything. That’s us. Yeah. Yeah. That we can remain in our current exalted position, materially, and the rest of the world can go to catch up with us a wonderful story. Why wouldn’t I want to believe that, instead of a story that says, You’ve got to look in the West, we’d have to cut back 80% of our material consumption in order to equilibrate across the world?
Christopher Ketcham 41:00
God forbid?
William Rees 41:01
Absolutely. And even if everybody lived in total equity, if we were all equal all 8 million of us, we’d still be an overshoot. So that’s not enough.
Christopher Ketcham 41:11
Yeah. So that the you know, and we’ve known about all these issues of overshoot, we’d known about the the the destiny that Homo sapiens, growth is technological, industrial homosapiens faces. Given the limits of a tiny planet. We’ve known about this since 1972, Limits to Growth report, laid it all out before a world audience and sold millions and millions of copies, right. We in the team of researchers at MIT concluded Yes, we have to stop growth and then there has to be an equitable distribution of existing wealth. Well, problems, because once you start demanding an equitable distribution of wealth, you’re talking about revolution, you’re talking about political, political change. That is, that is a just a tearing up of existing political infrastructures, a collapsing or destruction of existing ideology, which is revolution. So is there any revolution on the horizon? Maybe what’s necessary?
William Rees 42:16
Look, when limits to growth was published, I had a stack of papers two feet high on my desk. That rejected limits growth, mostly written by economists. Yes, because the economists are profoundly dedicated to two propositions first, that the economy is completely separate from the ecosphere. And that’s absolutely ridiculous presumption, but most of their models are based on that assumption. The second is that technology can substitute for nature. And the main criticisms of limits to growth were based on the fact that they didn’t take into account the evolution of technology, that technology would solve all of these problems. So within a couple of years limits of growth disappeared. However, there have been now for at least for that I’m aware of independent studies of how the real world has behaved compared to the projections of the so called base case scenario of limits to growth study, one of these studies just came out last week, I believe, all of them confirm that we’re on track for a major contraction of population and economy sometime later in the century. So I think the Limits to Growth study was rejected prematurely. It was a simple, primitive, perhaps, but realistic. One of my computer science professors told me it’s always better to be approximately correct, then very precisely wrong. So economists, economists develop marvelously interested models that are better precisely wrong. I think limited growth is roughly correct.
Christopher Ketcham 43:50
So Nandita, let’s talk about what’s overarching all this what’s behind all these collective decisions we make to embrace growth to to embrace technology as the Savior. Does it all come back to human supremacism? And this idea that we were the chosen ones were the gods smiled upon us. I mean, it go back to Genesis, was at Genesis 126. And the Lord said, Thou shalt rule over everything that crawl Earth on the earth and have dominion over all living things, lunacy. And yet, that’s the, I mean, hell you talk to the average person, the average person will tell you exactly what they’ll say or what Rex was saying what Bill has been saying that human beings deserve all our comforts, and pleasures, and conveniences and rising affluence at the expense of all our brothers nonhuman brothers and sisters in the wild world. So for example, between 1970 and present, we’ve lost 69% of all vertebrate populations on the earth, which is got absolute holocaust. This is a this is a catastrophe if you care about other than human creatures, if you don’t, then you look at the aisles of Walmart and, and whole frauds foods and you say, wow, we’re doing great look at all this abundance. So talk a bit about human supremacism and how this and I mean to Bill’s point, humans supremacism is a construction of reality. Absolutely false construction of reality.
Nandita Bajaj 45:35
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you described it really well, Chris, and, and also Rex and Bill have alluded to it. Human supremacy, the idea that we are the most superior species to have ever existed on the planet, and that nature and the nonhuman world simply exists to serve us. And if it doesn’t benefit us immediately, then we have all the power to… prerogative to kill them, dominate them, whatever it is that we need to do, they’re simply there to, for us to, you know, commodify, as resources, as Bill said, to turn into human artifacts, in fact, you know, you you brought up kind of Judeo Christian ideology that that, you know, we think led to the worldview of human supremacy, it definitely contributed to the modern world view of it. But I think it goes back even further, I think 10,000 years ago, when we first started, agri, the agricultural revolution, when we first started de you know, domesticating animals, and went from gatherer Hunter societies, tomorrow, settlement societies, and that’s where the idea of domination over animals over nature, nature is property, animals as property, women as property, people with lower socioeconomic status as property, the enslavement, basically, all of the different versions of social economic types of oppression, the systems of oppression that exists today, including militarism, started with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. And, you know, we, the other thing we often think is somehow it’s a religious fundamentalist idea that human supremacy has become the dominant worldview, science played a huge part in buying into that the Cartesian scientific philosophy, you know, I think, therefore I am, and because animals don’t think the way we do, because nature doesn’t have the capacity to think like we do, we can just appropriate and exploit it. It’s just there as a machine, as a human colony. So I think much of the science that is actually being produced, is perpetuating that dominant worldview. And then, of course, you know, we’ve had 1000s of years of exploitation and the genocide of indigenous communities where we have totally lost that connection of reverence and respect to the nonhuman world. And now, I’d say there’s been a global brainwash through imperialism through colonialism, where, really the modern human civilization across the globe, for the most part, believes in human supremacy with small communities, you know, that are still protected from that who, who are living in kind of a symbiotic relationship.
Christopher Ketcham 48:47
So very, very quickly, you reminded me when you’re talking about how science is also helped maintain the false reality of human supremacism. There’s a great essay by Lynn White Jr, the historical roots of our ecological crisis from I think, 1966 or 67, in which he basically said, Okay, science when science developed into the Baconian principles in the 15 or 1600s. What it did is it appropriated that it basically took the mandate from Genesis and then secularized it and basically said, Okay, we’re gonna maintain this dominance without a religious veneer. And, and so and White’s thesis was hated, because so many scientists said no, no, no, we’re totally objected. What are you talking about? Well, I think, I think in fact, he was he was correct. So, Rex, a question for you. You have talked about the need for for environmentalists to radically disrupt the growth machine. How do we do that? Other practical ways? I mean, you can, I don’t know. street protests? Sabotage? Conversations like this and hope to change people’s minds? I don’t know. I mean, like I said, I’ve been writing about this subject for a long time you guys been working on it even longer collectively? To what effect?
Rex Weyler 50:18
Yeah, just tough question. And, you know, I’ve been involved in ecology efforts for 50 years. I can’t say I’m, I’m pleased with the speed of change. Of course, I’m not. So what can we do? Well, first of all, toss out the taboos against even talking about these issues about overshoot, and population, let’s at least have the conversation. I don’t care where you stand on the issue. Let’s talk about it. So in our media, in our in environmental groups, in our, you know, liberal institutions in our financial institutions, let’s have the discussions, first of all. And then let’s also think of of some metrics, if we look at this is what makes me concern is if we look at any significant metric to measure the health of our ecosystems on Earth, they are all worse than they were 60 years ago, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, or 50 years ago, when I and my my friends started getting involved with ecology and created Greenpeace. Let’s look at the metrics let’s measure the you know, the when we are we have the so called Nine boundaries, you know, ecological boundaries, but we’ve already exceeded six of them. The nutrient cycles, phosphorus and nitrogen have been exceeded. climate health has been exceeded the land changes have been exceeded species diversity and health which you’ve already talked about. Biodiversity, we’ve exceeded that tackle ecological boundary, freshwater depletion and pollution, toxins in our environment and what what is called novel entities, that is all the toxins, the indican, disruptors, the plastics, I just was just reading an article about plastics in the belly of camels dying in the desert, and, you know, it goes on, it goes on and on. And then, you know, the other the other three so called boundaries, ocean acidification, aerosols, and ozone depletion are all on their way to being overshot. So we’ve overshot all of these boundaries, and we’re not talking about it. We’re talking about solving climate change by making more gadgets. And making more windmills….
Christopher Ketcham 52:46
There’s money to be made, because…
Rex Weyler 52:49
I’m I’m not against windmills and solar panels, Christopher. I think that’s a good idea. But you know, Bill has pointed out right now we have a 19 terawatt global economy. And 2.3% of that is powered by wind and solar. We’re not getting there. And at the rate, we’re building wind and solar would take us I just did the calculation a few years, a few weeks ago, at the rate that we’re actually creating wind and solar, it’ll take us 20,000 years to create that 19 terawatts. And in the meantime, we keep growing that 19 terawatt demand look. So we’re not solving the problem. So first thing is we have to accept contraction, which Bill has talked about, we have to accept contraction, we have to accept in human population is a real issue, as Nandita has mentioned, we have to accept that we have to contract human enterprise at the largest scale. And we have to have these conversations. And and the environmental groups and the politicians and the economists can’t create taboos around even talking about this stuff.
Christopher Ketcham 54:00
Yeah, well,
Rex Weyler 54:02
And then then we have to take action. But we have to take for example, with the population issue. For example, we need universal women’s rights. And we need to fight hard for that. We need to fight hard for universal contraception available everywhere and free and cheap. And just those two things and eliminate all unwanted pregnancies, just doing that we could actually reverse population growth into a decline. But we’re not doing these things. Because a we’re afraid to even talk about it. And be you know, we have powerful forces that want the population to grow and want the economy to grow. So there’s lots of things we can do, Christopher. We’re not doing them and we’re not talking about we’re fooling ourselves. So it’s like the addict. We we’ve had 36 Climate meetings in 44 years, and the UN and human carbon emissions have doubled In that time in 36 minutes, it reminds me as if you had a friend who was who was a drug addict, and they went into rehab 36 times over 44 years, and their drug intake doubled, wouldn’t use recommend they try something new and different.
Christopher Ketcham 55:14
For sure.
William Rees 55:15
What Rex is talking about is the power of our mindset, the socially constructed alternative view of reality. And as long as we live out of that view of reality, all the facts that Rex has talked about, and that we’ve been discussing here, make no difference whatsoever. What is the point of facts if you’re living out of a fantasy, and I can’t emphasize this enough, people simply do not realize the extent to which we’ve been brainwashed, literally, into believing in a certain way of being on this earth, particularly in Western techno industrial society. And it’s deliberate. That means if you look at the history of this whole neoliberal way of thinking back from late 60s and early 70s, good starting point would be an essay called the Kennedy era was called, but it was basically an essay to the US Chamber of Commerce, saying that look, feminism and environmentalism.
Christopher Ketcham 56:17
It was the Powell memo.
William Rees 56:21
Oh, that’s right. The Powell memorandum [1971] which you can download online, instructing the industrial heartland of the United States to start funding in economics departments or professorships, or think tanks, and then that there is somebody mentioned a whole list of think tanks, all of which sprang out of the urgings of Louis Pauwells memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce. So we’ve been literally millions and millions of dollars put into the social construction of this growth fist mentality, which acts as a kind of intellectual shield against contrary information. So the data I mean, Rex has talked about at length simply does not penetrate. If you believe something profoundly enough, it doesn’t matter a damn what the contrary evidence is. And belief is so powerful and a people religion, every religion, pardon me, I don’t mean to offend anyone, is a social construct. But they’re so powerful that people go to war over their social construct with people who are genetically identical to themselves. Young men blow themselves up because of their belief in some fantasy created out of their religious ideology. Economists win Nobel prizes out of an ideological insanity, such as the notion that, look, climate change is mostly going to affect agriculture. But since agriculture is only two or 3% of the economy, if we just grow for a year or two, we can overcome the loss of agriculture. I mean, that’s a Nobel Prize winning kind of thesis. It’s William Nordhaus. Well, yeah. So this is the kind of insane world in which we live literally insane, because there is no sanity, in the sense of paying attention to the external realities within which culture is embedded economic models are so utterly, utterly devoid of any important information about the ecosystems or even the social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world, that it’s an insanity of humankind, that we place so much confidence in economics, as opposed to the real world,
Christopher Ketcham 58:37
yet, what’s the real world? Let’s call it ecology. Right? All right. Real world that? Yeah. Yeah,
Nandita Bajaj 58:49
I could just add to what’s happened as a result of, of our uncritical support of this ideology, especially on the left and I identify as as a left leaning person. But I and I know this this issue is not a partisan issue. This issue affects everybody. Ecological overshoot is not a left issue. Yet, because the liberal media commentators and lefties generally have silenced the issue of population. What has happened is the far right and religious fundamentalist and market fundamentalist have swooped in to fill the void and are now creating a different kind of alarmism that we are facing a human population collapse, and that we need to figure out how to put women back into their positions their traditional gender roles, so we can convince them with baby bonuses with abortion bans with contraceptive disinformation, to start having babies for the economy, because economy is the ultimate measure of human success and And it represents a tremendous backsliding of human rights of reproductive rights of children’s rights of ecological justice for the justice of the millions of species that have vanished. The justice for the billions of animals that are currently part of the agricultural industrial system that are that are being slaughtered. It makes absolutely no sense. And yet he was looking at some of the major media outlets that are reporting. Everybody’s talking about the panic of the fertility decline. This is some of the biggest left media, how are people not alarmed about the language shaming women for not producing enough babies for the economy? Why is that not being challenged? Why are we uncritically accepting this ideology?
Christopher Ketcham 1:00:59
Right? Well, let’s challenge it. I mean, it’s, it’s to Rex’s
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:02
point, you know, we need to start talking about these things, we need to remove the taboo from academia, that is no longer teaching students about population and demography, or ecology in the way we were being taught 3040 years ago.
Christopher Ketcham 1:01:22
So let’s take some questions from viewers here, one of them. I don’t know if we’ll be able to answer this one. Question. So what is the economic alternative to the capitalist economy that is built on perpetual growth? Can you guys come up with a whole new economy in minutes? Well, there
Rex Weyler 1:01:42
was there was the steady state economy described by Herman Daly. Which really if you read that book now, yeah, he got it pretty much pretty exactly right. You know, this, this idea of a steady state economy goes back 150. It goes back to John Stuart Mill in England who could see the the factories growing across the landscape and realizable sooner, you know, capitalism is great, but sooner or later, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to stop growing. And but anyway, so the steady state economy is one good and I think Bill probably has some billon Nandita probably have some ideas about that as well.
Speaker 4 1:02:25
Well, I look, I’m an acolyte of Herman Daly. So the steady state economy to me is certainly the most well articulated alternative may look, your body is a steady state, a certain amount of stuff comes in a certain amount of stuff goes out, and it maintains yourself in thermodynamic equilibrium. You don’t go perpetually young growth is normal. But it’s a juvenile phase in the development of any system, including the individual body. So to to put a religious tone around growth and hold it up on the throne, as if it can’t be disobeyed is an absolute absurdity again, but that’s the way humans think. So we should recognize that societies tend to grow, but then they mature. And at that point, if they mature within the carrying capacity of their environments, however, that is defined, then they can continue indefinitely without destroying the biophysical basis of their own existence. That’s what we are doing. The current growth model literally is destroying the biophysical basis of the entire human enterprise. Now, that is an absurdity that I find almost impossible to wrap my mind around. And yet, that’s what we’re doing. So the steady state gets around all of that, figure out what a decent standard of living is, we know what the capacity of biophysical systems are to sustain, do a little bit of math, and you can figure out what an appropriate steady state economy might look like, maybe 1 to 2 billion people on this point, at a reasonably decent material standard.
William Rees 1:02:42
Yeah, if you lower if you lower the population, material standard goes up for everybody
William Rees 1:04:05
We forget that the more people on a finite planet, the lower the average material standard. So if you want the highest standard of living, it becomes a logical to reduce numbers, not any coercive way, but through the ways that Rex and Nandita have been talking about.
Christopher Ketcham 1:04:23
Yeah. Oh, here’s another question from someone named Andy Luck. “Is it okay to just withdraw from the apparently futile political resistance to the machine, the machine being capitalized and just concentrate on defending what’s left of wilderness in the hope that some of it survives the collapse?”
Rex Weyler 1:04:47
Sure. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with protect every last square inch of of wild wilderness. Absolutely. I don’t know if it’s enough, no one thing is enough. But it’s certainly okay to do that.
William Rees 1:05:10
I think it’s a wonderful idea. The problem is that if the current system continues, then there won’t be any real survival have significant patches of wilderness. Look, we’re in an exponential growth phase, that means a constant doubling time. And the quantity of consumption that occurs in any one doubling time is equivalent to the sum of consumption that has occurred and all previous doubling times combined. People don’t understand that, in the last 30 years, we have used using that model. In fact, it’s data verify one half of all the fossil fuels and most other minerals ever used by humankind in just the last 35 years. Here we have 10s, hundreds of 1000s of years of human existence, and more than half of everything important has been consumed in the last 35 years. If we double a game, then that would mean in effect, using as much material and energy in the next 35 years, as has been used in all previous human history. This is already on a Ruben overshoot, it becomes a biophysical impossibility. So yes, let’s conserve what we can but you won’t conserve a whole lot unless you get come to grips with this growth model.
Christopher Ketcham 1:06:31
So, let’s say you know it past behavior is a great indicator of future behavior, my experience, let’s just say that our history today we’ve done nothing about these issues, and we keep on going on the trajectory that we’ve been on. Oh, what are the chances of a collapse? In the lifetime of say, myself? I’m 50 years old. I’d like to see it. I think it’d be exciting.
William Rees 1:06:57
Would it be exciting? I’d like to hear horrific.
Christopher Ketcham 1:06:59
It’d be horrific. But so I’m wondering,
Rex Weyler 1:07:01
I’d like to hear from Nandita on this. But just let me say the collapse is already underway. The likelihood of a collapse is 100%. As to most people in the world are living in what we would call collapse conditions. Billions of people living on the edge of poverty, about 10 million people starve to death every year. Humans in their and their livestock comprise 96 and a half percent of all mammal biomass on earth. You know, Christopher, the collapse is underway. And it’s not something that happens one morning when we wake up, we find out it’s collapsed. A collapse can take generations, but I’m interested Nandita What’s your feeling about that?
Nandita Bajaj 1:07:47
Well, I don’t have an idea on the projection of collapse. I turned to people like you and Bill to, to get to get gain an understanding on that. But I’d like to reinforce what you just said, Rex, in terms of the collapse has been happening for 1000s of years. I mean, this collapse is not a new thing. 1000s of different civilizations of indigenous communities have experienced collapse, and genocide and have actually, not many of them have risen out of the ashes and some of them are living in the remnants of of what we left, what we have left for them. There’s been an extreme genocide of the nonhuman world to Rex’s point 4% of of what’s left of the wild vertebrate world, mammalian biomass is now wild, right? 4% is now wild. That used to be 99% 10,000 years ago, before we started domesticating animals and appropriating nature for our benefit, we hit represented 1% of all mammalian biomass at that point. Now we represent along with the animals that we kill for food 96% that I agree with Rex the collapse is way underway. And I think, you know, in the words of another of my colleagues, Robert Jensen, you know, all all trajectories, the degrowth trajectory, you know, where when we are looking at declining our human enterprise, whether we continue increasing our human enterprise or whether we stagnate are going to India is going to involve massive suffering. We are expecting billions of people in the next few decades to be displaced from their homes and become climate refugees. We’re, you know already we’re going to be seeing more millions of species go extinct within the next couple of decades at at our current rates. So, you know, I think at this point, our focus really should be in trying to avert as much unnecessary suffering as we can. We know it’s baked in, we know the temperature increases is baked in. We know catastrophe and flooding and droughts are baked in, at this point that really our focus should be trying to reverse and avert as much of that as we can. And Bill’s favorite you know, one of my favorite things that Bill has talked about is lifeboats is is for communities like ours, who are really oriented around justice, ecological, justice, intergenerational justice, social and reproductive justice, to try to expand our communities so that they can add like lifeboats to those sinking industrial civilization that is happening. And, you know, try to roll fast enough, so we don’t get sucked into the eddies of that sinking ship. That’s where I feel the hope lies is strengthening, strengthening the communities and the models of of, you know, Relocalization of new economies of kind of reclaiming some of the traditional wisdoms of being in reciprocity relationships with the nonhuman world.
William Rees 1:11:35
I think it’s really important, in context a good question because for people to realize it, every major civilization prior to this one has gone through a whole process of growth and maturation, corruption, and implosion are the fast or slow. And two really good books that people might want to take a look at are called ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’ by Jared Diamond, who takes an ecological perspective on this, and another one by Joseph Tainter, called ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’, which is a more sociological, anthropological take on it. But both of them present lists of symptoms that suggest the society is approaching that unstable equilibrium, when collapse becomes inevitable in response to the next major trauma that it faces. And every one of the major symptoms that each of these authors has described, either ecological or socio economic and political, are with us today. So we are as I think we’ve already stayed on the verge, if not well into the beginnings of that to collapse. We may not feel it here today, but it’s being felt elsewhere in the world, and it will catch up to the rest of us inevitably.
Christopher Ketcham 1:12:55
Yeah, I mean, in terms of what to do about this stuff, I kind of think I mean, about these incredibly difficult problem, wicked problems, as they’re called and that seem to be intractable and, and are certainly not anywhere on the horizon of mainstream political discourse. What do you do, and I’m reminded of Albert Camus, great book, The Myth of Sisyphus, where he talks about the existential crisis that we all face, which is that we all end in death and nothingness. So what’s the meaning of life? Well, you have a certain amount of duty to do the right thing. And the right thing for Sisyphus is to roll the rock up the hill, knowing that it’s gonna roll right back down every time and yet he puts his back into it. And it keeps on rolling that rock up the hill over and over and over again.
William Rees 1:13:44
That’s the basic life force.
Christopher Ketcham 1:13:47
Yes, basically, I feel like I feel like that, that is what we have to do even in the face of, of darkness and, and wicked problems and seemingly insoluble I mean, a, a wall that we’re fast approaching, we still need to, to maintain a certain positive view that you just gotta keep trying. Even though yes, we’re if if collapse is unfolding now and I think yes, you’re right. And I should have formulated, formulated it as it’s unfolding. Now. If collapse is happening, then I don’t know. What do you think what what? Closing thoughts give me some closing thoughts,
Rex Weyler 1:14:42
Christopher? You know, I have hope. But my hope is in wild nature, my hopes in the natural process. You know, we think about the collapse of human Yeah, human industrial civilization is in fact, going to collapse and collapsing now. But life makes life and life we’ll find a way and it might not include us. And it’s going to be very painful for the human community. The coming contraction, but Earth is gonna be here a long time. And you know, in 100 million years, you could have a population of raccoons that have figured out how to make fire in and around their campfires. They’re up
Christopher Ketcham 1:15:25
here in the Catskills. Yeah. So I know them.
Rex Weyler 1:15:29
So my final comment is I trust wild nature and she’ll be alright.
Christopher Ketcham 1:15:35
Yeah. Yeah. Earth First! Okay. Well, I’m gonna leave it at that. Thank you so much all of you. We should have gotten we could go on for several hours as Bill commented before this started, but we’ve got to conclude it there. So thank you again.
William Rees 1:15:55
Thank you very much.
Zuade Kaufman 1:15:59
Yeah, I want to thank all of you for such an informative, thoughtful discussion helps us all think about our world and many possibilities for its future. Thank you to the Truthdig audience for your concern for our world and participation in this event. And for more information, come to Truthdig, read Chris’s dig and find more information and resources and thank you all just so much. Great talk.
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I would only quibble on one point of agreement. As the Book of Common Prayer notes: “In the midst of life we are in death,” and that would include the new born babe. Near the end most everyone seems to believe that we are not merely going to collapse, but that we are in collapse, that collapse is “way underway.”
Well, if a child is “in death,” on a pathway leading to death, then in that sense we are in collapse, collapse is underway subjectively in that the rate of growth is declining, but overall we global animals are not in decline, let alone collapse.
Actually, we expansionist humans have been in growth for over 50k years since our beginnings as a small group (band) in East Africa (had to start somewhere and an invisible time traveler/observer could go back to one person who turned his/her band into one that believed their law giver/storyteller was omniscient, and that following the alpha male promising conquest was the way to do-be-do (which led to a pattern of expansion reinforced, selected for, by its success in taking — for a time). In hominin time, 50k years is less than a year.
Subjectively, the last 50k years of mostly growth have not looked like collapse. Even the recent Black Death event (1346 to 1353) that killed half of those living in some overdensity areas, the downward turn in population was, viewed over the last few thousand years, not even a noticeable downturn in our exuberant growth.
Subjectively and objectively, degrowth, descent, or rapid descent (collapse) will be different. Growth by most metrics is still on the up and up globally (there have always been pockets of decline/descent/collapse).
Doesn’t look like collapse to me. The beginning of descent, by one measure, will be when the human population is no longer growing (i.e. adding 83–85 million more humans than die each year to the planet). Subjectively, energy being the real wealth of families to nation-states, climax will, for the average human, come when their consumption of energy, the number of energy slaves that serve them, stops growing and begins to decline. This climax will come before population climaxes. When the climax and collapse of our consensus narrative, our belief in our exceptionalism, occurs in unknowable, but whether sooner would be better is not
Climax hasn’t happen yet. We planetary consumers haven’t seen nothing yet. Actual collapse, even regional, hasn’t been experienced by any ancestors known to most people in the West (in China, 1958–1961, famine killed an estimated 30 to 40 million people, but there was no collapse). Most don’t even have an epigenetic memory of descent unto death (as a child I was told to eat everything on my plate because there were starving children in China).
Imagine building the greatest civilization ever known (1900 BCE, climax of Indus Valley Civilization) and then things start to not look so good (rate of growth has noticeably slowed). Then the overcomplex society climaxes and in two hundred years most cities have been abandoned. Degrowth/contraction continues for four hundred years. No one leaves any written record of what six hundred years on the downslope to regional extinction was like, perhaps because no one who was literate survived the initial collapse phase or had time/inclination to leave us any clues apart from unburied bodies left in streets.
Anyone writing a novel about the early 21st century a hundred years from now (to end on an optimistic note) will likely begin with the words, “It was the best of times. Some thought it was the worst of times, but by 2125, who among us could think so? In 2025, wealth was beyond…”. When will peak energy slave occur? I don’t know.