A Controversial Assertion on Climate Change

I recently wrote a multi-part series about Turning Climate Change On Its Head.  In this post, I will try to reduce the essence of that series to 30 statements, and a controversial conclusion.  I am dispassionately following the facts where they lead.  You tell me where the logic might be questioned.

The Aanimad Assertion on Climate Change

[It seems that even a single blog post can run a little long for some, so I have added a three-statement summary of my assertion:

A.  Given that life is predicated on growth, biosustainability REQUIRES negative feedback.

B.  Fossil fuels and number-based value systems have resulted in humans neutralizing nature's usual negative feedback mechanisms.

C.  Climate Change IS the missing and required negative feedback.

What follows is the detailed derivation of this assertion.]

1. Climate Change is the process whereby the climate of the Earth is warming up due to the greenhouse effect, which is caused by megatons of greenhouse gases (primarily CO₂) being released into the atmosphere at rates exceeding the rates at which natural processes are able to re-assimilate them.

2. The vast majority of current human-generated CO₂ production is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which has exponentially increased because of civilization’s exponentially increased use of fossil fuels to provide energy.

3. The energy from fossil fuels has been used to power massive leaps in human technology, survival, and standards of living, including the ability to live in relatively inhospitable climates and to provide food for a hugely growing population.

4. All living things are characterized by a drive for growth and propagation.  Without such imperatives, any species would soon disappear from the biosphere.  Humans are no different.

5. The natural control for unfettered exponential growth of any one species is negative feedback.  ["Negative" does not describe good or bad.  It is used in the scientific sense, as in "feedback in opposite phase with (i.e. decreasing) the input".]  Negative feedback is a necessity for sustainable systems.  [In this case, "sustainable systems" refers to the dynamic balance required to allow a species population to continue to exist.]

6. Negative feedback occurs in two forms: kind and unkind.  Kind negative feedback includes concepts of peak sufficiency, where the organism chooses to alter a behaviour.  ["Peak sufficiency" refers to the peak value, after which more would not be desirable.  It is a maximum, not a minimum.]   Unkind negative feedback includes impacts such as resource shortages, disease, and conflict, which almost invariably arise as a direct result of the growth itself.

7. While physiological concepts of peak sufficiency (as applied to food, sleep, warmth, etc.) have not changed for humans, our knowledge and understanding of science have progressed to the point where, combined with the awesome energy of fossil fuels, we are able to circumvent many of nature’s unkind negative feedback mechanisms, such as disease, food scarcity, and habitat limitations.

8. Having apparently bypassed nature’s unkind negative feedback for population control, humans have followed the natural drives of any species for growth, propagation, and maximal use of all available resources.

9. The rise of agriculture transformed our required food inputs from things found in nature to (mostly) things managed (and therefore ‘owned’) by humans.

10. Since humans no longer felt totally vulnerable to the influence of nature, and saw its resources as boundless, they developed human-centric economic paradigms, independent of natural linkages, consisting predominantly of producers and consumers, where nature’s bounty was simply a given.

11. It is suggested that the evolution of agriculture, trade, and ownership led to increasingly sophisticated numeracy skills, and societies where numbers were used to measure wealth.  For example, trade led to the introduction of some form of money, and ownership led to counting what is owned.  From this arose number-based values, which are different from our innate qualitative values.

12. Number-based values are measures where more is always worth more.  Since numbers are limitless, wealth measured by number is such that More is Always Better, and the negative feedback concept of peak sufficiency does not apply in number-based value calculations.

13. Having removed the concept of peak sufficiency from our predominant measure of wealth, humans eventually created entities (business corporations) who embodied number-based values exclusively, leveraging the intrinsic positive feedback loops of numbers, without being subject to the mortal filters of human qualitative values or even the limitations of human life spans.

14. Adopting value systems which have no concept of peak sufficiency (i.e. kind negative feedback), while bypassing nature’s unkind negative feedback, results in an unsustainable way of life for our species.  (See 5.)

15. Exponential growth of human population and technology transpired over a time that was not long enough for the natural world to evolve adaptations for the changes or processes to deal with the inevitable waste products of exponentially increasing economic activity.

16. As civilization is something that happens with physiological beings (who must live within nature’s complexity on a finite planet), any economic model that does not account for nature’s inputs and waste management is fatally flawed.   (See 10.)

17. One important fundamental need of economic activity and human survival is energy.  Fossil fuels continue to provide the vast majority of cheap energy, so their exponential consumption is tied to exponentially growing economic activity.

18. One impact of relentless economic activity expansion and population growth is (1) anthropogenic climate change.  Other direct impacts include (2) freshwater withdrawals, (3) nitrogen/phosphorus loading, (4) land conversion, and (5) biodiversity loss.

19. Being disconnected from nature, the neoliberal economic models did not effectively address waste management, resulting in (6) chemical pollution, (7) ocean acidification, (8) air pollution, and (9) ozone layer depletion.

20. The nine impacts listed above are collectively known as Ecological Overshoot.  Climate Change is only one of these serious threats to human civilization and the continuance of our species.  This combination of multiple looming disasters is where the term “polycrisis” originates.

21a. Human civilization got to this point because we adopted a predominant measure of wealth that had no concept of peak sufficiency (reducing the influence of natural kind negative feedback on our consumptive behaviours), and we circumvented nature’s typical unkind negative feedback (which controls population growth).   (See 8 and 12.)

21b.  This is not to say that we abandoned our core qualitative (human) values (like justice, compassion, beauty, joy, integrity, etc.).  Those are hardwired into our brains.  However, we have allowed those values be consistently trumped by number-based values, and created powerful entities (corporations) that do not recognize our human core values.   (See 13.)

22a. Our current economic model of More is Always Better, combined with the absence of integration with concepts of finite resource and waste management, can be directly tied to all nine components of Ecological Overshoot.

22b.  I refer to this situation (where one factor is a key cause of the polycrisis of Ecological Overshoot) as our Value Crisis.  The idea that one factor might be at the root of a polycrisis is where the term “metacrisis” originates.

23. Given that we are in a polycrisis, solving, mitigating, or adapting to Climate Change will likely have minimal impact on any of the other major threats of Ecological Overshoot.

24. However, addressing the metacrisis and correcting the basis of our economic values could indeed mitigate and potentially reverse all of these nine threats listed above.

25. Recent evidence suggests that humanity will not voluntarily comprehensively correct its current way of life and the economic values that underpin that.  I suggest that we are unable to solve the metacrisis on our own.  (See, for example, The Value Change Conundrum.)

26. Any serious attempt to correct our flawed economic values will be vigorously opposed by the massive forces that derive their wealth from those values.

27. Still, Climate Change poses a serious threat to our current way of life.  It is popularly the most pressing (and increasingly visible) threat to our economic activity.

28. Climate Change therefore constitutes one of nature’s most powerful negative feedback mechanisms to the economic values that caused it.

29. The other aspects of Ecological Overshoot will not be far behind, and will have similarly disastrous consequences for human civilization.

30. Unkind negative feedback is never desirable to the targeted species.  We are therefore highly motivated to resist it.  However, the negative outcomes of our poly/metacrisis for the human race are similar, whether Climate Change is ‘solved’ or not.

Concluding Assertion:

a)         The impulse to demand action on mitigating the effects of Climate Change is inevitable for human nature, but that action will not dramatically change the prospects for civilization and our species.   (See 26, 29, 22, 24, 25 and 28.)

b)         On the contrary, given that Climate Change could be the force needed to break humanity out of its flawed economic values, the sooner that happens the better, before the effects of the other aspects of Ecological Overshoot become irreversibly fatal.   (See 24, 27, 21, 23, and 28.)

c)         Climate Change could well be a major part of the solution to our metacrisis.  Our primary focus should be on restoring some precedence of qualitative values to be adopted after systems which rely exclusively on number-based values are no longer working for us, and how to minimize the damage from that transition.

d)         Rejecting the unquestioned precedence of number-based values, acknowledging our interrelationships with nature, and rethinking the definition and role of commercial corporations could be enough to redirect civilization towards a sustainable model.   (See 21, 16, 13, and 5.)

Disclaimer:

? - Am I opposed to citizens demanding action on Climate Change?

No, but only so long as there is a realization that the real challenge is the causal value system underpinning Climate Change.  Our compassionate instincts insist that we do our best to combat the destructive impact of fossil fuel burning, however, I do not accept that any significant gains will be made in the attempt.

If explicit by-products of any climate change action include an increased awareness of the root cause of our multi-part polycrisis (that being a flawed value system), and greater acceptance of our true role within the biosphere, then I have to support that.

If, on the other hand, the proposal is that we can somehow continue our current behaviours and economic model simply under an alternative energy source, then I oppose such delusional thinking.

I also oppose the demonization of the fossil fuel industry.  Those corporations, like all commercial corporations, are acting precisely in the manner that society programmed them and continues to demand them to.

Support for The Aanimad Assertion on Climate Change:

The following scientists and progressive thinkers have signed on as supporters of this Assertion:

John Maskell, PhD - Brockville, ON
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome

Ruben F.W. Nelson - Calgary, AB
Executive Director, Foresight Canada
Member Emeritus, Association of Professional Futurists 

Mike Nickerson - Lanark, ON
Seventh Generation Initiative
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome 
Author of Life, Money & Illusion

Andrew Welch - Alton, ON
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome 
Author of The Value Crisis

We are all Trump

The sequel to The Value Crisis (titled Our Second Chance) ended up being a lot more optimistic than it started out to be.  The original working title was "Trumping Our Survival", and although it was referring to how number-based values trump natural values, the reference to the chaos in American politics was implicit.  Perhaps that harsher message still needs to be disseminated.  I will be more explicit:

We are all Donald Trump.

What do I mean by that?  I don't mean that we are individually like Trump.  I refer instead to humanity collectively.  Here are some statements that few (objectively rational?) people would argue with:

Donald Trump started off with some powerful advantages over other people and now believes himself superior to them.  He also believes that the rules that govern other people do not apply to him, so he is above society's laws.  He declares himself wealthy, but, in reality, Trump has a habit of not paying his debts to other people and society, and what he has is less valuable than he thinks.  He will say and do anything to increase his wealth and power because, to him, More is Always Better.  By declaring himself superior to other people, Trump ignores the reality of his situation and his dependence on them for his survival.  Even though support for his behaviours is massive, enlightened observers can see that, from his position of power, Trump inflicts catastrophic damage on society.

Now read what happens when we simply replace "Trump" with "humans", "society" with "nature", and "people" with "species":

Humans started off with some powerful advantages over other species and now believe ourselves superior to them.  We also believe that the rules that govern other species do not apply to us, so we are above natural laws.  We declare ourselves wealthy, but, in reality, humans have a habit of not paying our debts to other species and nature, and what we have is less valuable than we think.  We will say and do anything to increase our wealth and power because, to us, More is Always Better.  By declaring ourselves superior to other species, humans ignore the reality of our situation and our dependence on them for our survival.  Even though support for our behaviours is massive, enlightened observers can see that, from our position of power, humans inflict catastrophic damage on nature.

To be kind, Donald Trump is not intentionally evil.  He is simply a lethal combination of financial power placed in the hands of someone who suffers from psychopathic narcissism.  To be equally generous to humans, the same might be said of humanity - a lethal combination of evolutionary power placed in the hands of a species whose collective self-aggrandizement now blinds us to the needs and value of everything around us.

What natural laws do I accuse humans of breaking - and can I prove it?

The Core of Natural Values

Philosophers have debated for centuries what constitute natural values.  I am going to audaciously propose a core principle of natural values - made all the more tricky by the fact that it incorporates a negative:

There is no value in nature where More is ALWAYS Better.

By "value", I refer to any intrinsically desirable quality - demonstrated either by an operational attribute or choices made (excluding number-based values which exist only in recent human cognition).  By "nature", I refer to the physical universe, including all forms of life.  By "always", I mean in every situation, regardless of circumstances.  By "better", I mean: that results in a higher measure of value (i.e. more desirable state) for whatever natural value you are exploring.

While it is impossible to prove a negative, we can make this principle a good working proposition by examining its derivatives.  For example, consider food, shelter, territory, and energy – there are plenty of instances in the natural world where more is better, but it is never always better. To absolutely everything, there is a beneficial sufficiency – a peak value, after which more is no longer a good thing, and often becomes a bad thing. More is not always better.

It is only when value is measured exclusive by number (for example, monetary value) that more is always worth more, by definition.  With virtual wealth, More is Always Better.

Furthermore, material resources - things that we need to survive - are subject to long-accepted rules like the Laws of Thermodynamics.  Neither matter nor energy (nor real value) can be created from nothing, and every transaction is subject to the value-decrementing principle of entropy.  Virtual wealth, on the other hand, is not subject to those laws.  We create value from nothing all the time – well over 90% of the planet’s monetary wealth exists only as debt.  Meanwhile, if you spend $100 on food, the food degrades over time, but the $100 will always be $100 - entropy does not apply to numbers.

Guilty As Charged

So, when our society adopts number-based values like monetary wealth and economic growth as the values that will trump all others, we adopt a More is Always Better approach to managing our lives and our limited resources on this planet.  We think nature's laws don't apply to us and that we are superior to everything in the environment that we live in.  Our decisions become entirely incompatible with the reality of the physical world around us, and, slowly but surely, we bring an extraordinary range of disasters down upon ourselves.

How do we fix this?

I propose some tantalizing options in other posts, but the key thing to challenge is the More-is-Always-Better philosophy.  Individually, we can do this by introducing concepts of sufficiency into our lives.  For example, instead of letting your income determine your standard of living, try selecting the minimal standard of living that you are comfortable with, and then figuring out what income that requires.  Instead of wealth maximization, focus on joy maximization.  A colleague puts it very nicely: "More Fun, Less Stuff".

No doubt, Donald Trump/humanity is insufficiently aware of these flaws.  That may only change when society/nature punches back with sufficient force.  The question is whether or not that reality is going to assert itself before all is lost...

Using the Marshmallow Test on Our Value Personae

Here's a twist on a psychology classic: the Stanford Marshmallow experiment - a study on delayed gratification.  In the original experiment, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward (a marshmallow), or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time alone in a room, staring at the marshmallow but not eating it.  In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index, and other life measures.

A blog post from an old applied improv conference colleague brought this study to mind.  She spoke of what she referred to as Marshmallow Test 2.0, in which you conduct the experiment on kids living in the shelter system.  In that experiment, each trial is more a test of privilege.  The kids have to believe and trust that the original and second treat will be there if they wait.  It turns out, many under-privileged kids have learned to eat when the treat is available - not to wait for someone else to maybe take it first.  So naturally, their scores in later life are already skewed, not based on will-power but on their survival-oriented upbringing.

That's an interesting thought.

What came to mind for me, though, was the three Value Personae that I suggest operate within all of us.  (An idea from Robert Reich that I expanded on.)  I now theorize that the Consumer value persona - the one which values immediate gratification and looks after present needs - might be the earliest value persona, from an evolutionary perspective.  We see lots of plants and animals exhibit this approach to resources, and it's not surprising that younger kids will express this tendency as well.  There's a marshmallow.  I like marshmallows.  Munch!

The Marshmallow Test is kind of checking for the presence of our Investor value persona.  Are we willing to wait, resist consumption now, and reap some benefits in the future?  As animals evolve, some species seem to become more aware of future needs and have learned to set food aside for leaner times.  That Investor behaviour might be considered a sign of evolutionary progress (or a predictor of better life outcomes in children).

Given that perspective, I naturally had to ask myself where the third value persona - the Citizen - might fit in.  The Citizen is our value set that looks after the needs of others or the collective.  Perhaps a test could be easily devised with two kids, where, if the first child resists the temptation to eat the  marshmallow, then they both get one.  Surely that says something about the first kid's ability to co-operate, share, and show empathy for their fellow human being.  Since (I believe) we only tend to see such behaviours in collective-oriented or cognitively-advanced species, I recently posited that perhaps the Citizen value persona is yet another step up on the evolutionary ladder.

My Value Personae theory proposes that each one of us has all three value sets available to us at any time, and that they are exclusive.  If I give you $50, you can either spend it (Consumer), save it (Investor), or give it away (Citizen).  All three actions can give us joy, but you can only do one of those choices.

A Fourth Value Persona?

So, if you're wondering how humanity might evolve to the next level, what might that be?  Increasingly, I believe that the fourth value persona might encompass some kind of realization that we are all connected to our environment and every other living thing in complex and inextricable ways.  I'm still trying to figure this out and express it as a value.  One thing I'm sure of is that the fourth value persona would not be based on any kind of zero-sum game, but rather one where there is no game.

One of the real-world expressions of this fourth value persona is a Guaranteed Universal Basic Income.  I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that a Basic Income is humanity's way of severing the connection between the imperative of a job and basic survival.  That game-changing concept could be the first step to solving what I call the Value Change Conundrum, and escape the paradigm of "More is Always Better" that I suggest is at the core of civilization's ecological overshoot, sociological shortfall, and all major global disasters.

I guess in that study, we just give every child a marshmallow when they need one, and we move on to other life priorities.

Responses to Comments from William Rees

In October of 2023, I gave a Zoom talk to the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR).  The requested topic was an overview of my sequel to "The Value Crisis", that being "Our Second Chance - Changing Course and Solving the Value Crisis".  Months later, the CACOR site curator sent me a copy of the Zoom Chat conversation from that talk.  It turns out that the most frequent contributor to the chat was Dr. William E. Rees, FRSC.  Bill Rees is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and well-known as the originator of the "ecological footprint" concept.

Following the CACOR Zoom talk tradition, many of the chat room questions and comments will have been raised after the presentation, and some will be heard on the actual video.  Still, knowing that I have a huge amount to learn from this leader in ecological economics (and one of my heroes), I decided to devote a post to his comments and my more-considered reflections on them.

(It would obviously help a great deal if you watch the presentation first, but I'll try to craft this post in such a way that it's not entirely necessary.)

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 1:42 PM
What if the More is Better strategy is an innate adaptive strategy that worked in paleolithic times but is catastrophic today, when technology makes it possible?

Firstly, there is a very important distinction to be made here.  The value system that I claim to be flawed and unnatural is "More is ALWAYS Better".  Generally speaking, there are many times in nature when More is Better.  But more is never always better - everything in nature has sufficiency.  That's why, when more does happen to be better, it could indeed be seen as an innate adaptive strategy that worked in paleolithic times.  It is only when you have values measured by number (such as monetary wealth) that More is Always Better.  Having a limitless value, with no definition of sufficiency is where the trouble begins.  Add in technology that gives exponential growth, and that trouble does indeed become catastrophic.  This is not a value that has changed over time, because More is Always Better did not exist in paleolithic times.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 1:50 PM
We have to be careful about 'first nations' values.  The paleoecological evidence suggests that the spread of humanity over the Earth was followed by the depletion and often extinction of megafauna of all kinds.  Only after massive destruction, or at least alteration of their ecosystems, did indigenous peoples culturally evolve a stable relationship with their much diminished habitats.  That is what we see today.  

When you consider "the spread of humanity", you are really talking about a species of primate that was successful enough to produce a thriving population - one that did really well at adapting to other environments as well.  So whenever humans spread into an area where they had not existed before, they were essentially an invasive species.  We all know that any successful invasive species will invariably redefine the ecological balance of its new territory - sometimes wiping out previously existing species.  (This is easier to do when you are at or near the top of the food chain.)

I think another thing we obviously have to be careful about is generalizing "first nations".  There were/are hundreds of First Nations.  Some evolved into empires who adopted and applied a More is Always Better value system to territory, riches, slaves, and temple heights.  (Perhaps their demise was correspondingly predictable.)  Others are still living in relative isolation and in harmony with their original environment.

Still, I think your general heuristic applies.  When some First Nations people first came upon plains teeming with bison, they did not worry about the wastefulness of driving hundreds of them over a cliff, just to butcher a few for their needs.  And they did indeed alter their ecosystems - it would have been almost impossible not to.  However, for the First Nations that did not adopt a More is Always Better philosophy, they noticed the changes to their ecosystems and made various conscious choices to alter their behaviours.  The values that we associate today with indigenous wisdom are distinctly different and decidedly superior in terms of ecological economics.

BtW, modern techno industrial society is going the same way.  We will destroy our habitat to the point that it pushes back and forces an adaptive strategy onto the survivors of the great contraction.

This is my conclusion as well.  I believe climate change is one of the negative feedbacks that our habitat is going to push back on us.  The question of whether or not we will recognize our essential problem as a value crisis is still to be answered.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 1:56 PM
Overshoot is a function of population at any material standard.  Three billion over-consumers can be in overshoot: Ten billion people in poverty can be in overshoot.

This is very true.  Since ecological overshoot is based on available planetary resources, that quantity available doesn't change with population or lifestyle, but the amount lost to consumption does.  Right now, we have simultaneous examples of both kinds of overshoot (from overconsumption and overpopulation).

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:36 PM
Where does the wealth or money come from to fund the basic income?  Doesn't this require a complete reorganization of the income/tax/economic value system.  And what if the basic income destroys any incentive to fend for oneself?

These are three common concerns with a Guaranteed Basic Income.  The simplest answer to the first question is that the money is already there - it is simply redirected.  For a full explanation of this, see a previous blog post.  Money is not like material resources - this is simply a math issue, not a show-stopper.

The introduction of a Basic Income does not require a complete reorganization of the income/tax/economic value system - we saw that when we implemented the CERB program almost overnight during the pandemic. However, it could eventually lead to such a reorganization - and that's the whole point.  We need a complete reorganization of the income/tax/economic value system as part of our rebalancing of qualitative and quantitative values.  A Guaranteed Basic Income program is perhaps the best and most powerful tool for easing society into that paradigm shift.

Finally, Basic Income pilot programs have consistently demonstrated that such schemes do not destroy any incentive to fend for oneself - although current social safety nets often do just that.  Humans want to be productive, to contribute to society, and to better their lot.  Basic Income facilitates and encourages those activities.  See my explanation in an earlier post.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:41 PM
I don't see much new in the notion that natural systems tend toward more complexity.  In any case, this assumes a continuous supply of energy.  Reduce the energy flow and the system simplifies. Remove available energy and the systems ceases to function and moves toward maximum entropy or disorder.

I agree entirely.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:50 PM
The value of human life changes with the availability of vital resources.  Lots of resources, we share; land and resources get scarce with overcrowding and overshoot, then we devalue live, particularly other peoples' lives.

This is also fairly obvious.  However, I believe that there is a more important factor in how we value human life, which is defined by our relationship to that human.  Yes, we all know that we care more about the life of a friend or family member than we do about some stranger on the other side of the planet, but sometimes we just need a connecting narrative for our perception to change.  Think of how a simple photo of a drowned toddler washed up on a beach completely altered the way millions of people thought about the Syrian refugee crisis.

This introduction of compassion works both for and against us.  You might think me awful for saying this (which would in fact prove my point), but when we start to think of every child as our own, then we start to believe that every life is worth saving, regardless of the cost or quality of life being saved.  That may be all very well, but few people who aggressively pursue disease eradication and lifespan extension consider what the ultimate effect on our planet might be if we were wildly successful in those endeavours.  (Imagine what would happen if all mosquitoes born survived to adulthood.)  If you are going to cure everything and have people living decades longer, there will HAVE to be other changes.  Single lives are valuable because they become qualitative.  At the same time, we can kill thousands in war, because those people are simply numbers.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:53 PM
Stasis implies a steady-state economy, an idea that has been around for 50 years or more and rejected by mainstream economists and techno-optimists. (Steady-state implies a constant level of economic throughput compatible with nature's productivity and waste assimilation capacity.)

A steady-state economy also includes minimal fluctuations in population.  It is not the only possibility for a sustainable economy - which could also be achieved by an economy the fluctuates up and down in relatively bounded cycles.  I'm not sure why mainstream economists and techno-optimists reject the idea of a steady-state economy, unless it's because they feel it is impossible to achieve.  I would think it's a lot easier to prove the impossibility of an ever-growing economy on the finite resources of a single planet.  It may also be a case of them being NIMPLEs - leaving the consequences of continuous growth to future generations.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:56 PM
There are lots of studies on how many people -- even a book called "How Many People can Earth Support?"

Determining the number of people that the planet can support is based on many variables.  The whole exercise seems more academic than policy-based.  I think it safe to say that, in terms of environmental impact, there are too many humans, regardless of our adopted lifestyle.  Yes, the planet could possibly support more, but at what cost?

I believe our focus would be better directed towards more sustainable and qualitative lifestyles.  The population decline will likely follow.  If it does not, then nature will address our numbers in her own way, as she inevitably does for all species that get out of control.

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 2:58 PM
Ray's financial insecurity is the modern expression of our innate need to acquire the means to live.

[This was in reference to an earlier comment from Raymond Leury: "When I was much younger, being poor, my anxiety about the need to have money to survive was so big that it blinded me to just about anything else.  It also drove my strong desire to build up wealth so that I would have financial security."]

Actually, I don't entirely agree with the implications of this one.  All animals have an innate drive to survive.  For that they need the basics of life: oxygen, water, shelter (or appropriate environment), food, etc.  However, "financial security" is not focused on our immediate needs - rather, it is intended to address our future needs.  I theorize that conscious concern for future needs is a higher stage of evolution - perhaps even in a grey area between instinct and learned behaviour.

What strikes me as the most important takeaway from this is how financial wealth takes over our lives when we must struggle to have enough to survive.  Imagine how much collective anxiety there is in society right now, arising from this singular stress, and how a Basic Income would change their lives - and yours!

William Rees Oct 18, 2023, 3:16 PM
Great discussion. Thanks Andrew for providing the catalyst.

I hope my content will eventually prove to be more than just a catalyst.  Anyway, I think this made for a good blog post exploration.  Thanks Bill for providing the catalyst!

A Human Behaviour Crisis?

In September, 2023, a group of authors, led by Joseph Merz, put out a peer-reviewed paper that captured significant interest in the world of ecological economics.  The paper is titled “World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot”.

It immediately caught my attention because, in line with my own thinking, the paper proposed that looming disasters like climate change and the loss of biodiversity were just symptoms of a bigger problem.  Instead of trying to fix symptoms, a far more effective strategy for humanity is to track down the causes and explore solutions to those.  I hope that, by now, we can all accept that human behaviours are behind our most serious threats to species continuance.  This particular group of authors suggested that this human behaviour crisis was driven by the intentional manipulation of innate adaptive behaviours.  Specifically, Economic Growth, Marketing, and Pronatalism (encouraging population growth) were being used to exploit populations into behaving in ways that were ultimately not in humanity's best long-term interest.

[If you are curious about the details, I encourage you to read the paper for yourself.  For an academic work, it is a fairly easy read.  It also proposes a solution, which I found intriguing but less compelling.]

This short reactive exploration builds on the content of that paper, which asserts:

“While human behaviours were implicit in the various world scientists’ warnings, we believe they need explicit attention and concerted emergency action in order to avoid a ghastly future.”

I believe this is absolutely correct.  For decades, world scientists have stated that human behaviours had to change, but they insufficiently examined the driving source of the maladaptive behaviours in the first place.  My graphic image above summarizes the premise nicely.  I want to now take this exploration one step deeper.

Who is holding the hammer?

This post asks:  Who (or what) is behind that exploitation?  Why have those behaviours been exploited?  Obviously, a select fraction of the population profited from it, but can we really assume that some kind of all-trumping wealth-maximization motivation is innate in all humans?  Answers such as “greed”, “wealth”, or “power” might be implicitly assumed, however, I fear they are untested.  For all the same reasons behind the identification of a human behavioural crisis, the perpetrators and values driving that exploitation need explicit attention, and that may well lead to a different concerted emergency action.

The paper hints very slightly at a factor where my own personal research began:

“Like other species, H. sapiens is capable of exponential population growth (positive feedback) but until recently, major expansions of the human enterprise, including increases in consumption and waste, were held in check by negative feedback – e.g. resource shortages, competition and disease – which naturally curbed continued population growth.”

I accept that each and every species has an innate drive to increase their population and expand into as much territory as possible – to grow, occupy, and consume.  In a system of negative feedback where each life form is ultimately consumed by others, a drive to increase population is necessary to offset risk factors and ensure a continuance of presence.  (Any species that lacked sufficient capability for that would have disappeared long ago.)  The drive to occupy territory corresponds with the needs for an increased population.  As for consumption, it is one of the basic conditions (if not definitions) of life.

The critical element in all of this is the concept of sufficiency.  There are peak values for growth, territory, and consumption, after which benefits to the individual life form invariably cease, to be replaced by negative outcomes.  I suggest that there is nothing in the ‘natural’ world where More is ALWAYS Better.  There are peaks and limits.  Furthermore, it could be argued that energy is the ultimate expression of value, but energy cannot be created from nothing, and entropy takes its cut of every transaction.  We exist in a world subject to the laws of thermodynamics, on a planet of finite resources.  A never-endingly increasing value does not exist anywhere in nature.

The measure of any resource value to any life form therefore expresses a qualitative value – one that depends on context and marginal utility.  More is not always better.

And yet, what if a higher species created another kind of value for itself – one measured by number, where (within that value system) more is always better.  Such a quantitative value system has no concept of sufficiency.  This is what I propose humanity has done, with the creation of the concept of virtual (monetary) wealth.  Within a monetary system, more money is always worth more than less.  In 1926, Nobel-laureate chemist Frederick Soddy (in Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt) pointed out that money is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, even though all of the material things exchanged for it are.  Monetary wealth can be created from absolutely nothing (and is – as debt), and does not lose numeric value in transactions.  Being just a number, the potential value expressed is theoretically limitless, and it can exist virtually – it does not require material objects to back up that value.

This takes us back to the two significant questions that the paper raised for me:

a)      Who (or what) is behind that exploitation of behaviours?

b)      Why have those behaviours been exploited?

I suggest that the driving forces behind this exploitation would not be possible, or at least anywhere near as influential, without humanity’s adoption of an overwhelming precedence of number-based (quantitative) values.  The predominant overarching goal of the entities (be they individuals or corporations) is an increase in monetary wealth.  This is not a ‘natural’ value.

Contrast this goal, for example, with the human impulses listed in the paper – the ones that those entities are leveraging for their own gain:

• seek pleasure and avoid pain;
• acquire, amass and defend resources from competitors;
• display dominance, status or sex appeal through size, beauty, physicality, aggression and/or ornamentation;
• procrastinate rather than act whenever action does not have an immediate survival benefit particularly for ourselves, close relatives and our home territories (humans are innate temporal, social and spatial discounters).

I suggest that all of these are qualitative values, subject to peaks, sufficiency, and negative feedback loops.  Also consider the simple imperative of procreation.  The mathematics of population growth often produces exponential curves, but that is never the whole story.  Steep curves are brought down with equal speed by overcrowding, disease, food shortages, and increased predatory populations.  In nature, explosive growth always creates the circumstances required for that growth to collapse.  The same mathematics can be applied to unfettered economic growth – the major differences being that there is no limit to the potential monetary wealth, and there is no inherent negative feedback built-in to that growth.  (Most importantly, what if climate change is the negative feedback that has been inevitable from the beginning?)

According to the paper:

“Fossil fuels enabled us to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits.”

This is quite true, and there is no question that the Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) civilization that followed has been a major contributor to our exponential population growth and the resulting ecological overshoot.  However, I propose that our ability to reek havoc upon our environment is due to more than just the capability of our technology to outpace human evolution.  Something is still amplifying the incentives for that technology and defining the destructive principles used for its implementation.  Moreover, humans are not alone at the pinnacle of the pyramid.  There is another significant player in this narrative that hardly gets a mention in the paper – corporations.

I propose that, from economic, ecological, and sociological perspectives, corporations must be considered as a separate species and treated as such for the kind of work that we do.  They have full status as legal persons and increasingly claim rights created for humans, and they operate indepen­dently of their creators in almost all respects.  Furthermore, this is a species that is not subject to any natural laws of sufficiency, that can grow to any size, and has a theoretically unlimited lifespan.  Most importantly, this species is entirely based on a quantitative value system that is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so they can create ‘tangible’ value from nothing.  And even though this value system is man-made, it is unhindered by human morals or ethics.  We programmed them this way!  This, I believe, is an accurate description of the public-traded commercial corporation.

It is impossible to state with certainty that the technologies that we have today would have eventually appeared, regardless of the participation of corporations in an MTI society.  Still, I argue that the pace of technology, the uses of technology, and the impact of technology on our ecological overshoot is inextricably tied to the singular quantitative value systems of commercial corporations.  To push civilization to the brink that we currently teeter on, it is necessary to have blinders to a great deal of evidence of self-destructive behaviours – evidence and warnings that go back hundreds of years.  The ability of monetary wealth to trump all other human and ethical values is the just the thing to provide those blinders.  After all, “it’s nothing personal – it’s just business”.

This is why, 20 years ago, when I asked the same “Why?” questions as did the researchers for this human behaviour crisis paper, I concluded that human behaviours were based on values, and what civilization was experiencing is a value crisis.

Human Behaviour Crisis or Value Crisis?

This is not just a rewording of exactly the same concept.  Good and bad behaviours can be difficult to empirically identify, but the difference between measuring success by quality or measuring it by quantity (where more is always worth more) is crystal clear.  It is not that one value system is good and the other is bad.  The point is that if society gives number-based values practically unlimited power to trump every qualitative human value, we are headed for a guaranteed disaster – and ecological overshoot.

For example, when you can translate limited resources into a limitless value, impervious to decay, and do so in such a way that the resulting scarcity drives the value of additional consumption even higher, that is a positive feedback recipe for resource annihilation.  If we’re looking for clues as to how humans circumvented natural negative feedback mechanisms, it seems to me that basing much of society on value systems that freely create and leverage exponential curves without any hindrance from natural laws and limitations would be a great place to start.

In addition, it is imperative that the role of corporations be included as an integral part of any search for solutions to the human behavioural crisis.  This is not just because of their phenomenal impact, but because, in the words of Yuval Noah Harari, public corporations are myths – they exist only on paper, and operate under arbitrary values and laws that we established in their entirety.  That proves that theoretically we could change any of those factors, and thus change those entities overnight. Such changes might not seem practical or likely right now, but those probabilities will change if/when we accept that civilization, as we know it, might be on the line.

Yes, I agree that human behaviour has been meticulously, psychologically (and mathematically) exploited.  This has been so effective and well-established that we are not only dealing with entrenched flawed perspectives – we also have gross examples of hedonic adaptation on a cultural scale.  Despite unprecedented population numbers, a large portion of the planet also consumes more energy, more materials, and more residential square footage per capita than ever before.  How can generations of people living this lifestyle ever be expected to voluntarily scale back?

I used to believe that the only mechanism possible to provide a paradigm shift of sufficient significance would be some kind of catastrophic system collapse.  I now believe that there is great potential in (re-)emerging policies like a Universal Basic Income, which severs the umbilical that our MTI society instituted between survival and the job-imperative, allowing people to view money, time, and lives in an altered light.