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!

#3 - The Myth of Self-Control and Immunity

 (This is the fourth of a nine-part installment, offering a fresh new perspective on Climate Change.  For the big picture summary, see Turning Climate Change on its Head.)

Humans are unlike any other species in the knowable history of our planet.  Our self-consciousness and incredible mastery of knowledge and collaboration collectively power a myth that the first two laws don't apply to us - that we can control our propagation and resource consumption, and that we are immune from nature’s feedback mechanisms.  This turns out to be false under our current paradigm.

World human population, as of November 2022, now exceeds 8 billion.

I can't prove that humans have insufficient self-control and lack immunity from the laws that I described in parts 2 and 3.  However, I think I can provide some fairly compelling evidence that this is so.

Population Growth

Yes, if we use the base goal of propagation as our measuring stick, there's no question that humans have been wildly successful, as demonstrated by the graph above.  (By the way, that graph goes much further to the left, and stays just as flat.)  And yet, one would be hard-pressed to find a single human who believed that our planetary home or our prospects for a successful future are in any way improved by our explosive growth in numbers.  Moreover, we have convincingly known this for at least two generations.  In that time, we have developed cheap and effective birth control, reduced birth rates through education and empowerment, and even imposed restrictions of family sizes.  The fact that our birth rate has declined moderately in the last 50 years suggests that we can indeed control it.  However, our actual population in the same period has doubled.  The basic math tells us that the way things are going, it will be a long time before that kind of declining birth rate has any appreciable effect on our crippling problem of overpopulation.  Our biological imperative to propagate still rules.

Consumption Control

I can't argue that humans don't have the potential for resource consumption control, but our history is littered with evidence of societies not exercising it.  From the tribal groups that drove thousands of bison over cliffs in order to consume just a few, to the peoples who cut down the very last tree on Easter Island, and even to the trawlers which now empty our seas of precious fish stocks and ranchers who burn down the rainforests - we refuse to see nature's bounty as finite.

One factor working against any practical application of self-control is our modern definition of value, where scarcity drives value higher.  We therefore doubly profit by harvesting most of nature's riches within our own lifetime.  It is true that we have applied our amazing intelligence to introduce remarkable efficiency in our productivity, but efficiency has never been used to reduce consumption - it invariably increases consumption at greater profit.  Like every other living thing, humans make maximum use of available resources.  The only difference our brains make is that we can consume to deadly effect.

Irrational Species with Flawed Values

Yes, humans are incredibly smart and self-aware, but, as Bill Rees points out (as his first premise), we are not rational creatures.  He says: "passion and instinct often trump reason, particularly in times of crisis".  Worse yet, even when we are supposedly being 'rational', our Modern Techno-Industrial civilization has adopted quantity as its predominant value system.  When value is quantity, then More is Always Better.  As a consequence, our rationality is exercised within a value system which has no concept of peak sufficiency - within a natural world where absolutely everything incorporates the concept of peak sufficiency as an imperative.

We run our Modern Techno-Industrial civilizational using 'economic principles', based on mathematics, that only work in an unreal world, based on a false assumption of all humans as rational agents within a system of simple rules and calculations.  Our ability to alter the impacts of our reality has led us to believe that we can alter reality itself.  Again, to borrow from Bill Rees, "human beings 'socially construct' their own realities.  More accurately, we construct social lenses through which we perceive reality (e.g. political ideologies, religious doctrines, scientific models, economic paradigms, cultural narratives, etc.)"  As a result, "the conceptual lenses through which we perceive reality determine the kind of reality we perceive."  We are no longer able to be objective observers of what we are doing to our environment - we only see a tiny keyhole view of what we choose to look at and be aware of.  Thus, we are able to create the Myth of Self-Control and Immunity.

Failing at Improving Nature

There is no question that the belief in humanity's control over nature and immunity from its laws is widespread.  As a result, we act, and act quickly, whenever we see an opportunity to supposedly improve on nature and bend it to our will.  Our history is clogged with ever-increasing instances of where that behaviour has backfired with dramatic effect, climate change being simply the latest.  We wipe out entire species, with no understanding of the impact that removing key components from the complex network of life will have on the entire system.  We voraciously alter the landscape with our sprawling cites of pavement and concrete, and our decimation of entire ecosystems in search of more resources to consume.  We poison our world with biologically-indestructible plastics and lethal new chemicals, with only the tiniest of guesses on their long-term impacts (if we even care to consider them).  We commit, all in, to these virtually untested technologies, and make irreversible decisions based on profit over survival.  We think we can do better than nature's billions of years of trial and error and system evolution.  At best, we fool ourselves with short-term gains, only to fail spectacularly for the long-term.  Every time.

Common Heuristics for Negative Feedback

The best negative feedback against uncontrolled population growth and other problematic behaviours is not harsh environments like extreme cold or the pressures of the ocean floor.  We already know that, given time, life can adapt to those challenges and even thrive there (as humans can do.  Humans are not unique in that respect - the only difference is that instead of physically evolving for such environments, we evolved the intelligence to deal with them, allowing us to transition much faster than if we had relied on changes to our physiological design.)

No, the best negative feedback comes in two forms: Changes that happen faster than the species can adapt to them, and (in its purest form) reactions that are a direct result of the unwanted actions (and correspondingly scalable).  Generally speaking, change in nature does not happen very quickly.  The most common changes, like the seasons, are predictable and the cycles themselves rarely change, allowing species to adapt and thrive.

As mentioned, the most efficient negative feedback is undesirable outcomes driven directly by the actions of the species, such as starvation due to excessive population growth with limited food sources.  The greater the population boom, the more depleted the food sources and the more catastrophic the effect on the species.

Conclusion

From the characteristics discussed above, climate change is particularly well categorized as negative feedback.  Even though its progress seems pretty slow to us, the localized effects like forest fires, floods, mega-storms, and even sea-level rise are happening faster than humans and human infrastructure can move out of the way.  More importantly, the effects of climate change (and their severity) are directly attributable to our own actions - there is no doubt of that anymore.

No one can dispute that humans have significant self-awareness and impressive self-control - as individuals.  However, our impacts are now significant enough that they are subject to nature's most powerful complexities - systems that we cannot begin to fully comprehend.  Humans, as living organisms, are not immune to the Law of Propagation and Consumption, and while our intelligence has given as a huge advantage over some of nature's minor limiting factors, we are clearly still subject to the potentially fatal Law of Negative Feedback - even feedback of our own creation.

(Continue to part 5 of 9)