SUNDAY, JAN 14, 2024: NOTE TO FILE
Another World Scientists' Warning to Humanity
The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: PAYING ATTENTION, FROM THE WIRES, AND THEN WHAT?, REALITY-BASED ISSUES
Abstract: Yet another warning to humanity that at least offers new to public/officials information. Managing behaviors is needed to effect a viable outcome.
COOS BAY (A-P) —
Joseph J Merz, Phoebe Barnard, William E Rees, Dane Smith, Mat Maroni, Christopher J Rhodes, Julia H Dederer, Nandita Bajaj, Michael K Joy, Thomas Wiedmann, Rory Sutherland. September 20, 2023, Sage Journals. Sage Journals (“often considered a reputable and reliable source for scholarly work”) includes papers as submitted by authors for exclusive publication only whether in the free to read Open online site or in pay-to-read journals for a $1600 fee for two peers to review submission (I wouldn’t be published — they’d keep my money so I wouldn’t try, but looks like a low-bar publisher). And click above to consider authors and how many you would consider scientists with a relevant background.
The idea is that anthropogenic ecological overshoot, our meta-problem, is in turn a “subversive modern crisis of human behaviour,” and so to address ecological overshoot, focus on addressing “the Human Behavioural Crisis.”
The news is that mainstream media (The Guardian) has an article on another scientists’ warning to the world. The warning uses the word ‘population’ 36 times in the body of the article and… drum roll… ‘overpopulation’ was used once. A year or so ago I searched The New York Times in print all the way back to 1851 for the words ‘ecological overshoot’. Results: zero. The concept doesn’t exist in their (the readers of NYT) domain of discourse. I looked at the usage of ‘overshoot’, but apart from airplanes that ‘overshoot runway’ events, nothing.
But in a science journal, ‘overshoot’ can be mentioned 42 times (overshoot is the answer to humanity’s plans for life, if not the universe and everything). And, second drum roll, ‘ecological overshoot’ occurs 21 times starting with the title to the end of the main body of text.
That ‘Humanity, we have a problematique’ has been known to those paying attention since about 1950 when the Great Acceleration kicked in, and by millions in the 1970s (after which, there being no political solutions, the consensus narrative came to ignore biophysical reality 101 stuff).
Of course, The Guardian had to change the title to Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists: New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. [If you don’t subscribe and have exceeded your free views, right click on link and open in an incognito window.]
I only read as far as the link to the actual warning so I could reread it. But out of anthropological interest, I read The Guardian version too. Excepts [and comments] follow.
A globe at a CES technology consumer show in Las Vegas this week. Climate experts claim ‘creativity and innovation are driving overconsumption’. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images. [Forget “overshoot,” let’s talk about CLIMATE change.]
Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot [emphasis added], which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour [to grow the economy].
“We need to become mindful of the way we’re being manipulated,” says Merz, who is co-founder of the Merz Institute, an organisation that researches the systemic causes of the climate crisis [overshoot] and how to tackle them.
Merz and colleagues believe that most climate “solutions” proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three “levers” of overshoot: consumption, waste and population [not necessarily in that order].
They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster [for those who don’t speak the King’s English, read Band-Aid]. “We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot,” says Merz. “The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades — they’re not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand.” [PxA, populaltion x per capita consumption]
“Overshoot” refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain — or grow — itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. [If exceeding carrying capacity (overshoot) is understood to include systemic (agricultural) species extinction, then humanity went into overshoot about 3k-4k years ago.]
Where discussion of climate often centres on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth’s biosphere.
“Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction — and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.” [The ‘crisis of human behavior’ seems to have begun 75k years ago, and so underestimating the challenge of changing our form of civilization/culture it maybe likely.]
[Ads omitted. And the Guardian article uses ‘population’ six times and ‘overpop…’ zero, but overshoot is used 10 times, 7 times not in quotes. ‘Ecological overshoot’ used once. Maybe this will be the year the New York Times uses the term (50 years too late).]
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.
“People are the victims — we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”
Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms.
“We’re talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they’re trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint –our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season’s trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint — or even better, have an ecologically positive one.”
The Merz Institute runs an overshoot behaviour lab where they work on interventions to address overshoot. One of these identifies “behavioural influencers” such as screenwriters, web developers and algorithm engineers, all of whom are promoting certain social norms and could be working to rewire society relatively quickly and harmlessly by promoting a new set of behaviours.
The paper discusses the enormous success of the work of the Population Media Center, an initiative that creates mainstream entertainment to drive behaviour change on population growth and even gender violence. Fertility rates have declined in the countries in which the centre’s telenovelas and radionovelas have aired.
Population growth is a difficult topic to broach given the not-too-distant history of eugenics and ethnic cleansing practised in many nations around the world. However, Merz and colleagues insist it is important to confront the issue as population growth has cancelled out most climate gains from renewables and efficiency over the past three decades.
“It’s a question of women’s liberation, frankly,” says Barnard. “Higher levels of education lead to lower fertility rates. Who could possibly claim to be against educating girls — and if they are, why?” [So does Calhoun’s “behavioral sink” effect of overdensity populations moderns have been living in, on average, for 6–8 generations, which is closer to the real behavioral crisis.]
The team calls for more interdisciplinary research into what they have dubbed the “human behavioural crisis” and concerted efforts to redefine our social norms and desires that are driving overconsumption. When asked about the ethics of such a campaign, Merz and Barnard point out that corporations fight for consumers’ attention every second of every day.
“Is it ethical to exploit our psychology to benefit an economic system destroying the planet?” asks Barnard. “Creativity and innovation are driving overconsumption. The system is driving us to suicide. It’s conquest, entitlement, misogyny, arrogance and it comes in a fetid package driving us to the abyss.”
The team is adamant that solutions that do not tackle the underlying drivers of our growth-based economies will only exacerbate the overshoot crisis.
“Everything we know and love is at stake,” says Barnard. “A habitable planet and a peaceful civilisation both have value, and we need to be conscious about using tools in ethical and justice-based ways. This is not just about humanity. This is about every other species on this planet. This is about the future generations.”
“I do get frustrated that people sit in paralysis thinking, what do I do? Or what must we do? There are moral hazards everywhere. We have to choose how to intervene to keep us working on a path forward as humanity, because everything right now is set up to strip us of our humanity.”
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Betsy Reed, Editor, Guardian US; American journalist and editor, degrees in history/literature, Harvard, 1990.
The End
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The short of it per mainstream media: we have behavioral problems (a crisis) and should choose to do something about it.
Per the original paper, anthropogenic ecological overshoot, our meta-problem, is in turn a “subversive modern crisis of human behaviour,” and so to address ecological overshoot, focus on addressing “the Human Behavioural Crisis.”
The proposed solution is to globally recognize “the Human Behavioural Crisis… as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot…. We call for an emergency, concerted, multidisciplinary effort to target the populations and value levers most likely to produce rapid global adoption of new consumption, reproduction and waste norms congruent with the survival of complex life on Earth… We urgently call for increased interdisciplinary work to be carried out in directing, understanding and policing widespread behaviour manipulation.”
Or, in fewer words: “If people want the planet and their communities to survive, they will have to learn to consume and waste less, have small families and share more.” Oh, but I heard all of this loud and clear on Earth Day 1970, and meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed. I also heard that “we have met the enemy,” but Pogo was overoptimistic — we didn’t, we were merely bemused by the idea that we are posterity’s (and biosphere’s) worst enemy (when we are not working to save it — or when we are).
But “ecological overshoot” is short for “we are on a pathway poised to kill over 10 billion humans by premature death this century.” Short-term self interested political animals can’t think about rapid human population reduction…, and so then what?
Plausibly, the distal cause of our problematique is “maladaptive behaviours,” but what if such behaviors began before early 20th century advertising? Perhaps a “shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste” to change the three drivers, “economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism” is a distraction from distal causes that date back 75 thousand years.
From a K-strategist/K-culture point of view, we (our ancestors) were stripped “of our humanity” about 75k years ago and evermore so since rapidly expanding out of Africa 55k years ago. Ignoring archaeogenetics and Calhoun will not have a viable outcome. Sorry about that.
“If people want the planet and their communities to survive, they will have to learn to consume and waste less, have small families and share more,” then what? Renormalize as K-strategists with a viable K-culture, whether we want to or not? We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to (except go extinct).
Being denormalized came first. Failure to renormalize will have human extinction as outcome, whether in 50 years or 50k years. We (authors/readers of all warnings) are vastly underestimating the difficulty of sidestepping our (posterity’s) extinction. Aside from being energy blind, time blind, and overshoot blind, we are rapidly loosing any such fragile grasp of “reality” as we may still have. A bottleneck is foreseeable, and 8 billion and counting will not all pass through it. There have been dark ages before, but 4 of 5 times non-conquest collapse ends in extinction.
SUBNOTE TO FILE 2/2/2024
Pschology Today offers a summary of the warning.
A Human Behavioural Crisis Threatens Humanity: The climate crisis should shift from technological solutions to human behavior.
KEY POINTS
- A recent study shows the climate crisis is primarily a human behavioral crisis.
- The study emphasizes the need for changing harmful human behavior like overconsumption and population growth.
- Marketing, media, and storytelling tools can be used to reframe social norms.
“Attention should focus on maladaptive human behaviors that culminate in a state they term “anthropogenic ecological overshoot” — this could be described as human-caused, unsustainable overconsumption.”
After agreeing insofar as possible, the author ends with the thought stopper:
“The “WEIRD” skewing that tends to feature in manipulators, as well as the typical direction of research — from the “Global North” to the “Global South” — is also relevant…. Ethically speaking, there is a great deal to unpack….”
Biophysical reality (nature) is a subset of human centric political concerns. And where’s that latte I ordered?
