Editor’s note: This article was written over a year and a half ago. Things are so much more worse now. Overshoot
Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable
Mike Joy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually.
Many economists criticising the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth’s biophysical limits.
Ecologists on the other hand see the human economy as a subset of the biosphere. Their perspective highlights the urgency with which we need to reduce our demands on the biosphere to avoid a disastrous ecological collapse, with consequences for us and all other species.
Many degrowth scholars (as well as critics) focus on features of capitalism as the cause of this ecological overshoot. But while capitalism may be problematic, many civilisations destroyed ecosystems to the point of collapse long before it became our dominant economic model.
Capitalism, powered by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil energy, has indeed resulted in unprecedented and global biosphere disruption. But the direct cause remains the excessive volume and speed with which resources are extracted and wastes returned to the environment.
From an ecologist’s perspective, degrowth is inevitable on our current trajectory.
Carrying capacity
Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources. Overshoot declines when those resources return to more stable levels. This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust.
Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species.
One advantage humans have over other species is that we understand overshoot dynamics and can plan how we adjust. This is what the degrowth movement is attempting to do.
To grasp the necessity of reducing ecological overshoot we must understand its current status. We can do this by examining a variety of empirical studies.
Material flows and planetary boundaries
Analysis of material flows in the economy shows we are currently extracting more than 100 billion tons of natural materials annually, and rising. This greatly exceeds natural processes – erosion, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes – that move materials around the globe.
Such massive human-driven material flows can destroy ecosystems, cause pollution and drive species extinct.
Only about 10% of these resource flows are potentially renewable. In many cases, we are harvesting more than can be regenerated annually (for example, many fish stocks).
Humans have now transgressed at least six of nine planetary boundaries. Each boundary has distinct limits, but in some instances the overshoot is at least double the safe operating level.
Stockholm Resilience Centre, CC BY-SA
Both material flow analysis and planetary boundaries provide critically important information about our impacts on the biosphere. But they fail to capture the full picture. The former doesn’t directly measure biosphere functioning. The latter doesn’t capture inter-dependencies between various boundaries.
The biosphere is a holistic entity, with many self-organising and interconnected subsystems. Our generally reductionist scientific methodologies are not able to capture this level of complexity. The methodology that comes closest to achieving this is the ecological footprint.
Biocapacity
The ecological footprint measures the amount of productive surface on Earth and its capacity to generate resources and assimilate waste. These are two of the most fundamental features of the biosphere.
It then compares this available biocapacity with humanity’s annual demands. Humanity’s ecological footprint has exceeded the biosphere’s annual biocapacity since at least 1970 and is currently almost twice the sustainable level.
The reason we can use more of what is generated annually is because we use stored biomass – ancient solar energy captured over millennia – to power this draw-down.
“The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.” New paper by Bill Rees (one of the people who conceptualized the idea of “the ecological footprint” just dropped…)
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable
Humanity exceeds its fair share of natural resources by more than 50%, and likely needs to reduce this demand by 70-80% to operate within carrying capacity. Those with greater wealth are responsible for a disproportionately large share of overshoot.
It’s not just a climate crisis
The political and public concern about climate change is considerable internationally and in New Zealand. But this is one of many environmental crises, together with soil erosion, groundwater pollution, deforestation, the rise of invasive species, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and the depletion of resources. They are all symptoms of overshoot.
The climate crisis is seen as a problem requiring a solution rather than a symptom of overshoot. The problem is generally formulated as looking for a way to maintain current lifestyles in the wealthy world, rather than reducing overshoot.
The ecological perspective accepts that we exceed biophysical boundaries and emphasises the importance of reducing energy and material consumption – regardless of how the energy is provided.
The scope of human disruption of the biosphere is now global. This ecological perspective highlights the current magnitude and closeness of significant and unwelcome changes to Earth systems. The reduction of humanity’s demands on the biosphere is an overriding priority.
Ecological economics, with its emphasis on a steady-state economy, is perhaps the most rigorous existing economic framework with specific proposals for determining priority actions. We urge scholars of all disciples to examine these.
The author acknowledges the contribution of Jack Santa-Barbara.
Mike Joy, Senior Researcher; Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash
The whole overshoot idea is ridiculous. The problems are overpopulation and wrongful living/overconsumption. Overshoot is just a symptom of those problems.
Additionally, focusing on overshoot is no different than focusing on “sustainability;” both are totally immoral and evince a very bad attitude toward the natural world and the nonhuman life there. The basic premise of these concepts is to figure out how much harm, destruction, and killing humans can do before they do so much that it causes harm to themselves. Is that really your goal? If you kill anyone you don’t eat — directly or indirectly — or cause ANY unnatural harm to the Earth, land, air, water, sky, or any nonhuman, you’ve caused ecological harm and done wrong to another, regardless of whether the harm is great enough to cause “overshoot.”
“Many degrowth scholars (as well as critics) focus on features of capitalism as the cause of this ecological overshoot. But while capitalism may be problematic, many civilisations destroyed ecosystems to the point of collapse long before it became our dominant economic model.”
Civilization itself is the problem, and civilization is caused solely by overpopulation. In turn, overpopulation is caused by agriculture. Agriculture is the physical root of the problems here, not fossil extraction & use of fuels, which agriculture predates by 10,000 years.
“Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources.”
And high school biology tells us that more food = more animals, humans being no exception. That’s why agriculture caused overpopulation: it created an unnatural overabundance of food, causing the original human population bomb. Population is the No. 1 factor in determining whether carrying capacity has been reached or exceeded.
What we SHOULD be discussing is changing to a morality that disallows ANY harm or killing except to eat, and that exception only applies to killing naturally, i.e. hunting & gathering. We should be striving to live as lightly as possible, doing the least harm possible. All this blathering about sustainability and overshoot is no different than the calls for “green” energy: it’s just people trying to maintain their lifestyles.