KLAMATH, CALIFORNIA—Brook M. Thompson was just 7 years old when she witnessed an apocalypse.
“A day after our world renewal ceremony, we saw all these fish lined up on the shores, just rotting in piles,” says Thompson, a Yurok tribal member who is also Karuk and living in present-day Northern California. “This is something that’s never happened in our oral history, since time immemorial.”
During the 2002 fish kill in the Klamath River, an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 salmon died when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. This catastrophic event catalyzed a movement to remove four dams that had choked the river for nearly a century.
Now, that decades-long tribal-led movement has finally come to fruition. As of Oct. 5, the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams have been fully removed from the river, freeing 676 kilometers (420 miles) of the river and its tributaries. This is the largest dam-removal project in history.
“This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” says Thompson, who is an artist, a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe and pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“I feel amazing,” Thompson tells Mongabay at the annual Yurok Salmon Festival in Klamath, California, in late August, just weeks before the river was freed. “I feel like the weight of all that concrete is lifted off my shoulders.”
A river dammed
The Klamath River stretches 423 km (263 mi) from its headwaters in southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean just south of Crescent City, California. It was once the third-largest salmon-producing river in the contiguous U.S., sustaining tribes for centuries and later also supporting a thriving recreational and commercial fishing industry.
Six Klamath River dams were built by the California Oregon Power Company (now Portland, Oregon-based electric company PacifiCorp) in the 20th century. The four lower dams, built to generate hydroelectric power, were Copco No. 1, completed in 1918, followed by Copco No. 2 in 1925, the J.C. Boyle Dam in 1958, and Iron Gate Dam in 1964.
At the time, they were seen as marvels of engineering and progress, promising cheap electricity to fuel the region’s growth. Together, these four dams could generate 163 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 70,000 homes and drive development in the remote territory.
However, the dams came at a tremendous cost to the river’s ecosystem and the Karuk, Yurok, Shasta, Klamath and Modoc tribes who have depended on its salmon since time immemorial.
In the decades after dam construction, the river’s once-thriving ecosystem began to collapse and salmon populations plummeted. In 1997, coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the Klamath were listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The life cycle of salmon is tied to the free flow of rivers. These fish are born in freshwater streams and migrate to the ocean, where they spend most of their adult lives, and then return to their natal streams to spawn and die. This journey, which can span thousands of miles, is crucial for the genetic diversity and resilience of salmon populations.
Dams disrupt this natural cycle by blocking access to spawning habitat, altering water temperatures, and degrading water quality. On the Klamath, salmon lost hundreds of miles of habitat. Worldwide, not just salmon, but many other migratory fish species such as trout, herring, eels and sea lamprey are blocked by dams.
Dead salmon floating in the Klamath River in 2002. An estimated 70,000 salmon died when PacifiCorp withheld water behind the Iron Gate Dam, sending it to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. Photo from Salmon kill photo archive.Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner uses a dip net to fish for salmon on the Klamath river in Karuk territory. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
“The dams were like a blockage in the river’s arteries. They stopped the flow of life, not just for the fish, but for our people too,” Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner, tells Mongabay. He recalls the stark decline in fish populations during his lifetime.
“As I grew up, the fish catching down here became almost nonexistent. At some points I was catching maybe 100 fish in a year,” Reed says. “At the time the Karuk Tribe had more than 3,000 members. That’s not enough for anything. Not even everybody gets a bite.”
Commercial and recreational fishing also took a hit over the years. “Back in the mid-1900s, the Klamath River was known as the single most revered fly-fishing river in California,” Mark Rockwell, vice president of conservation for the Montana-based NGO Fly Fishers International, which supported the dam removal efforts, said in a statement. “Fly fishers came from all over the U.S. and other countries to experience the historic fishery. All that was lost because of the dams and the damage & disease they brought to the river.”
For the tribes, the impact of the dams went beyond fish. The dams created large reservoirs that flooded ancestral lands and cultural sites, particularly village sites and important ceremonial areas of the Shasta Indian Nation in the upper Klamath.
Reed also shared memories of the dangers posed by the dams farther downstream in Karuk territory. “When I was growing up, we were not allowed to go to the river. Before Iron Gate Dam was put up [to control flows from the Copco dams] you had that surge when they made electricity and that fluctuation was up to 3 feet,” he said. “We were losing people along the river. There are stories of our people drowning.”
The movement to undam the Klamath
The fight to remove the four lower Klamath dams began in earnest in the early 2000s, led by the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes. After the 2002 fish kill made national news, the campaign to remove the dams grew beyond a local issue into a national movement supported by environmental NGOs and pro-fishing groups in California and beyond, such as American Rivers, Ridges to Riffles Conservation Group, California Trout, Save California Salmon, and the Native Fish Society.
In 2004, Tribal members and their allies traveled to Scotland to protest Scottish Power, which owned the dams at the time. The Scottish people rallied in support of the protesters, and in 2005 Scottish Power transferred ownership back to PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Protesters then took their message to shareholder meetings in Omaha, Nebraska.
Those in favor of dam removal argued that dams had been catastrophic for the ecosystem. The lower dams provided no irrigation, drinking water or flood control. Electricity from the dams did not go directly to local residents but was channeled into the Pacific power grid, which powers homes as far north as Vancouver, British Colombia, and as far south as Baja California. And finally, it would cost more to bring the dams up to modern standards than to remove them.
On the other hand, residents of the Copco community stood to lose the Copco Reservoir, a lake used for recreation and a tourism draw for the area. Others feared loss of energy and water quality problems. The campaign to remove the Klamath dams faced numerous challenges, including entrenched economic interests, local opposition, and complex regulatory hurdles.
Dam removal advocates overcame these obstacles through persistent grassroots organizing, alliances between tribes and environmental groups, and media campaigns that brought national attention to the scientific evidence about the dams’ negative impacts on salmon populations and water quality.
But what really made a difference was proving that removing the dams would cost less than fixing them up.
PacifiCorp and its parent company, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, initially resisted removal, but gradually shifted their stance as the financial and regulatory landscape changed. The turning point came when advocates demonstrated that removal could cap PacifiCorp’s liability and potentially save ratepayers money in the long term.
In 2016, after much negotiation, PacifiCorp agreed to transfer the dams to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), a nonprofit organization created specifically to take ownership of the dams and oversee their removal. By agreeing to transfer the dams to KRRC, PacifiCorp found a way to get rid of money-losing properties while avoiding uncertain future costs and risks.
In 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the plan, paving the way for the largest-ever dam removal and river restoration project not just in the U.S., but in the world.
Ultimately, dam removal and river restoration came with a price tag of approximately $450 million, funded through a combination of surcharges on PacifiCorp customers and California state bond money. Although Pacificorp hasn’t provided an official cost estimate, they have said it would have cost a great deal more to keep the dams operating safely.
Removing mountains of concrete and earth
Removing four massive dams is no small feat. The process involved years of planning, environmental impact studies, and complex engineering work.
“Removing a dam is like performing open-heart surgery on the landscape,” says Dan Chase, a fisheries biologist with Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the company contracted to handle the restoration work. “You have to be incredibly careful and precise, or you risk causing more harm than good.”
The physical removal of the dams began in mid-2023 and concluded in October 2024. It was a carefully orchestrated process that involved slowly draining reservoirs, demolishing concrete structures, scooping away the earthen dams, and managing the release of decades of accumulated sediment.
The removal of the dams occurred in a staggered sequence, beginning with the smallest dam and progressing to the larger ones. Copco 2, the smallest, was the first to be fully removed, with the process completed in October 2023.
This was followed by the initiation of drawdown (the controlled release of water) for the large reservoirs behind the three remaining dams, Iron Gate, J.C. Boyle and Copco 1, in January 2024.
The first step was to breach the dam (either with explosives or using existing openings) and lower the water level in the reservoir behind it. This was done gradually to minimize erosion and downstream damage. Contractors used special water tunnels and diversions to control water release.
Dam removal underway on the Iron Gate dam on Aug 15, 2024. Contractors diverted water during the removal process. Drone image by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Ren Brownell, the public information officer for KRRC, describes the day she watched the waters of the Iron Gate reservoir, tinged electric green from toxic algal blooms, drain in just 17 hours.
“It was like watching 10,000 years of geology in a matter of a week. [The sediment] washed away and eventually the Klamath River was revealed,” Brownell, who grew up in the area, tells Mongabay. “I end up looking back on that period as one of my favorite times on the project, because I got to watch a river come back to life and just reveal itself.”
Decades worth of sediment had accumulated behind the dams, most of which was washed downstream by the draining of the reservoirs. Although the river was extra muddy and turbid after each dam removal, experts view this as a positive sign of the ecosystem reclaiming its natural state.
The historic path of the Klamath river reemerges after the Iron Gate dam was removed and the reservoir drained. Native plants can be seen along the, planted by crews after the reservoir was drained. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
With the water levels lowered, heavy machinery moved in to begin breaking apart the concrete structures. Kiewit, the contractor KRRC hired to complete the deconstruction elements of the project, used hydraulic hammers, explosives, and other specialized equipment to demolish the dams, piece by piece.
According to KRRC, the concrete was buried onsite and the earthen material was returned to nearby areas, ideally where it had been originally removed from to build the dams. Hazardous materials were hauled offsite to appropriate facilities and metals were recycled.
Restoring an ecosystem
RES, who is overseeing restoration, now faces the monumental task of restoring the river channel and the 890 hectares (2,200 acres) of land that were once submerged beneath reservoirs.
“It’s not enough to just take out the dams,” says Chase, the RES fish biologist. “We need to help jump-start the ecosystem’s recovery.”
This effort began years before the dams were removed. In 2019, crews of primarily Yurok tribal members began a massive effort to gather seeds from native plants in the surrounding areas, including oak trees, poppies and various grasses.
“We had crews out collecting native seeds, with close to 100 different species collected from the area that we then took to commercial nurseries to grow and harvest and grow out again to the point where we’re now in the neighborhood of 17 to 19 billion native seeds,” says David Meurer, director of community affairs for RES.
A combination of hand seeding and helicopter seeding occurred at all three major reservoir footprints: Copco 1, Iron Gate and J.C. Boyle. (The smaller Copco 2 dam had impounded just a narrow, rocky area that only needed to be reshaped, according to RES.) The first round of seeding served to stabilize the sediment and improve soil. RES says this was a success, though there have been some challenges and surprises, including some rogue horses.
“We did not expect a huge and ever-increasing herd of horses who obviously are going to prefer our forage, which is green and lush, to what they saw in the surrounding hillside,” Meurer says. To address this unwanted grazing, RES is installing a rather long and costly fence around the planted areas.
As the dams came down, crews also began restoring the natural river channel. RES worked with a Yurok construction company to help direct the stream back toward its historic alignment. The team is still fine-tuning the river’s path, using plane-mounted lidar laser imaging to map and guide their work.
Free-roaming horses graze on restoration plantings along the Klamath river. Before dam removal, this area was submerged by the Iron Gate reservoir. The piles of logs shown here will be placed along the river to guide the river path and create habitat. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
The return of the salmon
Down a gravel road in Northern California, through a thicket of willow trees, around big boulders, and over smooth cobbles, is the place the Karuk Tribe calls the center of the world. A massive wedge of stone, a mini-mountain, stands guard over a section of the Klamath River rife with riffles and rapids.
On the river’s edge, Reed sits atop a massive boulder, praying. A white bird traces slow circles overhead. It’s later summer, a season of ceremony for the tribes. The world renewal ceremony is tied to the upstream migration of salmon.
Reed, a tribal elder, hops spryly across boulders to the base of a small rapid. With practiced movements, he swoops the end of a traditional dip net, a 15-foot loop of willow tree branch with a net at the end, into the whitewater.
Karuk Tribal citizens Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell catch the first fall chinook salmon of the on the Klamath river in late August. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Within seconds, a fat salmon thrashes in the net. Reed and Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, let out shouts of celebration. This was the first fall Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) of the season. They carry the fish back to a congratulatory crew and carefully clean it in a trickle of fresh water.
“We’re eating well tonight,” Mitchell says.
Because of their cultural and economic status, restoration efforts cater largely to the needs of the fish. As the physical landscape transforms post-dam removal, eyes are on the river’s iconic salmon.
“We’re already seeing positive changes,” Toz Soto, fisheries program manager for the Karuk Tribe, said, just weeks before the dam removal was complete. “Water temperatures are more natural, sediment is moving downstream as it should, and we expect fish to start to explore areas they haven’t been able to reach in generations.”
This expectation has already become a reality. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, “On October 16, a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.”
And a post by Swiftwater films, the official documentary crew for the project stated, “The first chinook salmon in over 60 years are officially spawning above the former Iron Gate dam on the Klamath, just two weeks after construction wrapped on dam removal…The fish are bright, strong and beautiful. What an incredible few days and a testament to the resilience of salmon.”
Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, holds the first fall chinook salmon of the year caught by the tribe. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
To improve salmon habitat, the RES team is adding structures to the river and its tributaries, such as fallen trees, to create pools and riffles the salmon require for spawning. They’re also installing what they call “beaver dam analogs,” structures of wood or rock pounded in along streams to slow the water down and catch sediment.
The removal of the Klamath dams will help many types of fish, says Shari Witmore, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who is studying salmon and other fish in the river, told Mongabay. The coho salmon, which are threatened with extinction, will gain about 122 km (76 mi) of river to live in. The project might also bring back spring Chinook salmon, which used to be common in the upper river but have nearly disappeared.
“What we’ve seen in other dam removals is that it takes about three to four [salmon] generations for salmon populations to become sustainable,” Witmore says. “And so for Chinook salmon, that’s 15 to 20 years, and for coho salmon, that’s six to 12 years.”
Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus), another culturally important species for the tribes, and steelhead (O. mykiss irideus) will gain access to an additional 644 km (400 mi) of river. These fish can swim in faster-moving water than salmon. With more places to live and breed, all these fish species should have a better chance of survival.
And, of course, the whole ecosystem will benefit, says Chase of RES. “We have northwestern pond turtle. We have freshwater mussels. There’s beaver out there. We’ve been seeing river otter foraging … it goes on and on.”
Yurok tribal members and others fish at the mouth of the Klamath River. Commercial salmon fishing was suspended this year due to low numbers, but scientists predict salmon populations will rebound in about a decade. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Tribal knowledge and collaboration
The restoration of the Klamath River has been aided by tribal knowledge, sometimes referred to as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or, as Reed calls it, “place-based Indigenous science.”
“Certainly, the place-based knowledge component has been vital to us,” Chase says. “Thinking about the species of plants to use, where they’re occurring on the landscape, what species are culturally significant and important that need to be included. That’s been an element of refining and improving our restoration work.”
On the fisheries side, Chase says, the tribes have shared an immense amount of information with the RES team on how fish move through the landscape, the habitats they use, and the ways the different life stages respond to various environmental factors.
One example is related to off-channel habitats, places off the main river stem where fish can go in the winters when stream flow is faster and in the warm summer when cover and food are critical. Tribal knowledge about how to create and enhance these features, and how fish interact with them, has helped RES to restore historic salmon habitats.
Healing rivers, healing people
“The decline of salmon has been linked to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease in our communities,” says Thompson, the Karuk and Yurok restoration engineer and Ph.D. student. “Their return is quite literally a matter of life and death for us.”
The removal of the Klamath dams is a step toward healing historical wounds inflicted on the Native American tribes of the region through decades of genocide and colonialism, according to Thompson and Reed.
However, the fight to remove the dams has taken a toll on those involved. Reed speaks candidly about the mental health challenges he and others have faced during the long struggle.
“I almost lost my family. You’re gone trying to fix the world. I’m going to Scotland. I’m going to wherever, whenever, however. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle. Meanwhile, my wife’s home with six children.” Eventually, he says, “I broke down, suffered depression … I just happened to have a good, strong family that allowed me to kind of come out of it.”
Reed and hundreds of others persevered. “We’re not just fighting for ourselves,” Reed says. “We’re fighting for our children, our grandchildren, and the salmon themselves.”
“These salmon were taken care of by my ancestors, who I had never met and never had contact with myself,” Thompson says. “The salmon are like love letters sent into the future where the love and effort put into the salmon were done so that I could have a good and healthy life.”
Challenges remain
For the Klamath region, the challenges are far from over. Climate change, wildfires, and the legacy of more than a century of colonialism and ecological disruption still pose significant threats.
“There’s been so much degradation over the last 100-plus years from agriculture, forestry, water diversion and grazing,” says Mark Buettner, director of the Klamath Tribe’s Ambodat Department, which is responsible for aquatic resource management in the Upper Klamath Basin.
There are still two smaller dams in the upper Klamath River in Oregon: the Keno and Link River dams. These aren’t hydropower dams, unlike the four that were removed; they provide flood control and water for agriculture, and there’s currently no plan to remove them.
“I want to emphasize that we’re happy that salmon will be back, but we’re not really ready for them,” Buettner adds. “Sure, the fish have free access to the upper basin, but the upper basin habitats aren’t optimal. Young fish could be diverted into irrigation diversions. The Keno dam needs a new fish ladder.”
As I pass through Karuk territory in late August, traveling west toward the ocean, the air is heavy with smoke and fire crews pass regularly in their trucks, serving as a stark reminder of the work that still lies ahead. This includes addressing more than 150 years of colonial fire suppression practices, Reed says.
A sign warns of high fire risk near the Klamath river in late August 2024. More than a century of colonial fire suppression practices, along with climate change has made fires more frequent and severe in the U.S. West. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.As the Klamath River flows by, a wildfire burns in the distance, near Orleans, California on August 18, 2024. This is was just one of many fires burning in the region that day. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
“When settlers first arrived in the Klamath region of what is now Northern California, they found forests with enormous trees, wooden homes and structures, acorn orchards, abundant plants, berries, fish, wildlife and clean water. All of it was made possible by Indigenous peoples’ frequent use of fire on the landscape,” Russel Attebery, chair of the Karuk Tribe, writes in a opinion piece for news outlet CalMatters. “California is not just fire-adapted, it is fire dependent.”
However, these controlled or cultural burns were outlawed in 1850 and are still “unjustly criminalized,” Attebery writes. The lack of prescribed burns, coupled with warmer and drier conditions from climate change, has led to more severe and frequent wildfires.
Wildfires are taking a toll on the Klamath River. Debris flow from last year’s McKinney Fire killed thousands of fish. Fires can heat up the river, making it too warm for cold-water fish like salmon. They also send silt and ash into the water, which can choke fish and smother their eggs. Sometimes, the erosion from fires even changes the river’s path. The ecosystem evolved with fire, but not at the frequency and severity of modern fires.
Reed and other traditional fire practitioners are being asked by academics and fire-management agencies to advise on traditional burning practices, and restore balance.
The irony of Native peoples being asked to consult on how to restore the land that was stolen from them isn’t lost on Reed. “I think we’re leading the nation with teaching cultural fire, through a faith-based process and hopefully this co-production of knowledge,” he says. But, he adds, “it’s kind of like, OK, they took our gold, they took our timber, they took everything, and they’re still taking our knowledge.”
Karuk Tribal members Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell in “the center of the world” by the Klamath River. The air is smokey from nearby forest fires. As a cultural fire practitioner, Reed has been asked to teach and share traditional knowledge in academia and with government agencies but says Indigenous people are seldom justly compensated for their knowledge. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
A cautionary tale
Many of the people I speak to cast the story of the Klamath dams as one of hope, but also as a cautionary tale for regions around the world considering large-scale dam projects.
While dams can provide benefits such as hydropower and water storage, they also levy significant environmental and social costs. Moreover, all dams have a finite lifespan, and their eventual removal is an expensive and complex process that planners often ignore.
“Dams were never meant to be pyramids,” says Ann Willis, California director of the NGO American Rivers. “They’re just infrastructure, and eventually, infrastructure ages. You can either be proactive about repairing, retrofitting or removing it, or you can deal with the far greater costs of a catastrophic failure after it happens. But there’s no question that one day it will fail.”
In many parts of the world, large dam projects are still being proposed and constructed. The lessons from the Klamath suggest these projects should be approached with caution, with full consideration given to long-term environmental and social impacts, as well as the inevitable costs of decommissioning at the end of the dam’s lifespan.
Site of the J.C. Boyle dam in Oregon after dam removal. Drone photo by Mongabay.
“No single agency is responsible for removing a dam, and [there’s] no requirement for dam owners to save funds for its removal,” Willis says. “The process of removing obsolete, disintegrating dams can take decades while people navigate a web of bureaucracy and look for funding. As time goes on, the risk of failure increases, which is incredibly dangerous as most dams would cause significant loss of human life and economic damage if they failed.”
As of February 2024, more than 2,000 dams have been removed across the U.S., most of them in the past 25 years, according to American Rivers. But more than 92,000 remain standing. Willis says she hopes the success of the Klamath dams’ removal and restoration project can serve as a blueprint for similar efforts around the world.
“The Klamath is significant not only because it is the biggest dam removal and river restoration effort in history, but because it shows that we can work towards righting historic wrongs and make big, bold dreams a reality for our rivers and communities,” Willis says. “Dam removal is the best way to bring a river back to life.”
Ren Brownell, public information officer for Klamath River Renewal Corporation, stands over the Copco 1 dam removal site. KRRC was formed to oversee the dam removal process. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
‘Anything is possible now’
Amid the world’s tallest trees, where the Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean, the annual Yurok Salmon Festival is in full swing when I arrive. On the main street, outside the Yurok Tribal Headquarters in the town of Klamath, California, dozens of booths are selling arts and crafts. There’s music, dancing, games, and a palpable sense of joy in the air.
But something’s missing this year: The salmon. Due to low numbers, both tribal and commercial fishing have been suspended this year.
Despite this absence, attendees express hope and a sense that change is coming. “We are delighted about the dam removal and hope for the return of the salmon,” says Yurok artist Paula Carrol. “We are salmon people. Without salmon, who are we?”
“This is still a celebration,” Thompson says, “and anything is possible now.”
A parade rolls through the town of Klamath, California during the annual Yurok Salmon Festival. This year, there was no salmon. Still, many attendees were hopeful for the salmons’ renewal post dam removal. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
Editor’s note: Climate change can not be addressed without stopping the extinction and plastics crisis. Every day, an estimated 137 species of plants, animals and insects go extinct due to deforestation alone. Microplastics have been detected in more than 1,300 animal species, including fish, mammals, birds, and insects. A global plastic treaty will only work if it caps production. Bangladesh is about to implement its existing law regarding plastic usage by strictly banning single-use plastic and, gradually, all possible plastic uses.
Scientific models can never account for all of the interconnected relationships within planetary systems’ boundaries. That is one reason why catastrophe predictions are always being pushed ahead.
There is simply no way the current economic system can persist indefinitely on a finite planet. Unfortunately, COP16’s primary goal is critical to striking a sustainable balance between human civilization and the natural world. That is an impossibility. We must tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations, basically civilization.
It is time to end civilization. Everything that claims existence must lose it; this is the eternal law. Power never gives up power willingly; it can only be broken with struggle. Nature is struggling to survive; we should help it.
Wildlife, climate and plastic: how three summits aim to repair a growing rift with nature
By the end of 2024, nearly 200 nations will have met at three conferences to address three problems: biodiversity loss, climate change and plastic pollution.
Colombia will host talks next week to assess global progress in protecting 30% of all land and water by 2030. Hot on its heels is COP29 in Azerbaijan. Here, countries will revisit the pledge they made last year in Dubai to “transition away” from the fossil fuels driving climate breakdown. And in December, South Korea could see the first global agreement to tackle plastic waste.
Don’t let these separate events fool you, though.
“Climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are not isolated problems,” says biologist Liette Vasseur (Brock University), political scientist Anders Hayden (Dalhousie University) and ecologist Mike Jones (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).
Earth’s fraying parasol “How hot is it going to get? This is one of the most important and difficult remaining questions about our changing climate,” say two scientists who study climate change, Seth Wynes and H. Damon Matthews at the University of Waterloo and Concordia University respectively.
The answer depends on how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases like CO₂ and how much humanity ultimately emits, the pair say. When Wynes and Matthews asked 211 authors of past reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their average best guess was 2.7°C by 2100.
“We’ve already seen devastating consequences like more flooding, hotter heatwaves and larger wildfires, and we’re only at 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels — less than halfway to 2.7°C,” they say.
There is a third variable that is harder to predict but no less important: the capacity of forests, wetlands and the ocean to continue to offset warming by absorbing the carbon and heat our furnaces and factories have released.
This blue and green carbon pump stalled in 2023, the hottest year on record, amid heatwaves, droughts and fires. The possibility of nature’s carbon storage suddenly collapsing is not priced into the computer models that simulate and project the future climate.
However, the ecosystems that buffer human-made warming are clearly struggling. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) showed that the average size of monitored populations of vertebrate wildlife (animals with spinal columns – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians) has shrunk by 73% since 1970.
Wildlife could become so scarce that ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest degenerate, according to the report.
“More than 90% of tropical trees and shrubs depend on animals to disperse their seeds, for example,” says biodiversity scientist Alexander Lees (Manchester Metropolitan University).
“These ‘biodiversity services’ are crucial.”
The result could be less biodiverse and, importantly for the climate, less carbon-rich habitats.
Plastic in a polar bear’s gut
Threats to wildlife are numerous. One that is growing fast and still poorly understood is plastic.
Bottles, bags, toothbrushes: a rising tide of plastic detritus is choking and snaring wild animals. These larger items eventually degrade into microplastics, tiny fragments that now suffuse the air, soil and water.
“In short, microplastics are widespread, accumulating in the remotest parts of our planet. There is evidence of their toxic effects at every level of biological organisation, from tiny insects at the bottom of the food chain to apex predators,” says Karen Raubenheimer, a senior lecturer in plastic pollution at the University of Wollongong.
Plastic is generally made from fossil fuels, the main agent of climate change. Activists and experts have seized on a similar demand to address both problems: turn off the taps.
In fact, the diagnosis of Costas Velis, an expert in ocean litter at the University of Leeds, sounds similar to what climate scientists say about unrestricted fossil fuel burning:
“Every year without production caps makes the necessary cut to plastic production in future steeper – and our need to use other measures to address the problem greater.”
A production cap hasn’t made it into the negotiating text for a plastic treaty (yet). And while governments pledged to transition away from coal, oil and gas last year, a new report on the world’s energy use shows fossil fuel use declining more slowly than in earlier forecasts – and much more slowly than would be necessary to halt warming at internationally agreed limits. The effort to protect a third of earth’s surface has barely begun.
Each of these summits is concerned with ameliorating the effects of modern societies on nature. Some experts argue for a more radical interpretation.
“Even if 30% of Earth was protected, how effectively would it halt biodiversity loss?” ask political ecologists Bram Büscher (Wageningen University) and Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield).
“The proliferation of protected areas has happened at the same time as the extinction crisis has intensified. Perhaps, without these efforts, things could have been even worse for nature,” they say.
“But an equally valid argument would be that area-based conservation has blinded many to the causes of Earth’s diminishing biodiversity: an expanding economic system that squeezes ecosystems by turning ever more habitat into urban sprawl or farmland, polluting the air and water with ever more toxins and heating the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gas.”
Editor’s note: For capitalism, “renewable” energy is a transition to green(greed) colonialism. Splinter colonization is still the policy of the day, divide and conquer the masses and corrupting local elites with bribery.
Capitalists benefit from business-friendly legal doctrines and a uniform regulatory system. They do not have to contend with patchwork prohibitions and restrictions enforced by sovereign communities that require FPIC and put their sovereignty into practice by persuasion or physical force, refusing obedience and cooperation. No justice, no peace, so the guerrillas will keep investors away.
“Municipalities are the white man’s reservations. The only difference is, we know we’re on reservations.” – Debra White Plume (Wioweya Najin Win).
People of the global north must look upstream to the damage they cause to communities whose resources are being extracted by outsourcing diminished health and welfare externalities associated with alternative forms of energy.
The Philippine government has approved 99 hydropower projects in the mountainous Cordillera region, part of a broader plan to rely on renewable energy sources for 35% of the country’s power by 2030.
The planned projects are dividing rural communities between those who believe the dams will bring in jobs and money and those who fear damage to water sources and cultural sites.
The Cordillera region, home to many Indigenous groups, has a deep history of activism against dams.
It’s also heavily militarized as one of the last bastions of an armed communist insurgency — a circumstance state security forces are apparently exploiting to coerce communities into compliance.
KALINGA, Philippines — On the mountainsides flanking the mighty Chico River in the northern Philippines’ Kalinga province, residents of once tight-knit villages have drifted apart in recent years. Hearty greetings between neighbors tending to farmlands have been replaced with avoidant looks or glowering stares.
“We don’t talk much like before,” says Gohn Dangoy, a 59-year-old farmer of the Naneng tribe in Kalinga’s Tabuk city. “If we do, we argue. Families and friends alike are at odds.” He says the “deep division” started because of the proposed dam on the Chico River.
West of Tabuk, locals in the municipality of Balbalan live in fear of the military operations that began around the same time the hydropower projects rolled into town.
They remember the first of the bombings happening in March 2023, as they were sound asleep on the night following their annual Manchachatong festival. Eufemia Bog-as, 30, recalls jumping from her bed at around 2 a.m. “It was like an earthquake. I heard a big boom six times. I went outside and the sky was covered with smoke,” she tells Mongabay. The government and military said they were targeting armed rebels, who were supposedly stirring up opposition against the dams.
“They told us, it’s because we’re against development,” Bog-as says.
Kalinga is one of six provinces in the northern and mountainous Cordillera region, populated by the Indigenous Igorot people. For more than 50 years, the government has been in conflict with armed communist guerrillas in the countryside. During that time, the military has often set up posts in rural villages to stifle dissent and support for the rebels.
Now, the government is eyeing the resource-rich region for a bevy of renewable energy initiatives.
A pivot to renewable energy by the Philippine government has led to a wave of hyrdoprojects projects across the Cordillera region. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Since 2015, the Department of Energy has greenlit 99 hydropower projects in the region, with total combined generating capacity of more than 4,000 megawatts. Of these, 52 are listed by their proponents as being in the development stage, 32 in pre-development, and 15 already operating commercially.
At every stage of development, the hydropower projects are breeding conflict and fracturing communities between those who favor them for ushering in modernity, and those who resent the potential damage to farms, burial grounds and water sources. Moreover, experts believe that the staggering amount of projects threatens to drastically reshape the region’s hydrogeography and economy for the worse. Throughout the Cordillera mountains, Igorot communities opposing the dams are frequently reporting militarization and even aerial bombings close to pasturelands and villages.
Both national and local governments have firmly backed the spate of projects.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has styled himself as something of a climate champion. In his 2023 state-of-the-nation address, he hyped his administration for “aggressively promoting renewables so that it provides a 35% share in the power mix by 2030.”
In the same speech this year, Marcos spoke of having approved projects with a combined more than 3 trillion pesos ($54 billion) in investments for four priority sectors, including renewable energy. He called it a “crucial step” in addressing climate change.
To that end, the Cordillera region is similarly crucial for the government’s renewables pivot. The region hosts the headwaters of 13 major river systems and can harness around 30% of the country’s hydropower potential, six times more than what the Philippines makes use of at present.
And in 2022, the Cordillera regional council announced plans to fast-track renewable energy projects. For local communities and activists, this raises the question of whether these changes jeopardize the natural landscape and livelihoods in one of the country’s most resource-rich and culturally diverse regions.
Dam disagreements
In the 1970s, Kalinga’s Indigenous communities, led by Macli-ing Dulag, now a national icon, famously resisted construction of a huge dam on the Chico River. Dulag was killed by state forces in 1980, but the project was shelved and the struggle blossomed into a discourse on safeguarding ancestral domains.
Since then, just a single 1-MW micro dam has been built in Kalinga, and its operations were suspended in 2021 after farmers complained of decreased water flow for irrigation. Now, however, the province is the proposed site of 19 hydropower projects across its rivers, with the famous Chico among them.
Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) heads four of these planned projects, two each on the Saltan and Cal-oan rivers. The Saltan River projects are still in the consultation stage, while the villages along the Cal-oan River have registered opposing views to the projects there.
In March 2023 and August 2024, Mabaca village filed petitions with the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), registering its disapproval of the 45-MW Mabaca 2 Dam on Cal-oan.
The latest petition intends to stall the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) process required for the project to commence. It asserts the river as part of the community’s ancestral domain, thus giving it “legitimate claims to the watershed.”
Only initial talks have taken place. However, local leaders say the NCIP is forceful about the project, planning 12 further consultations with reluctant villagers.
Village captain Barcelon Badin says he’s seen the project blueprints and fears the dam will compromise their already scarce food sources since it “will clearly drown our rice fields.”
But downstream in Buaya, the next village over, locals are ready to sign a memorandum of agreement, a major step toward securing FPIC, with JWPI for the 40-MW Buaya hydropower project.
Hydropower projects have met with differening receptions in Cordillera villages such as Balbalan, Mabaca and Buaya. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Jermito Jacinto, an elder of the Buaya’s Butud tribe, is now a JWPI consultant. He says the project offers jobs, cheaper electricity, scholarships for children, and several million pesos in annual revenue for local authorities.
“Cal-oan River is full of honey and sugar but we don’t know how to use it,” Jacinto tells Mongabay.
He chides the villages that continue to hold out, calling their aversion to development a “hangover” from rebel rhetoric. Buaya and Mabaca villages are squabbling over these projects, as the former seeks revenue while the latter says any disruption to any part of the river risks the fields of all.
Having examined other dams in the region, former Balbalan mayor Eric Gonayon disputes any promise of growth associated with the dams.
“They will not develop the roads, only use them to relocate us from our heritage for the benefit of foreigners and businesses,” he tells Mongabay.
He scoffs at the potential revenue the projects could generate, saying “It’s not even worth 1% of the resources they’ll extract from us. It’s like they’re giving us candy but taking the whole shop!”
The Cal-oan River, also known as Mabaca River, where Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) has two planned hydropower projects. Image by Michael Beltran.
The Department of Energy mandates that companies allot village officials 0.01 pesos per kilowatt-hour, roughly 0.09% of average electricity sales.
Farther east in the provincial capital, Tabuk, the Karayan Hydropower Corporation, with ties to Singaporean investors, has secured memorandums of agreement with the three affected tribes this year for the 52-MW Karayan Dam on the Chico River.
Various tribal representatives allege the FPIC process was fraught with irregularities including bribery, withholding information, and excluding anyone against the dam from consultations.
Members of the Naneng tribe, who live in an area recognized by the province as a heritage village, say the dam will raise waters, drowning their coffee and rice fields and their ancestral burial sites.
“The ones who said yes were either bribed or unaffected!” says Dangoy, the farmer in Tabuk, who has rejected any financial assistance from the company in exchange for their consent. “What happens to our ‘rest in peace’ if we lose our tombs? We won’t replace that with a chance to be employees at the dam. The company won’t give jobs to all us farmers.”
Farmer Gohn Dangoy, of the Naneng tribe, says proposed dams have already caused deep divisions in his community. Image by Michael Beltran.
The NCIP has denied any wrongdoing, stating publicly that it consulted with all affected residents.
In Bagumbayan, one of the affected areas, village captain Andrew Cos-agom, says the dam’s critics won’t listen to reason. He swears by the project because it was twice surveyed by the city government and a third party and both gave assurances there would be minimal changes to the villages.
“It’s just a minority opposing the dam,” Cos-agom tells Mongabay.
However, Dominic Sugguiyao, the Kalinga provincial government’s environment and natural resources officer, refutes this. He says the surveys, which haven’t been made public, show that erosion and submersion are a distinct possibility. Sugguiyao says “misinformed politicians” are too blinded by the prospect of collecting taxes from these projects to see the negative impacts.
Because the Chico River is such a vital water and irrigation source, Sugguiyao says, the dam could inflict massive harm through siltation. “The fish and eels won’t be able to swim upstream!” he says.
Sugguiyao accuses the NCIP of brokering agreements with local communities on behalf of the companies and officials as though it were a one-sided middleman. “They just want to make money. Even without a consensus, they’ll make it seem like there is one,” he says.
When Mongabay raised these points with the NCIP’s regional office, it responded that “We would give no comments considering that issues are still being resolved.”
A man in Kalinga Province wears a shirt reading “No to Dam.” Image by Michael Beltran.
On the whole
Ariel Fronda, head of the Department of Energy’s hydropower division, says the surge in hydro projects is a good sign, a step away from fossil fuels and toward “energy self-reliance.”
The department has been tasked with speeding up project approvals with the help of a 2019 law, known as EVOSS (Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop), which guarantees that developers with a signed contract will be awarded approval in just 30 days. The law also enjoins the NCIP to standardize the release of FPIC approval in 105 days.
Additionally, the department updated its awarding and project guidelines in June, urging officials to troubleshoot complications for developers. Fronda tells Mongabay that he personally visited Kalinga earlier this year, speaking to officials about streamlining projects to meet their 2030 targets.
Fronda says not everything has gone according to plan, citing snags in obtaining community consent and political approval as the main obstacles — such as “when an elected official endorses a project, then, after elections, is replaced by someone who doesn’t.”
Fronda says the state must persist in explaining the benefits of hydropower. “We’ll save money with cheaper electricity!” he says.
Jose Antonio Montalban, an environmental and sanitation expert with the group Pro-People Engineers and Leaders (Propel), says pushing so many projects in such a small geographic area is “alarming.”
“It could have severe impacts on the Cordillera’s ecology and communities; altering basic features too quickly without understanding the area’s carrying capacity,” he says.
Abruptly altering rivers can choke water flows at several junctures, which Montalban says compromises supplies to communities that depend on them daily. “All these projects are intended to detain water,” he says.
Montalban adds that flash floods could become increasingly common during typhoon seasons, when dams have to abruptly release their load.
Lulu Gimenez, of the Cordillera People’s Alliance, raises concerns about the impact to food sources. “What about all the farms that depend on irrigation sources? They’ll either disappear or decrease their yield,” she says.
Rosario Guzman, research head at the Ibon Foundation, an economic think tank, calls into question the Department of Energy’s promise of cheaper electricity. The Philippine power sector is fully privatized, and because of this big businesses will reap the main benefits, Guzman says.
“Energy is a natural monopoly and demand for it is inelastic. By this nature, opening it up to other players in the guise of getting the best price that competition brings will only result in a monopoly price,” Guzman tells Mongabay.
Relying on renewables for more accessible energy will only work through “strong state intervention,” which will “redound to cheaper electricity and service and cheaper costs of production and commodities,” they add.
Locally, Sugguiyao laments how projects like the Karayan Dam will end the livelihoods of those who quarry sand and gravel. He says the industry is worth billions of pesos and its loss will “cost the locals millions.”
Residents of villages close to the Chico River meet to discuss plans to dam the river for hydroelectricity. Image by Michael Beltran.
Bombs follow
Since 2022, civil society groups have documented bombings and permanent military presence close to communities opposed to various renewable energy and mining projects.
Caselle Ton, of the Cordillera Human Rights Alliance (CHRA), brands the soldiers “investment defense forces,” adding that the heightened militarization is intended to “terrorize and coerce communities into accepting the projects.”
In March 2023, the military dropped bombs on Balbalan on two separate days, supposedly targeting armed guerrillas in the area. The CHRA documented bombs dropped on the provinces of Abra and Ilocos Sur on the same day in April this year. The latest bombs fell in June, in Balbalan once again.
In Abra, peasant and antimining leader Antonio Diwayan was killed in October 2023 by soldiers who claimed he was a guerrilla. The military also labeled a slew of prominent antimining and antihydropower activists as terrorists.
In October 2022, the military described Cordillera as the “last bastion” of a decades-long insurgency in the Philippines.
Kalinga Governor James Edduba likewise called on the entire region in August last year to support the efforts of the troops to weed out dissent. “Only peace and order will give us hope and development. If we have peace in our communities, the investors will surely come to Kalinga,” he said.
However, for Bog-as, the Balbalan resident and witness to the municipality’s bombings, the problem is the military makes no distinction between civilian dissent and insurgent activity.
“We hear it from the soldiers themselves, they blame us progressives who are keeping them here. Because we don’t want their dams or mines,” she says.
Johnny a farmer in Balbalan who asked to use a pseudonym for his safety, describes how the military’s once occasional presence turned permanent since the hydropower project was proposed.
Speaking in the Ilocano language, Johnny tells Mongabay: “The soldiers hold monthly and quarterly meetings. They force farmers’ associations to admit we’re supporting the guerrillas so that we can ‘clear our names.’ If we agree, it’s like we’re accepting their accusations. But we just want to fight for our community.”
Johnny says there are undoubtedly some rebels in the region, but the military paints civilians with the same brush. He also tells of how roving soldiers have disrupted their work in the fields.
“We don’t have any freedom to visit our fields. Children and adults alike would run away at the sight of a soldier!” he says.
The Philippine government’s continued press for renewables is causing friction among the villages of one of its most resource-rich regions. If all goes according to the state’s fast-tracking, Cordillera might never be the same.
Banner Chico River in Kalinga Province by Michael Beltran.
Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioural crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism. These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses. In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.
For Will Steffen (1947–2023), one of the kindest advocates for our planet in a time of crisis.
‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’. – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
‘A species causing the extinction of 150 species per day doesn’t need more energy to do more of what it does’. – Hart Hagan, Environmental journalist
Introduction
Modern humans and millions of other species face an unprecedented number of existential threats due to anthropogenic impacts exceeding our planet’s boundaries. We are in dangerous territory with instability in the known realms of biosphere integrity, land system change and novel entities such as plastics and synthetic toxins, climate change, freshwater change and biogeochemical flows.
Considering the dynamic, closed and interconnected nature of Earth’s systems together, these threats pose an increasingly catastrophic risk to all complex life on Earth. Many scientists privately believe it to be already too late to avoid the tipping points that will trigger devastating and irreversible feedback loops.
It is increasingly acknowledged that all of these threats are symptoms of anthropogenic ecological overshoot. Overshoot is defined as the human consumption of natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, and entropic waste production in excess of the Earth’s assimilative and processing capacity.
In this paper, we explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress.
In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.
Scientists working in limits to growth must join forces with social scientists not only in academia but critically with the non-academic practitioners of applied social and behavioural science. Not only are such practitioners demonstrated masters in the theory of driving behaviour change but crucially also masters of the practical implementation of that theory in the real world.
Lastly, we will provide a possible frame through which to view our species’ ability to consciously drive large-scale behavioural change as an opportunity unavailable to most other species. An implementation of such a framework limiting widespread maladaptive behavioural manipulation may ensure human appetites remain within planetary boundaries, and be key in unlocking a truly prosperous and sustainable future for H. sapiens on Earth.
This paper is not intended to be an exhaustive roadmap to address the behavioural crisis, instead it should be taken as a call to action for interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve just that.
Scope
In this paper, aside from reproductive behaviours which we mention below, our focus is largely confined to socially constructed attitudes, values and behaviours that encourage unnecessary personal consumption, and which have led the world into a state of overshoot.
This focus is critical because, to date, a mere quarter of humanity – the wealthy quarter – is responsible for 74% of excess energy and material use. This, when taken alone, is sufficient to propel the human enterprise into overshoot.
Meanwhile, the quarter of the global population who live below the USD $3.65 poverty line, and the almost half, 47%, who live below the USD $6.85 poverty line9 aspire to achieve equivalent high-end lifestyles, encouraged, in part, by the constant barrage of advertising. To achieve this would certainly increase greenhouse gas emissions, deplete many essential renewable resources from fish-stocks to arable soils and strain global life-support to breaking point, including the risk of triggering runaway hothouse Earth conditions.
We acknowledge that there are many other relevant behaviours and considerations, including genetic pre-dispositions to consume, the role of temporal, spatial and social discounting, socio-political factors (e.g. status hierarchies) and even addiction to conspicuous consumption.
Repeated rewarding experiences help shape the synaptic circuits of the developing brain, predisposing the individual to seek out similar experiences that reinforce the already preformed circuits and to deny or reject contrary inclinations or information.11
We also acknowledge that part of our focus, on media and marketing manipulation, is just one example of how intentional behavioural manipulation undermines planetary and social health. There certainly are other examples – such as how firms and governments limit more sustainable options either by design or consequence. In essence, power dynamics in society underlie the manipulation of needs, wants and desires. This is crucial for understanding how our human predisposition for potentially maladaptive behaviours has been twisted to become actually maladaptive. While we humans are fully capable of regulating ourselves, power dynamics in societies often overcome this. Better understanding this within different societies, and how it perpetuates our ‘polycrises’, will help us move into a wiser and more sustainable civilisation.
In regards to reproductive behaviours, population growth plays, and will continue to play, a significant role in ecological overshoot. Across the globe, the middle class is the fastest-growing segment of the population, projected to grow another billion to reach 5 billion by 2030. Over the coming decades, the majority of projected population growth will be concentrated in the developing world, where the average standard of living must be raised through increases in per-capita consumption. As a result, however, their ecological footprints are likely to increase towards those of the Global North.
Proponents of ‘green growth’ may argue that there is a way to avoid this, however, ‘the burden of proof rests on decoupling advocates’.
To avoid ecological breakdown ‘incrementalist propositions along the lines of green growth and green consumerism are inadequate. The ideals of sufficiency, material thresholds and economic equality that underpin the current modelling are incompatible with the economic norms of the present, where unemployment and vast inequalities are systematic requirements, waste is often considered economically efficient (due to brand-protection, planned obsolescence, etc.) and the indefinite pursuit of economic growth is necessary for political and economic stability’.
Even the relatively conservative IPCC views population growth as a significant factor in climate change (a single symptom of ecological overshoot). Additionally, a recent paper found that population growth has cancelled out most climate gains from renewables and efficiency from the last three decades. For these reasons and more, we have not gone into detail on certain aspects of population dynamics. Instead, we have rooted this paper in ecological economics where population – at any level – plays an important role.
We call for additional research to develop a full understanding of the many dimensions of the behavioural crisis and how we can best address it.
Previous scientists’ warnings
The initial ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ was published in 1992, starkly emphasising the collision between human demands and the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. It was followed by a further report, ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’ which confirmed that the intervening 25 years had merely accelerated environmental destruction driven by a global population increasing by more than 40% – some 2 billion humans. The ‘World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency’ report, so far endorsed by 14,859 scientists from 158 countries, proposed a range of measures for restoring and protecting natural ecosystems, conserving energy, reducing pollutants, reducing food waste, adopting more plant-based diets, stabilising population and reforming the global economy.
Subsequent warnings from the scientific community have added to the evidence of overshoot including insect extinctions, the impact of climate change on microorganisms, the freshwater biodiversity crisis, endangered food webs, invasive alien species, the degradation of large lakes, the illegal/unsustainable wildlife trade, the role of affluence, tree extinctions, an imperilled ocean, and population growth as a specific driver. These papers are gathered on the Alliance of World Scientists website.
Despite so many warnings, there has been a marked lack of action, driving several of us to co-author a ‘World Scientists’ Warnings into Action, Local to Global’ paper, so far endorsed by over 3,000 scientists from more than 110 nations, to set out a framework for concrete action to curb our hyper-consumption of resources. This paper focused on the same six key issues (energy, pollutants, nature, food systems, population and the economy, plus governance and leadership), and on three timelines to 2026, 2030 and 2050. None of the key issues identified by the authors are isolated problems; they are all symptoms of human ecological overshoot.
In the present paper, we contend that an underlying behavioural crisis lies at the root of ‘overshoot’ and probe the implications for humanity if we are to retain a habitable planet and civilisation. 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.
Human behaviour drives overshoot
The main drivers of anthropogenic ecological overshoot are human behaviours and cultures relating to consumption and population dynamics. These two factors are mathematically, though certainly not linearly, related. 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.
H. sapiens took around 250,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion in 1820, and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. This was largely made possible by our species’ access to cheap, easy, exosomatic energy, mainly fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enabled us to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits. In that same 200 year period, fossil energy (FF) use increased 1300-fold, fueling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product, i.e. consumption, and the human enterprise is still expanding exponentially. We are arguably in the late boom phase of a one-off boom-bust cycle that is driving us rapidly beyond the safe harbour of planetary boundaries towards chaotic collapse and worse.
Figure 1. Ecological overshoot in number of Earths required. Data from Global Footprint Network – June 2023.
In this paper, we use the term ‘behavioural crisis’ specifically to mean the consequences of the innate suite of human behaviours that were once adaptive in early hominid evolution, but have now been exploited to serve the global industrial economy. This exploitation has accumulated financial capital – sometimes to absurd levels – for investors and shareholders, and generated manufactured capital (‘human-made mass’) that now exceeds the biomass of all living things on Earth. Significantly manipulated by the marketing industry, which several of us represent, these behaviours have now brought humanity to the point where their sheer scale – through our numbers, appetites and technologies – is driving ecological overshoot and threatening the fabric of complex life on earth.
These behaviours are related to our previously highly adaptive, but now self-defeating, impulses to:
• 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).
Many of our continuing environmental and societal challenges arise from these hijacked impulses. In a global economy that strives to create and meet burgeoning demand, rather than fairly and judiciously apportioning supply, these behaviours are collectively highly maladaptive, even suicidal for humanity.
Drivers of overshoot behaviour
The evolutionary drive to acquire resources is by no means exclusive to the human animal. In H. sapiens however, the behaviours of overshoot are now actively promoted and exacerbated by social, economic and political norms largely through the intentional, almost completely unimpeded exploitation of human psychological predispositions and biases. Here, we explore what we consider to be three critical drivers in the creation and continuation of the human behavioural crisis.
Economic growth
Economists define the ‘economy’ as all those organised activities and behaviours associated with the production, allocation, exchange and consumption of the valuable (scarce) goods and services required to meet the needs and wants of the participating population. But this is a simplistic, limited definition. An ecologist might describe the economy as that set of behaviours and activities by which humans interact with their biophysical environment (the ecosphere) to acquire the material resources required for life, and to dispose of the waste materials that result from both our biological and industrial metabolisms. Economic accounts should therefore record all the energy and material ‘throughput’ from the natural world through the human subsystem and back into nature; they should even account for those produced goods that do not enter formal markets, as these add to gross material consumption. In other words, human economic behaviour helps define the human ecological niche, the role H. sapiensplays in interacting with, and altering the structure, function and species composition of, the ecosystems of which we are a part. From this perspective, economics really should be human ecology. But it is not.
Today’s dominant neoliberal economics conceives of the economy as a self-generating ‘circular-flow of exchange (monetary) value’ that operates separately from, and essentially independent of, the natural environment. We generally measure the scale of economic activity in terms of gross national product, i.e. the abstract monetary value of final goods and services produced in a country in a specified time period. Physical natural resources (i.e. ‘the environment’) are seen as merely one of several interchangeable ‘factors of production;’ should a particular resource become scarce, we need only increase the input of other factors (capital, labour, knowledge) or depend on rising prices to stimulate some engineer to find a substitute.
The same simplistic thinking conceives of humans as self-interested utility maximisers (i.e. ‘consumers’) with unlimited material demands and no attachment to family or community. It was easy for modern techno-industrial society to make the leap from believing that the economy is untethered from nature, people essentially insatiable and human ingenuity unbounded, to accepting the notion of unlimited economic growth fostered by continuous technological progress. This helps explain why real gross world product has ballooned 100-fold, and average per capita income (consumption) has increased by a factor of 14 (twice that in wealthy countries) since the early 1800s.
Interestingly, most people seem unaware that this explosion was made possible not only by improving population health but, more importantly, through technologies that use fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. Fossil energy is still the dominant means – 81% of primary energy in 2022 – by which humans acquire sufficient food and other resources to grow and maintain the human enterprise. Between 1800 and 2021, global FF use increased by a factor of 1,402, from just 97 TWh to 136,018 TWh. The average world citizen today uses 175 times as much FF as his/her counterpart in 1800. Remarkably, we humans have burned half the FFs ever consumed and emitted half our total fossil carbon wastes in just the past 30 years
Marketing
Up until the early twentieth century, marketers focused on functional differentiation.
The effectiveness of their work was largely contingent on its ability to ‘spotlight’ functional reasons to buy specific products when people needed them. In essence, the role of marketing was to connect functionally differentiated products with willing buyers. As markets matured, however, competition intensified, and businesses looked to find better ways to differentiate themselves beyond the purely functional.
Around this time, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, began experimenting with his uncle’s psychoanalysis work to develop techniques for widespread behavioural manipulation. Bernays later termed this The Engineering of Consent, describing it as the ‘use of an engineering approach – that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs’. Bernays successfully commercialised his work and is commonly regarded as one of the founders of the public relations industry. This novel approach, along with others developed in advertising agencies around the globe, proved highly influential on the way products were marketed and sold to consumers.
Suddenly, marketing effectiveness was no longer determined by its ability to ‘raise awareness’ or harvest existing demand but by its ability to deepen and diversify the needs and wants that could be met through personal consumption. This paradigm shift meant that business growth was no longer constrained by people’s mere biological requirements, it could instead be unlocked by attaching greater meaning to an effectively infinite number of market offerings.
In this brave new world of unchecked business growth, multinationals were no longer marketing hygienic toothpaste, but a mint-flavoured confidence boost – a maintenance purchase was suddenly something that could make you feel more attractive. Cars were no longer being sold based on their functional superiority (i.e. space, speed, comfort, price), but by what they suggested about you as a person (i.e. status, sexiness, rebelliousness, appetite for adventure).
In an era saturated by brands and marketing, consumption has become less reflective of our physical needs and more reflective of our runaway psychology. For example, we may buy to boost our mood, reinforce our identity or elevate our social status above others.
The targeting of consumers has become increasingly effective through the collection and use of data and analytics. The collection and sale of individuals’ personal data is rampant. Unsurprisingly, tech giants like Google and Facebook are amongst the most active in this space. These companies track and sell not only what consumers view online but also their real-world locations through what is known as RTB (Real-Time Bidding).
In the US, users’ personal online data is tracked and shared 294 billion times each day (for your average American, that’s 747 times per day). In Europe, that figure was found to be 197 billion times (Google alone shares this personal data about its German users 19.6 million times per minute). Combined that’s 178 trillion times per annum. All this leads to incredibly detailed data about individual user behaviours and preferences. In fact, a 2017 report found that by the time a US child reaches 13 years old, Ad Tech companies hold an average of 72 million data points on that child.
The subsequent egregious overconsumption, which in combination with the resulting creation of waste, disproportionately multiplied by population, gives the wealthy a far greater negative environmental impact than the poor. Individuals with incomes in the top 10% are now responsible for 25–43% of environmental impact and 47% of CO2 emissions, while the bottom 10% contribute just 3–5% of environmental impact, and the bottom 50% contribute only 10% of CO2 emissions. A recent report found the top 20 wealthiest individuals on Earth produce 8000 times the carbon emissions of the poorest billion people.
For sustainability, reductions in FF and material consumption between 40% and 90% are necessary. This may seem unattainable without a proportionate loss in living standards; however, affluent countries exist far beyond sufficiency. In fact, ‘the drastic increases in societies’ energy use seen in recent decades have, beyond a certain point, had no benefit for the well-being of their populations – social returns on energy consumption per capita become increasingly marginal’. As such, multiple studies now demonstrate per-capita energy consumption in many affluent countries could be decreased substantially and quality living standards still maintained.
Pronatalism
Reproductive decision-making is assumed to be a largely personal choice, free from the constraints of cultural and institutional norms. As a result, discussion of reproduction as it relates to environmental degradation and ecological overshoot is often met with concern regarding impingement of people’s personal desires, rights and actions. However, human reproductive behaviours, like most other behaviours, are greatly influenced by cultural norms and institutional policies and deserve to be investigated critically.
Pronatalism is a set of social and institutional pressures placed on people to have children, often driven by forces such as patriarchy, religion, nationalism, militarism and capitalism. Pronatalism exerts enormous influence on people and their choices.
• Positive feedback is often expressed through glorification of motherhood and large families, financial incentives and subsidies for childbearing, including through assisted reproductive technologies.
• Negative feedback is expressed through stigmatisation of use of contraceptives, abortion and lifepaths that do not fit dominant cultural narratives, such as single adults, childless and childfree people, LGBTQIA+ people, adoptive families, those who regret parenthood or those who do not have the ‘right’ number of children.
Depending on the degree of patriarchal and institutional control in a given culture, stigma can take the form of physical and emotional abuse, divorce, economic marginalisation and social ostracisation. The degree of policing individual parenting choices strongly determines the degree of conformity by individuals in a culture or community. This explains why women’s stated preferences for number and timing of children vary in accordance with the norms of the community in which they reside.
Anthropological studies of later hunter-gathering societies as well as evidence of very early agricultural groups show that the shift to settlement societies led to a systematic diminution of female status, as women went from being active gatherers of food to being relegated to the home sphere, as males dominated the fields. The subsequent rise in population, cities and tribal conflict over land and power created the need for more laborers and warriors, which raised the value of women as child bearers to the exclusion of other roles, thereby underpinning the beginnings of pronatalism.
Due to the dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the laborious process of child-rearing, certain ‘social devices’ had to be employed to make reproduction appear more desirable, thereby population increase would offset the wastage of war and disease. Social devices including the institutions of law, religion, media, education and medicine were used to promote and reinforce the universal idealisation of pregnancy and motherhood.
Over the last 200 years, improvements in public health, medicine, disease control and sanitation – all of which occurred on the back of fossil-fuelled industrialisation – significantly lowered the risk of dying, especially amongst children, leading to unprecedented growth in the human population. Pronatalism remains deeply embedded within institutional policies and norms that glorify and reward reproduction to serve external demographic goals – capitalism, religion, ethnocentrism and militarism amongst others.
Despite great advances in gender equality and opportunities for women in education and the economy over the last several decades, pronatalism remains a strong pillar in many societies. Most religious traditions have strong pronatalist teachings and scriptural mandates to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, further buttressed through misinformation about contraceptives and abortion, and proscriptions on their use. Economists, political leaders and corporate elites regularly argue that keeping fertility high ensures a steady supply of workers, consumers and taxpayers, while generating a larger pool of potential inventors.
Neoliberal economic interests are also enacted through popular media and culture that perpetuate pronatalist narratives. From product advertising and women’s magazines glorifying motherhood, and celebrity gossip fixation on the ‘biological clock’ and ‘baby bump’, to popular movies and television programmes that use pregnancy to ‘complete’ the character arc of a protagonist. The marketing, media and entertainment industries exert an enormous influence on people’s reproductive decision-making.
Meanwhile, neoliberal feminism – feminism of the privileged colonised by neoliberal ideology – seeks to advance political goals and enhance market value and has only reinforced the mandatory-motherhood narrative by advocating for women to ‘have it all’, a goal unattainable for the majority of women around the world. This new form of feminism has conveniently been exploited by the assisted reproductive technology industry, growing annually by 9%, with projected growth to a global $41 billion industry by 2026 to market medically dubious technologies such as egg freezing to increasingly younger women.
Concerns about overpopulation in this century led authorities and advocates to institute campaigns and policies to reduce fertility rates. The majority of these policies, which employed measures to combat pronatalism by providing women the means to control their own fertility through access to education and family planning, proved extremely effective. Countries as diverse as Thailand, Indonesia and Iran saw their fertility rates drop from over six to under two in a matter of decades. On the other hand, coercive policies such as China’s one-child policy, and forced abortion and sterilisation campaigns in Puerto Rico and India, not only led to egregious violations of human and reproductive rights but they also backfired. They created the disastrous legacy of tainting all family-planning campaigns – including the majority that have focused on liberating women – with the blemish of coercion. These draconian measures not only led to widespread suspicion of any efforts towards population reduction and stabilisation but they also had the opposite effect of strengthening and legitimising the centuries-old form of reproductive control: pronatalism. Currently, half of all pregnancies globally are unintended and 257 million women are unable to manage their own fertility due to oppressive pronatalist norms within their communities.
Given that the number of children that women desire is largely a social construct within a hegemonic framework of pronatalism, we must create a new cultural landscape that illuminates the fertility levels that women anywhere in the world might truly desire outside this construct. Fertility trends in every geography where women have greater reproductive autonomy point towards a tendency for smaller families – a choice that has been described as women’s ‘latent desire’ for no or few children.
Addressing population growth, and the pronatalism that drives it, must become central to norm-shifting efforts in order to elevate reproductive rights while also promoting planetary health.
Tackling the behavioural crisis
Current interventions at the symptom-level often do more to maintain the status quo than to address the drivers of ecological overshoot. Accepted approaches are generally technological interventions requiring immense amounts of raw materials and generating proportional ecological damage. For example, the much-hyped wholesale transition of our energy systems from fossil fuels to renewables would require daunting levels of raw material and fossil fuels in a futile struggle to meet humanity’s ever-growing demands. Even if successful – which is not likely – the energy transition would address only a single symptom of ecological overshoot, likely worsening other symptoms significantly in the process. As noted earlier, it is humanity’s access to cheap, convenient energy that has allowed us to overshoot many planetary boundaries. Would anything else change simply because we substitute one form of energy for another?
Conversely, interventions addressing the behavioural crisis shift the focus from treating symptoms to treating the core cultural causes. Prioritising psycho-behavioural change over technological interventions may also have greater potential to relieve anthropogenic pressures on Earth. It would certainly greatly reduce the fossil fuels and material extraction required to maintain the human enterprise. An example of an intervention at this level could be the intentional creation of new social norms for self-identity to change human behaviours relating to consumption, population and waste.
Paradoxically, the marketing, media and entertainment industries complicit in the creation and exacerbation of the behavioural crisis, may just be our best chance at avoiding ecological catastrophe. Storytelling shapes appetites and norms: in this paper, we focus largely on the marketing industry, but we believe it important to highlight the potential of the media and entertainment industries for addressing the behavioural crisis also. Modelling behaviour through entertainment can be an extremely powerful way of driving behavioural change. A real-world example of this can be seen through the telenovelas created by the Population Media Centre. PMC’s broadcasts have been remarkably successful in changing reproductive behaviours in many countries through the role modelling of small family norms, delaying marriage until adulthood, female education and the use of family planning. In Ethiopia, pre and post-broadcast quantitative surveys found that listeners were 5.4 times more likely than non-listeners to know at least three family planning methods. Married women who were listeners increased current use of modern family planning methods from 14% to 40%, while use amongst non-listeners increased less than half of that.
It is also worth noting that when it comes to addressing maladaptive behaviours in the current paradigm, there appears to be a focus on raising awareness and education under the arguable assumption that this will lead to the desired behavioural changes. While awareness and education certainly have important roles to play in combating ecological overshoot, they are relatively ineffective at driving behavioural change. Can the same behavioural mechanisms that built and fuelled our immense appetites bring them back within planetary limits to growth?
Lessons from the marketing industry
For more than 100 years, marketers, and recently behavioural scientists, have become proficient at influencing human desires, particularly consumer behaviour. The frameworks of persuasion they have developed could help bring humanity, and countless other species, back to safe harbour by reducing per capita consumption through the celebration of lives of sufficiency, and setting healthy reproductive norms, all without triggering feelings of loss or regret in the general populace.
Though good marketing may seem like black magic, and the exclusive domain of a select number of creative ‘gurus’, it is actually an accessible and highly replicable system of proven practices and principles crafted to influence behaviour.
Broadly speaking, marketers strive to influence individuals’ felt wants and purchasing patterns in one of two key ways: by changing an individual’s perceptions of a product or by changing the social context in which specific forms of consumption take place. It follows that the same strategies can be put to use to redirect consumers’ behaviour rather than reinforcing the present consumption-based crisis. An individual’s belief about a product or service’s value relies heavily on how it is ‘framed’.
Tversky and Kahneman have extensively demonstrated this framing effect, showing that people’s choices can be predictably shifted, not through changing the choices themselves, but by changing what consumers perceive as the salient qualities of available choices. For instance, advertising a yoghurt as 98% Fat Free is much more compelling than promoting the same product as containing only 2% milk-fat. Similarly, people who would be turned off by the promotion of a vegan diet may be completely receptive to the same regime when it is advertised as a plant-based or cholesterol-free diet.
Of the many ways to frame a new behavioural choice, the most successful will offer a clear and relevant benefit to switching. It is not, for instance, as effective to sell nicotine patches merely as a means to quit smoking as it is to promote them in terms of concrete personal benefits (e.g. better relationships, improved health, longer life, etc.). In short, if we were to effectively address the crisis of human behaviour, the desirable alternative behaviours (e.g. flying less, driving less, wasting less, having fewer children) must be creatively framed in ways that accentuate the benefits to the individual rather than highlight their personal sacrifices.
Human behaviour – like that of many other animals – is not driven merely by individual perceptions and values but also by the social context and system in which it occurs. In regards to the former, we act in ways that advertise our wealth, sexual prowess or social status. Much like the peacock with its ornate tail or the stotting Springbok, humans have developed species-specific signals to demonstrate particular attributes or qualities to others.
While the intent of these signals remains largely the same across cultures and over time (i.e. to establish status, attractiveness, dominance, trustworthiness, etc.) the physical means of expression is constantly changing (e.g. from precious gold, silk or ivory in preindustrial times to the prestige automobiles and expensive sound equipment in the 1980s, to the high-end computers, iPhones and understated Airpods of the 2000s). By better understanding what values and qualities people are trying to signal about themselves, we can design alternative perceptual framing that results in dramatically altered behaviour. For example, in one highly successful Australian road safety campaign, a team of marketers was able to effectively reframe the meaning of dangerous high-speed driving from signalling ‘masculine bravery’ to signalling ‘masculine insecurity’. Similarly, between 1979 and 2012, strategic efforts were made to reduce the practice of driving while under the influence of alcohol in the UK. Through decades of targeted marketing, community advocacy and police enforcement, the dangerous behaviour was successfully transformed from exceptionally commonplace (i.e. performed by over half the male driving population) to exceptionally rare (i.e. viewed as unacceptable by 92% of the population).
This idea of signalling becomes particularly significant in light of the disproportionately negative impact that wealthy people have on the ecosphere through ‘conspicuous consumption’. While wasteful excess has historically been a reliable cross-cultural signal of social status, there is now promising evidence that this too is amenable to change in response to increasing eco-consciousness. Recent studies have pointed to a counter-signalling effect amongst wealthier populations, wherein more status is actually conferred to those who consciously try to impress by consuming less (e.g. driving modest cars, taking transit, wearing clothes from the thrift store, etc.). By developing ways to positively socialise responsible behaviour, we can help people maintain their sense of self-worth and social status while reducing their contribution to ecological overshoot.
Although social norms may be shifting slightly in the right direction amongst the wealthy, such a values revolution is unlikely to occur in a time frame rapid enough to restore humanity to a survivable limits to growth scenario. In order to effect the rapid changes necessary to secure our long-term survival, we must consider how marketing, behavioural science and other direct instruments of social influence, including but not limited to the media and entertainment industries, might be used in an emergency response to accelerate the process. At the same time, we must find ways to support the billions of individuals who are greatly in need of increases in consumption to do so without inducing further planetary harm.
While the stigmatisation of ‘driving under the influence’ took decades, recent developments in social networks theory have shown that comparable changes are possible within a timescale of years. With a concerted, multidisciplinary effort by the aforementioned industries, radical change would likely be possible even sooner. The concept of the social ‘tipping point’ shows that as a belief or value spreads through a population, there is a catalytic threshold beyond which there is accelerated widespread adoption of that belief. Evidence suggests that this ‘tipping point’ can occur after just 25% of a study population has accepted the belief as a new norm. This finding may be highly relevant to negate our behavioural crisis in an effective time frame.
Conceivably, there may be a ‘tipping point’ in social acceptance of the values associated with degrowth, where they are likely to become positively reinforced through various forms of media and entertainment without conscious participation. We urgently call for an emergency, concerted, multidisciplinary effort to target the populations and value levers most likely to produce the threshold effect, and catalyse rapid global adoption of new consumption, reproduction and waste norms congruent with the survival of complex life on Earth.
Directing and policing widespread behaviour manipulation
Behavioural manipulation has been intentionally used for nefarious purposes before, and as we’ve just explored, has played a critical role in the creation of the behavioural crisis and consequential ecological overshoot. Eco-centric behaviour is the heart of any sustainable future humanity might wish to achieve. Moreover, we are at a crossroads, with three paths ahead:
• We can choose to continue using behavioural manipulation to deepen our dilemma,
• We can choose to ignore it and leave it to chance, or
• We can use an opportunity that almost no other species has had and consciously steer our collective behaviours to conform to the natural laws that bind all life on Earth.
This raises ethical questions, for example, who is worthy of wielding such power? At present, the answer is anyone with the necessary influence or financial means to exploit it. However, we should not entrust this to any individual human, company, government or industry. Instead, any continued use of widespread behavioural manipulation should be firmly bound by, and anchored within a framework built upon the laws of the natural world, as well as the science on limits to growth.
We urgently call for increased interdisciplinary work to be carried out in directing, understanding and policing widespread behaviour manipulation.
Conclusion
In summary, the evidence indicates that anthropogenic ecological overshoot stems from a crisis of maladaptive human behaviours. While the behaviours generating overshoot were once adaptive for H. sapiens, they have been distorted and extended to the point where they now threaten the fabric of complex life on Earth. Simply, we are trapped in a system built to encourage growth and appetites that will end us.
The current emphasis for overshoot intervention is resource intensive (e.g. the global transition to renewable energy) and single-symptom focused. Indeed, most mainstream attention and investment is directed towards mitigating and adapting to climate change. Even if this narrow intervention is successful, it will not resolve the meta-crisis of ecological overshoot, in fact, with many of the current resource-intensive interventions, it is likely to make matters worse. Psychological interventions are likely to prove far less resource-intensive and more effective than physical ones.
• We call for increased attention on the behavioural crisis as a critical intervention point for addressing overshoot and its myriad symptoms.
• We advocate increased interdisciplinary collaboration between the social and behavioural science theorists and practitioners, advised by scientists working on limits to growth and planetary boundaries.
• We call for additional research to develop a full understanding of the many dimensions of the behavioural crisis (including the overwhelming influence of power structures) and how we can best address it.
• 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 call for increased interdisciplinary work to be carried out in directing, understanding and policing widespread behaviour manipulation.
The clock is ticking not only because the health of the natural systems upon which we are utterly dependent is deteriorating but also because broadscale interventions are only possible when a society holds together and is capable of coherent action. As the effects of overshoot worsen, the likelihood of societal breakdown increases. We still have an opportunity to be proactive and utilise the intact systems we have in place to deliver a framework for shifting social norms and other necessities for addressing the behavioural crisis. However, the day may come when societal breakdown will make intervention impossible, locking the planet into an unguided recovery that may salvage much of ‘nature’ but be inhospitable to human life.
A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.
The protesters shouted, “Tourists go home.” They held signs that said, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”
The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.” Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”
Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time. The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers.
There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.
In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.
The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.
“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.
“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”
One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.
“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.” Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”
The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.
With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.
***
I have watched the touristification process wreck lives in an American city I once considered a place to settle and raise a family. Moab, Utah, is called “the adventure capital of the world,” and the hordes converge on it for exploration of the surrounding desert wildernesses on vast public lands that include two legendary national parks, Arches and Canyonlands. In the last 20 years, the city has become a nightmare of hypervisitation. The Utah state government and a cabal of elites – landowners, businesspeople, speculators, moneylenders, rentiers – have joined to market Moab across the United States and globally so that huge profits can be reaped from a harvest of ever-increasing numbers of tourists.
The effect is no different from that in Barcelona, especially in the spawning of a precariat working class in Moab. These are the service-industry peons at the bottom rungs of a system of economic inequality that has only worsened with hypervisitation. Many are driven out of town by the high cost of living and end up car-camping on public lands, where they are vulnerable to predation. Such was the case of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, a gay couple described as “deeply in love” and who lived out of their car, who were stalked and murdered in August 2021. As my friend Laurel Hagen, attorney and long-time Moab resident and mother of two young children, put it to me, “Moab’s people are being fed slowly but surely to the tourism Moloch.”
The beneficiaries are also the same as in Barcelona. “Those who benefit the most from hypertourism,” Jon Kovash, a writer and radio journalist in Moab, told me, “are the hedge funders engaged in raping the town. Anybody selling gasoline or liquor or restaurant food. Realtors and land pimps. The internet lodging industry.” Kovash also includes in this list of villains what he calls the “adventure scammers.” These are the businesspeople who seek to convince the public of the need for paid guides or expensive mechanized rent-a-toys to get into the backcountry, when all one needs really is boots, backpack, a compass and map and a modicum of courage. (I lived in Moab for several years and spent glorious times in the backcountry without spending a nickel.)
Moab’s citizens are today under assault “like never before” – so longtime friends in town tell me – with the arrival of the UTV tour industry. Utility task vehicles, or “side-by-sides,” are small, powerful four-wheel-drive autos designed for aggressive driving both off-road and on. Piston, camshaft, clutch, gearbox, and various belts produce extraordinarily high levels of noise. Renting a UTV to tear about Moab and into the surrounding desert at full blast has become the thing to do.
“People in Moab should be defending their homes against UTV colonization and the violence of noise pollution,” Christian Wright, an author and former National Park Service historian, told me when I first met him in 2022. Wright, who in 2019 published a book about radicalized “miners for democracy” in the coal towns of the American West, had himself been radicalized by the torture of years of living around UTVs in Moab. The machines, he said, “are destroying the peace, harmony, and friendliness that once characterized Moab Valley. Do we not have mountains of evidence that the constant noise leads to elevated heart rates, discontentment, and unprecedentedly colorful manifestations of language?”
The problem became so widespread that some Moabites, who happened to be parents dealing with infants terrified of the sound of the machines, described UTV tourism as a danger to the health of children. Jon Kovash and his daughter Josie Kovash, who lived a few blocks from her dad and was herself a new mother, produced a radio documentary in 2021 cataloging the complaints of besieged residents.
None of these concerns were aired in a political vacuum. Officials of Grand County, of which Moab is the seat, noted that their offices had in recent years received more complaints about noise than about any other issue. According to former Grand County prosecutor Christina Sloan, the impacts on residents included “stress-related illnesses, high blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep disruption and lost productivity,” along with “feelings of isolation,” “lowered morale” and “emotional trauma.”
Acting on these concerns of the great majority of Moabites, the city in 2021 placed restrictions on UTV businesses and daily tours, setting up an enforcement system to reduce noise levels – only to see the Utah state legislature, friend to the industry, kill the local ordinances with passage in 2022 of an extraordinary bill that appeared to violate municipal sovereignty. The infamous Blue Ribbon Coalition, a rightwing astroturf lobby group funded by fossil fuel companies and auto manufacturers, joined the fray with the filing of a lawsuit against the city of Moab for the attempt at regulation. Christina Sloan declared the 2022 pro-UTV bill “an illegal restraint on county and municipal constitutional police power. ” It turns out Utah is now the only state in the union that has made UTVs street legal while also prohibiting municipalities from opting out of their use on streets.
Such is the hypocrisy that one finds everywhere across the rightwing American West: local sovereignty is sacrosanct only so long as it doesn’t conflict with industrial profits. In this case, tourism trumped both liberty and democracy.
***
As a global force of havoc in the natural world, tourism is well-known to be “one of the leading sectors with deleterious effects on the environment.” The air travel related to tourism accounts for 8 percent or more of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tourism is anathema to biodiversity, implicated in producing wildlife deserts, as masses of people in animal habitat tend to adrenalize the animals and scatter them while impairing the habitat with dispersed pollutants. Backcountry tourism in Colorado, to take one example, has caused the die-off of elk populations.
Tourism is implicated in diminished freshwater supply for local residents. It increases the chance of contamination from sewage and chemicals, soil erosion from trampling, and the accumulation of waste and air pollution. Craig Downs, a toxicology expert who runs the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, has found that sunscreen effluent from mass tourism produces “a cascade of insults to the ecological structure” of both marine and freshwater ecosystems, reducing the life cycle viability of aquatic wildlife – in other words, poisoning the animals to the point they can no longer reproduce.
Tourism is also a source of enormous volumes of noise pollution. The effect of noise pollution on human health is well-documented. Over time, it is debilitating to body and mind, and the problem is only getting worse with the growing din of technoindustrial civilization. What about the effect, on a captive population, of the peculiarly grating racket of UTVs? Moab is an experimental site, one resident told me, “to see how people react to the presence of high-pitched whining machines. I think we are guinea pigs and the goal of the experiment is to see how long it takes to drive us nuts.”
Christian Wright, the historian who worked for the National Park Service, was driven almost to the edge. His case, sensationalized and twisted in the media, made headlines across Utah. On February 17, 2023, he was surrounded at a gas station in Moab by heavily armed police. He was arrested, and his house was raided and searched. Police found five AR-15-style assault rifles, along with a stash of psychedelic mushrooms, possession of which made it illegal under Utah law to own the guns. His phones, computers, and hard drives were also seized. Local newspapers declared him a terrorist in waiting.
The evidence marshaled to justify the raid and arrest was that Wright may have participated in a vandalism campaign in which stickers were glued to various public objects in town, including utility poles. The campaign, I later learned, involved numerous Moabites who were posting such stickers. Wright was not some lone nutter. One of the stickers said DEATH TO INDUSTRIAL TOURISM: it burns oil – destroys habitat – low wages – expensive housing. Another said UTV NOISE IS CHILD ABUSE, and another said UTV NOISE IS RAPE CULTURE.
A sticker that Wright gave me as a gift was the old chestnut, DIE YUPPIE SCUM. Another that police allegedly found in their raid of his house was decorated with an image of an assault rifle and stated, DEFEND YOUR HOME, RESIST UTV NOISE HARASSMENT, ABUSIVE TOURISTS & SLC POLITICIANS TAKE NOTE: MOAB IS NOT YOUR WHORE.
I had been corresponding with Wright for close to a year prior to his arrest, and we had become friendly. Nothing in our exchanges suggested he was dangerous to people (though he might have been dangerous to property, which in the United States can be a worse crime). We had gone on long hikes together in the desert backcountry when I visited him in the snowy January of 2023, navigating the treacherous ice of red rock cliffs to collect in our backpacks the plastic detritus – mostly water bottles – that hikers had left in remote canyons of Arches National Park the previous summer. We had gone out boozing at a Moab saloon and had a fine time getting drunk. We played music in his basement, me on his drums, he on piano. He had a punk-rock style, with his mullet and leather jacket. He was aggressive in a gentle way, and a weirdo, and maladjusted (I can relate).
Yet here was Wright, one month later, confined to a holding cell in the Moab city jail, charged with crimes – terroristic threats, illegal possession of assault rifles and drugs – that made him sound like a lunatic ready to burst. It’s true that he had sent Grand County attorney Christina Sloan a letter, in 2022, stating that he wanted to chop up with an ax the owner of a UTV rental company that operated next door to the house he owned in Moab. The unceasing UTV traffic was like a jackhammer in his brain. He made no attempt to communicate with the person he wanted to kill, however, but only told prosecutor Sloan of his intentions – which is not how one usually conducts a death threat.
Sloan herself came to his defense in an article she published following his arrest. “I’ve watched this smart, articulate, engaged, empathetic human fall apart over the last two years,” she said of Wright. “It has made me feel more passionately than ever that noise pollution is a significant public health issue that needs our full attention.” Sloan recalled Wright’s comments on UTV tourism to the Grand County Commission in April 2021, noting that “he and his mullet were vibrant and refreshing.” Wright, she said, “articulately countered the pro-[UTV] conservative talking points hailing the supremacy of the American dollar above all else.”
Not long after his arrest, Wright was remanded for four months to a mental health facility in Utah, where he was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. He appreciated the care from the loving staff but didn’t enjoy being regarded as a “terrorist” based on slander spread by Moab authorities. As of this writing, he is back in his home, and most of the charges against him have been dropped.
***
The conflict over hyper-visitation plays out wherever there are lovely places that people want to consume as travelers. In my backyard, on the highlands along the Hudson River valley north of New York City, a man named Dave Merandy, ex-mayor of the touristed village of Cold Spring, is fighting to stop the flood of people on his home ground.
The Hudson Highlands is a major draw with its green hills and handsome cliffs that afford scenic views of the wide Hudson. The area already attracts hundreds of thousands of people a year. Merandy, who stepped down as mayor of Cold Spring in 2021 after seven years of service, is a leader in the opposition to a planned expansion of tourism amenities that will likely increase the number of visitors in the Highlands to more than a million per annum. Known as the Fjord Trail project, the expansion is supported by the New York State government, numerous environmental NGOs, and a friendly neighborhood billionaire named Chris Davis, heir to a Wall Street fortune who considers himself the lord over the commoners in this stretch of rural New York.
Why stop the growth of tourism in the Highlands? “Because we already have enough,” Merandy told me during a visit at his house. “We don’t need more people.” He understood with clear eyes that the conflict was part of a global problem. “Nobody wants to address overpopulation. Everybody thinks it’s sustainable. We think we can just keep growing and growing. It’s crazy. This is a case where we want to have as many people as possible. You only have X amount of acres that can sustain a certain number of people. But then we tell ourselves, just bring them in, more and more and more. Put up a neon light, have a ribbon cutting, and everybody will say Chris Davis the billionaire is a hero.“
After I left Merandy, I stopped at a busy intersection on Route 9, in the town of Fishkill, where a masked man stood in the median in a black robe that whipped in the wind of the passing cars. He wore the infamous Scream mask and a big analog clock around his neck. This, obviously, was the Grim Reaper. I stopped to ask him what he was doing. “I’m Death,” he said. “And I’m reminding people they’re going to die.”
It struck me that, yes, lots of us are going to die a lot sooner than we expect if the growthist monster isn’t stopped. Climate change and ecological collapse, driven by overpopulation coupled with affluence-seeking, will kill out not only the beautiful wild things worth keeping on this planet but also a large part of humanity that hasn’t the money to buy its way out of collapse.
The place to build opposition to the monster is in your backyard, where the consequences are most painfully felt. En revanche, the prostitutes of business-as-usual – say, the billionaire lords up in the manor – will curse and slander you, declare you reactionary, the enemy of “progress,” and, perhaps worst of all, a nimby, somebody who wants selfishly to keep the backyard all to yourself. Merandy, who grew up in the Highlands and learned there a love of nature, has been called all these things, as have the resisters in Barcelona and Moab.
Wright and Merandy and the Barcelonans armed with water guns are all engaged in the same fight in defense of the place they call home. They have the right and the duty to take their stand. And history will prove them to be honorable. Those who oppose mass tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow. The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if society is to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. The tourism industry – along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future – will not accept that judgment.
An abridged version of this piece first appeared at Truthdig.
A pivot to renewable energy by the Philippine government has led to a wave of hyrdoprojects projects across the Cordillera region. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Hydropower projects have met with differening receptions in Cordillera villages such as Balbalan, Mabaca and Buaya. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
The Cal-oan River, also known as Mabaca River, where Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) has two planned hydropower projects. Image by Michael Beltran.
Farmer Gohn Dangoy, of the Naneng tribe, says proposed dams have already caused deep divisions in his community. Image by Michael Beltran.
A man in Kalinga Province wears a shirt reading “No to Dam.” Image by Michael Beltran.
Residents of villages close to the Chico River meet to discuss plans to dam the river for hydroelectricity. Image by Michael Beltran.
