William Catton’s book, Overshoot,
describes the process by which most modern societies have achieved overshoot — a
population in excess of the permanent carrying capacity of the habitat. It examines the long human saga, and reveals embarrassing
failures of foresight that make our big brains wince and blush. Catton drives an iron stake through the heart
of our goofy worldview — the myths, fantasies, and illusions of progress. Readers are served a generous full strength dose
of ecological reality with no sugar coating.
Humans evolved to thrive in a tropical wilderness. In the early days, we lived lightly, like
bonobos, in a simple manner that supported a modest population density. As the millennia passed, we learned how to
increase carrying capacity by adopting ever-more-clever technology, like
spears, bows and arrows, and fire — better tools, more food. This was a blind leap into the unknown. It pushed us out of evolution’s safety net,
and required us to create cultural safety nets, based on enlightened
self-restraint. Our path became
slippery.
Much later, we slipped into soil mining — agriculture — which
sent our carrying capacity into the stratosphere — temporarily. Topsoil is created over geological time. From a human timeframe, it is a nonrenewable
resource. Soil mining often leads to
water mining and forest mining. It has a
long history of spurring population growth, bloody conflict, and permanent
damage to ecosystems.
Then, we slipped into metal making, and invented many new
tools for raising carrying capacity even higher. This was a big fork in the path. Up to this point, we increased carrying
capacity by takeover,
expanding into new habitat and pushing out other species. Now, we added drawdown to the game, by tapping into
finite nonrenewable resources, and becoming heavily addicted to them.
When communities lived with enlightened self-restraint,
salmon and bison could be renewable sources of food for tens of thousands of
years, or more. Iron, oil, and topsoil
are not renewable. Their extraction does
not contribute to the real carrying capacity of the habitat. What they provide is phantom carrying capacity,
a boost that can only be temporary.
A habitat’s carrying capacity is limited by the least abundant
necessity. The limiting factor was
usually food, but it can also be water or oil. Writing in the late 1970s, Catton perceived
that 90 percent of humankind was dependent for survival on phantom carrying capacity. Today, that figure is certainly higher, with
billions of people dependent on oil-powered agriculture and market systems. As the rate of oil extraction declines in the
coming decades, there will be many growling tummies.
Columbus alerted Europeans to the existence of an unknown
hemisphere, the Americas. This “New
World” was fully occupied by Stone Age nations that survived by low-tech hunting,
fishing, foraging, and organic soil mining.
They had no wheels, metal tools, or domesticated livestock. European colonists, with their state of the
art technology, vigorously converted wilderness into private property devoted
to the production of food and commodities for humans. This greatly expanded the carrying capacity
of the Americas (for humans). Colonists
exported lots of food to Europe, and population exploded on both sides of the
Atlantic.
A bit later, we developed a tragic addiction to fossil fuels,
which led to the Industrial Revolution. We
began extracting solar energy that had been safely stored underground for
millions of years. Cool new machines
allowed us to expand cropland, increase farm productivity, and keep growing
numbers of people well fed. The
population of hunter-gatherers grew 0.09% per generation. With the shift to agriculture, population
grew 0.78% per generation. Since 1865,
it’s growing 27.5% per generation.
For four centuries, much of the world experienced a
ridiculously abnormal era of innovation, growth, and excess — the Age of
Exuberance. This created a state of mind
that perceived high waste living as normal, and expected it continue forever. We were proud that our children would be able
to live even more destructively than we could.
Our glorious leaders worked tirelessly to increase drawdown and worsen
overshoot.
We have no limits.
We’ll grow like crazy until the sun burns out. This is known as the cornucopian paradigm. Cornucopians hallucinate that withdrawals from
finite nonrenewable savings are income,
and that wealth can be increased by withdrawing even more nonrenewable savings. Cornucopians proudly refer to overshoot as progress. Ecology, on the other hand, insists that our
ability to survive above carrying capacity, in overshoot, can only be
temporary. We can refuse to believe in limits,
but limits don’t care if we believe in them.
The Age of Exuberance was brought to an end by the oil shocks
of the 1970s. Our poor children now have
a bleak future, a sickening descent into primitive barbarism — no SUVs, ATVs,
RVs, PWCs, or McMansions. It was fun
having the wonders of industrial society, like bicycles, metal pots, books, and
running water. But these luxuries were
provided by a system that has been surviving for 200 years on an exponential drawdown
of nonrenewable resources. It’s a way of
life that survives by burning up posterity’s savings. Catton warned us, “It was thus becoming
apparent that nature must, in the not far distant future, institute bankruptcy
proceedings against industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing
crop of human flesh.”
Sadly, the consumer hordes can’t wrap their heads around the
notion that the Age of Exuberance is over.
Yes, things are a bit rough now, but recovery is just around the corner,
probably tomorrow. The crazy cornucopian
pipedream has become the primary worldview in most societies. It is still injected into the brains of every
student, numbing the lobes related to enlightened self-restraint, often
permanently.
We become anxious and angry as we slip and slide into more
and more limits. Catton noted that a
worrisome reaction to this is to blame someone, to identify scapegoats, hate
them, and kill them — but this is pointless.
“The end of exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and
innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid
illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a
heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to
specialize, exchange, and thereby prosper.”
While Catton was writing, 40 years ago, a new paradigm was
beginning to appear on the radar — the ecological paradigm. This rational mindset made it easy to
understand our predicament, and to envision intelligent responses, but probably
not brilliant solutions. Society is not
rushing to embrace the ecological paradigm, because any mention of limits is still
pure heresy to the dominant paradigm.
Ecology is not titillating infantile twaddle created by big
city marketing nitwits trying to sell you the keys to a treadmill way of life. It’s as real as life and death. In the game of ecology, there is no “get out
of overshoot free” card. There is no
undo command. The cost of overshoot is
die-off, an unpleasant return to carrying capacity. After the fever comes the healing. This is an essential book for animals younger
than 100 years old.
Catton, William R., Overshoot
— The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, 1980.
