The human behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot

Introduction

I am delighted to have the opportunity to write a guest blog for the SEAI. SEAI first made contact following the publication of our paper, “World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot”. We have been overwhelmed by the positive response from so many. It has been covered by major news outlets and global organisations and governments have reached out to us to explore the behavioural crisis in more depth.

Merz institute’s work pulls together inputs from the cutting edge of multiple fields; collaboration between these fields is critical, and it is an exciting time for the institute. With that collaboration in mind, we will give a bird’s eye view of the way we frame our work, and unpack some concepts central to our strategic focus going forward.

Growth of our species

It took our species 250,000 years to reach a population of 1 billion. But with access to new forms of energy which enabled an array of technological developments, we were able to increase that figure 7-fold in around 200 years. We added the latest billion in just 11 years.

This technology has enabled us to largely avoid natural negative feedbacks like disease and resource depletion, allowing our species to continue to grow. While this may make sense from a narrow field of vision, all we’ve really achieved is to push ourselves into an advanced state of ecological overshoot.

Our recent paper, defines anthropogenic ecological overshoot as the “human consumption of natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished and entropic waste production in excess of Earth’s assimilative and processing capacity.” Put another way, there are too many of us, consuming too much and producing too much waste.

Largely blind to the three levers of overshoot–population, consumption, and waste–there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that like any animal, humans exploit any suitable ecological niche, displacing other species in the process. Aside from almost inevitable population collapse, overshoot brings with it a range of risks in the form of symptoms.

Ocean acidification is a particularly concerning symptom, one that has been associated with a number of mass extinction events in Earth’s history. Another is the rise in novel entities like microplastics and nanoplastics, glyphosate, and the persistent and incredibly harmful chemicals like PFAS and PFOS. There’s biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. And then there’s everything in between–like the terrifying role that novel entities like microplastics and nanoplastics are playing as vectors in transporting other novel entities.

None of these symptoms can be addressed in isolation, just as none of the three levers–population, consumption and waste–can be ignored. Unless we lift our gaze, we will remain reactive and focused on the ever-increasing number of symptoms instead of the root causes.

Our behaviour and culture are selected for

Let’s take the example of the new pair of shoes. For the individual purchasing, the behaviours relating to acquiring the new shoes prove immediately reinforcing as they satisfy (temporarily) the individuals desire to signal resources and status.

For the merchant too, the behaviours relating to the manufacture and sale of the shoes prove immediately reinforcing as they receive a financial reward when the shoes are sold–which allows them to not only meet their more fundamental needs for food and shelter–but also in terms of their own signalling desires.

However, there are also negative consequences to these behaviours that worsen ecological overshoot, like increased energy use and increased resource extraction but these negative consequences are not felt immediately. They are realised in the future.

This is where another evolutionary concept comes into play. It’s called discounting (give less or no regard to) and like our impulses, it used to be adaptive. Humans have a tendency to ‘discount’ the importance of things that are far away in time, in space and socially - temporal, spatial and social discounting. This is what we do with the negative consequences of the behaviours described above. We focus on the short-term immediate rewards and discount the longer term negative consequences.

Our neoliberal paradigm has been (and is still being) “selected for” based on our perceived “needs” and the consequences of our behaviours to meet them. There is an infinitely complex relationship between all these factors and many more, but the broader point here is: rather than solely addressing downstream symptoms like climate change by replacing energy with energy and worsening overshoot in the process, we could be working to shift our behaviours, norms and culture, by intentionally guiding these much larger evolutionary processes at play.

Implications for policy

Our Policy Lead, Bridget Doran is going to explore implications for policy in a subsequent post. But for now, I’ll reiterate that anchoring in human behaviour is absolutely critical because it is the physical means by which our species interacts with the ecosphere. Once anchored here, we can explore the myriad upstream systemic, biological and evolutionary drivers and influences of our behaviour and work to guide them.

The fossil record shows us that persistence as a species is the exception not the rule, and while the hour is late, we believe we may still have time to socially reflect our biophysical limits.