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It’s a system, stupid!

By William E Rees, PhD, FRSC

Techno-industrial society is being forced by evolving circumstances to confront a meta-problem of unprecedented complexity. The human enterprise is in a state of potentially catastrophic ecological overshoot, systematically destroying the biophysical basis of its own existence. (Overshoot is an inevitable emergent property of the interaction of evolved survival behaviour that operates beneath consciousness and a deeply-entrenched maladaptive socially-constructed cultural paradigm.) Using contemporary examples from climate change to the population taboo, I argue that modern H. sapiens is not up to the challenge of self-rescue from its self-generated predicament. The human brain is obsolete; it evolved in the context of small tribal groups living in spatially-limited, relatively knowable predictable ecosystems. As a result most people naturally think in simplistic, linear, reductionist ways; emotions and instincts frequently override rational analyses. We are not neuro-cognitively equipped to understand, let alone control, the mind-numbingly complex world-system of overlapping sub-systems that we ourselves have created; we don’t ‘get’ complexity; we don’t connect the dots.  Overshoot is theoretically solvable but governments, corporations, NGOs and ordinary people alike both deny the diagnosis and reject policy initiatives that might effectively address the disease.