Ecological Economics

The tool that made the argument checkable

Add up the cropland, grazing land, forest, fishing ground and built area a population uses, add the land it would take to absorb its waste, and compare the total to the land it actually has. That is the whole instrument. It sounds crude, and critics say it is. What it did was translate a moral argument about greed into a hectare figure that a planning department could put in a report, and that is why it spread.

The finding that matters for the farm: a rich country runs its footprint overseas. Our land, our water and our labor are consumed to serve demand located somewhere else. That is not a metaphor. It is an acreage.

The claim he is actually making

Two inputs drive it. Human nature, evolved in small groups to expand and consume. And fossil energy, which released the negative feedbacks of famine, disease and predation that had held that expansion in check for the whole of previous history, while multiplying the energy available to one person many times over.

What follows is that the human enterprise is a dissipative sub-system of the ecosphere. It grows by consuming its host, and the host is finite. Overshoot is what you call it when the consumption has passed the replacement rate.

His sharpest claim is that climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss and pollution are four symptoms of one thing, and that treating climate as the whole problem is, in his phrase, a wasteful distraction that extends the status quo. That sentence is the reason he is worth reading rather than skimming.

Why he is useful to a practical book

Here he turns on his own side. We have an enormous literature describing what a just and sustainable society looks like, and almost nothing on how a household or a country actually gets there from here. The gap is not a failure of imagination. It is a failure of route.

He pairs that with a behavioral diagnosis. Our minds came up in a simpler world and are poorly matched to slow, statistical, global threats. We hold a myth that intelligence and technology substitute for nature. And large institutions reward exploitation. Add those together and you get a species that can measure its own overshoot, publish the number, and keep going.

The best single introduction

The Collapse of Modernity, on the OVERSHOOT podcast. If you want his argument in one sitting, this is it: human ecology, the economy as a fire, cities as feedlots, the what/how gap, and his view that renewables alone will not rescue an economy that has to keep growing.

Four chapters if you are short of time: human ecology at 4:20, psychopathic selection at 26:07, cities as feedlots at 50:32, and the what/how conundrum at 1:01:14.

Episode page with show notes and transcript

The strongest technical objection

Economists including Jeroen van den Bergh and Herman Verbruggen have argued that the footprint aggregates incompatible things, that carbon is treated as a land area by assumption, and that the indicator can mislead when used for policy because it conflates impacts with different causes and different timescales. The critique is serious and it is not going away. The footprint is a good teaching device and a rough accounting tool, and it is weaker than some of its users think.

Where we part company, partly

He says contraction is coming and only the planning of it is in question. That is a prediction drawn from a model, and models of this size can be right about the direction and wrong about the timetable. Treating a forecast as settled is the move that turns a useful thinker into a prophet, and it is the move we decline to make here.

A claim that gets borrowed by people he does not agree with

He argues for contraction of population and consumption both. He is careful to say that the consumption of the rich is wildly unequal and that the poor are not the problem, and he says so plainly. The trouble is that the frame travels, and people who want to talk about population and nothing else quote the first half and drop the second. Read him rather than his excerpters.

The paper that drew published replies

His paper in Energies argued that renewable energy cannot sustain a growth economy at current scale. Mark Diesendorf and Vasilis Fthenakis published formal replies, arguing that he underestimates build rates and overstates the constraint. He answered them. This is a live disagreement among people who all accept climate science, and it is worth knowing that before you repeat either version.