Overshoot 30/50
There is no environmental crisis
A crisis is something that reaches a climax and passes. We are in a predicament. Predicaments do not pass. They get worse. We are in this predicament because we have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity and there is now no going back.
The concept of overshoot is attributable to William R. Catton (1926 - 2015) whose seminal and visionary work of that title remains one of the more important foundational reference works.
I would include Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ersnt Schumacher's Small is beautiful, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth as other key seminal works.
One thing that unites all these works is that they were so far ahead of their time that they came to be dismissed.
BAD MISTAKE
Our precarious predicament began in the eighteenth century when we could have chosen ecological economics. Instead, we chose cornucopian economics.
Carrying Capacity
The Cornucopian Myth
A Catastrophic Wrong Turn
A Timeline of our Predicament
1968
Awakening
1996
Mitigation
2030
Resilience
2050
Anguish
If our predicament began when we rejected the idea of limits to carrying capacity, the iconic 1968 NASA photograph of Earthrise taken by the crew of Apollo 8 marked the dawn of a new awareness. Click the images to read more about three critical phases in the shift from cornucopian myth to the dawning realisation that carrying capacity has been overshot.
The difficulties we have got ourselves into are beyond the capacity of any political regime to solve, and certainly beyond the capacity of any individual human thinker or political leader. My small contribution as a now retired professor of education has been my PhD thesis on values. Read why I believe that values are responsible for our predicament and, if there is to be any way out of it, it will be through large scale changes in values.
