The Most Important Book You’ve Never Read

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but my guess is that none of you regular readers of my blog have ever read William R. Catton Jr.’s book Overshoot. I read it for the first time this year (and plan to read it again). I wish I had read it forty years ago; it is, truly, a book of great significance. 

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change was first published in 1980 and is still in print. (I read the Kindle version of the 1982 paperback.) Eco-theologian Michael Dowd, whom I have referred to repeatedly, says Overshoot is the most important book he has ever read.

All of the first part, “The Unfathomed Predicament of Mankind” can be read on Amazon.com’s webpage (see here). There the author asserts, “Today mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. That is what this book is about.”

Catton (1926~2015) goes on to state that “contemporary well-being is achieved at the expense of our descendants.” He then says,

A major aim of this book is to show that commonly proposed “solutions” for problems confronting mankind are actually going to aggravate those problems (p. 3).

At the end of the first chapter, the author declares, “This is not a book to be read either casually or passively.” Indeed, it is not.**

Catton explains the circumstance and consequence of what he calls “new ecological understandings.” This is summarized in Table 2 (on p. 71) in Overshoot (pasted here), and I encourage you to read it carefully. 

Having watched several videos by Dowd and having read the illuminating books by Ophuls and Catton, I have, reluctantly, adopted the first position, that of realism.

The second of the five “labels” is perhaps the only one that needs some explanation, although the position it designates is widely held. The term “cargoism” is based on the “cargo cults” in the Pacific island societies, especially the pre-literate Melanesian peoples.

Whatever was needed was “miraculously” brought in on European cargo ships. In a similar manner, many contemporary people have “faith in science and technology as infallible solvers of any conceivable problem” (pp. 185-6). Thus, such faith in sure-to-come technological solutions is called cargoism.

Perhaps the most common position for socially aware people is the third one. They realize there is an environmental problem and so they seek to do something (or many things) to address the problem. But such actions don’t solve the deep, underlying predicament; it is merely cosmeticism.

Some people, though, just completely disregard the “circumstance” and the “consequence” as described by author Catton, and this widespread position is called cynicism.

Many other people, and perhaps this is the largest group, don’t just merely disregard but actually deny both circumstance and consequence. This is the position of ostrichism.

So, here are the questions I leave with you. Which of these five terms best describes your present position? If you don’t hold to the first position (realism), are you satisfied with your current stance and would you recommend it to others? Why or why not?

Of course, many of you may think all this is too painful to think about—and I certainly understand why you may feel that way. But refusing to think about the issues is, in effect, “ostrichism.”

As for me, I want to continue advocating realism, believing that that is the best position for promoting both a social conscience and mental health for oneself as well as the optimal future for humankind.

_____

** Three times in the first chapter, Catton makes reference to Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) by William Ophuls, whom I introduced in my March 1 blog post. 

See here for helpful biographical information about Catton. 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

As many of you know, I have seven grandchildren. The oldest celebrated her 38^th birthday in January, so I have been a grandfather for 38 years now. In 2022, two of my granddaughters became mothers, so now I also have two precious great-grandchildren, the first born a year ago last month.

I have been thinking about my grandchildren in a new way because of reading two books written to or for grandchildren. Those books are closely related to my January 28 blog post.

Larry R. Rasmussen’s book The Planet You Inherit was published last year. Its subtitle is Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing. I had the privilege of writing a review of that book for The Englewood Review of Books, and you can read that review here.

Rasmussen (b. 1939) is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his published books are Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and Earth Honoring Faith (2013).

It is no surprise that the letters written to Eduardo and Martin Rasmussen Villegas (b. 2015 and 2018), his two grandchildren, are primarily related to his many years of ecotheological teaching and writing.

While the letters clearly express the writer’s love for his two young grandsons, it will likely be 2035 and beyond before they will be able to comprehend the meaning and significance of those letters.

Maybe, though, the writer’s intention was to say important things to us adults who read those letters now, as well as to Eduardo and Martin, who will be reading them much later.

One of Rasmussen’s most important letters is titled “Responsible by Degrees,” written in August 2020. There he broached the possibility of “widespread civilizational collapse”—and asserts that “we know we must put an end to a growing, extractive economy running on ecological deficits.”

Rasmussen, though, has hopeful views about humanity’s ability to confront the current and coming ecological crisis effectively, and those views need to be pondered thoughtfully.

Still, this challenging book written for the author’s young grandsons needs to be balanced with careful consideration of more realistic views about what is most likely to occur in Eduardo’s and Martin’s lifetime.

William Ophuls’s Apologies to the Grandchildren is a 2018 book of essays, the first one bearing the same title as the book, which does give a more realistic and less hopeful view of the current ecological crisis.

(I first learned of Ophuls, born in 1934 and with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, from the video by Michael Dowd that I introduced in my January 28^th blog post linked to above).

Ophuls begins his essay with stark words: ”Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.”

He continues by saying that civilization “generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.”

He goes on to write these blunt words to the grandchildren, “A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all” (p. 1)

What Can We Say/Do? While I would like to embrace Rasmussen’s hopeful view, I have become convinced by Ophuls and by Dowd—as well as by William Catton, whom I plan to introduce in later blog posts—that my grandchildren and their children will experience a world of increasing gloom.

Perhaps there is still time for necessary changes to be made, but that is doubtful—and there is little evidence to indicate that such changes will likely be made. Perhaps, sadly, little can realistically be done other than to offer deep apologies to the grandchildren.

Yet, surely, we can work toward pushing the impending collapse farther into the future and encourage the grandchildren to find ways to flourish now in the present, regardless of what looms in a future that, unfortunately, may not be as uncertain as Rasmussen thinks.