Overlooking Overshoot

As most of you know, I am a big admirer of the Christian group known as the Bruderhof and am a regular reader of Plough Quarterly, their excellent publication. However, I have both appreciation for and some serious questions about their Summer 2022 issue titled Hope in Apocalypse. 

“Hoping for Doomsday”

Peter Mommsen, the great-grandson of Eberhard Arnold (1913~82) who was the founder of the Bruderhof, is the able editor of Plough Quarterly. I have often been helpfully informed and challenged by his perceptive editorials.

I was dissatisfied, though, with his six-page editorial in the current issue of Plough. It is titled, “Hoping for Doomsday: The times are troubled. That’s why we need the promise of apocalypse.”

While Mommsen writes some about the possible disastrous effects of climate change, he seems to think that it is less a threat to humanity than the potential destruction of earthly life as we know it because of nuclear war.

After briefly looking at those two apocalyptic threats, he writes,

one day homo sapiens will go extinct, with or without our help through carbon emissions or nuclear war, and the game will be over. At least that is what current scientific models foretell. Perhaps it will be at the next round of global glaciation, predicted in a hundred millennia or so . . . .

What he goes on to say in that paragraph is what I learned in the 1960s. But, and this was my dissatisfaction, he makes no reference to what some scientists (and others) have said in recent years about ecological overshoot.

In passing, Mommsen does mention Don’t Look Up! the movie I wrote about in my Jan. 25 blog post (see here), but he makes no reference at all to the frightening phenomenon of overshoot.

Ecological overshoot occurs when human demands exceed what the earth’s biosphere can provide through its capacity for renewal. According to some ecological scientists, the industrial world is nearing the overshoot apex and will soon begin to collapse, an irreversible phenomenon.

For a good introduction to this matter, see Michael Dowd’s video Overshoot in a Nutshell: Understanding Our Predicament and also YouTube talks (such as this one) by William Rees, professor emeritus of British Columbia University. These articulate what some scientistic models are now foretelling.

(Rees, b. 1943, is primarily known for creating the ecological footprint concept. Wikipedia, here, gives a good, brief introduction to Rees and his academic work.)

Mommsen’s failure to make any reference to the concept of ecological overshoot and the work of thinkers such as Dowd and Rees is a major deficiency in his editorial.

Why is Overshoot Overlooked?

A main reason is doubtlessly unawareness. In spite of valiant efforts by Dowd, Rees, and others to warn us of the perils of overshoot/collapse, there is little public awareness of that real and present danger.

My “Google alert” for overshoot in recent weeks has yielded surprisingly few “hits.” There are some pertinent articles found at EcoWatch (such as here), but these important essays are read by relatively few people.

Most, I’m afraid, don’t know (and don’t care?) about what is likely to happen before the end of the present century.

But some are aware (to varying degrees) of overshoot but find the idea unbearable. Some who do know at least something about overshoot just don’t want to think about it, because it is too upsetting to consider.

Perhaps a major reason overshoot is overlooked by many, especially serious Christian thinkers such as Mommsen, is that the possibility of such is unthinkable.

Earlier this year, Brian McLaren’s new book Do I Stay Christian? was published. While he does not say a lot about overshoot, he does mention the concept and makes a passing reference to Michael Dowd.

The seventh chapter of McLaren’s scintillating book deals with “Christianity’s great wall of bias, which includes the “tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit in with our current understanding, paradigm, belief system, or worldview” (p. 67).

Perhaps this helps us understand Mommsen’s lack of serious attention to overshoot.

Much more needs to be said about this—and I plan to write at least a little more about it soon.

“Listen to the Scientists”: Considering the Limits to Growth

This post is directly related to the one I made on January 25. It is about the possibility of an “ecological Armageddon” (words not used but implied in the 1/25 post), which might occur even before the end of this century. 

Becoming Aware

I have been much concerned about this issue for 50 years, and more. By 1970 or ’71, I had read Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb (1968), or had read enough of and about that book, to be greatly concerned about what was often called “the population explosion.”

Then in 1972, the Club of Rome published another highly significant book. It was titled The Limits to Growth, authored by Donella H. Meadows et al. The New York Times (here) summarized the central thesis of that book succinctly:

Either civilization or growth must end, and soon. Continued population and industrial growth will exhaust the world’s minerals and bathe the biosphere in fatal levels of pollution. As the authors summarize, “if the present growth trends continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years.”

It was, however, many years later before I began to be aware of the serious problem of global warming—and I recently learned that the term “global warming” didn’t even appear in a scientific article until 1975.

In fact, as late as that year, some were still talking of climate change making the world too cold—which is why the term global warming is now much to be preferred to climate change.

In recent years, though, I have been very aware of the danger of global warming, and my 1/5/20 blog post was titled “Climate Crisis: The Challenge of the Decade.”

However, I have only recently become aware of the fact that global warming itself is not the primary ecological problem confronting humankind. Rather, global warming is the result of a network of problems all related to unrestrained growth, which is also called overshoot.

EarthOvershoot.org explains, “Overshoot is when a species consumes resources and generates wastes faster than the ecosystem in which it inhabits can replace those resources or absorb those wastes.”

Further, “Climate change is just one symptom (and a pretty big one) of a much larger ‘disease’ called overshoot. Overshoot is the all encompassing threat to sustainability posed by too many people consuming too many resources and emitting to much waste.”

The concept of overshoot clearly acknowledges the limits to growth—of the world’s population, of the consumption of nonrenewable resources, and of the global standard of living (and the stock market).

Unquestionably, we all need to be deeply aware of this perilous predicament.

Becoming Alarmed

“Listen to the scientists” has been widely used over the past couple of years in the attempt to get people to fight the covid-19 epidemic by getting vaccinations and wearing masks. That is good advice.

But I am afraid that, as William Rees forcefully emphasizes, politicians as well as the general public don’t listen to scientists well when it comes to considering overshoot / the limits to growth.

Rees (b. 1943), who has a Ph.D. in population ecology, was a professor at University of British Columbia from 1969 to 2012. During that time, he coined the phrase/concept ecological footprint (in 1992).

Since his retirement, he has continued to be an active advocate of protecting human life on this planet. Several recent talks are available on YouTube, and in one of them, he wisely emphasizes the great need for politicians and the general public to listen to the scientists.

In February 2020, Rees gave a talk entitled “Will Modern Civilization Be the Death of Us” (see here). I encourage you to watch that video as well as other more recent talks you can easily find under his name on YouTube.

Given the alarming facts that Rees graphically presents, I wonder when, oh when, are we the general public and political leaders going to listen to the scientists about the limits to growth?

And when, oh when, will we (humankind) begin to take more decisive and meaningful steps to limit growth?