Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change / Edition 1

by William R. Catton

Overview

Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology.

A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that "the principals of ecology apply to all living things." These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not irreversible and population growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252009884
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	06/01/1982
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	365,781
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

William R. Catton, Jr., is professor of sociology at Washington State University and author of From Animistic to Naturalistic Sociology and more than seventy-five articles in such journals as American Sociologist, Social Science Quarterly, Journal of Forestry, and BioScience.

Read an Excerpt

Overshoot

The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

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By William R. Catton Jr.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-00988-4

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CHAPTER 1

Our Need for a New Perspective

Competition across Time

On the banks of the Volga in 1921 a refugee community was visited by an American newspaper correspondent who had come to write about the Russian famine. Almost half the people in this community were already dead of starvation. The death rate was rising. Those still surviving had no real prospect of prolonged longevity. In an adjacent field, a lone soldier was guarding a huge mound of sacks full of grain. The American newsman asked the white-bearded leader of the community why his people did not overpower this one guard, take over the grain, and relieve their hunger. The dignified old Russian explained that the sacks contained seed to be planted for the next growing season. "We do not steal from the future," he said.

Today mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. That is what this book is about. It is not just a book about famine or hunger. Famine in the modern world must be read as one of several symptoms reflecting a deeper malady in the human condition—namely, diachronic competition, a relationship whereby contemporary well-being is achieved at the expense of our descendants. By our sheer numbers, by the state of our technological development, and by being oblivious to differences between a method that achieved lasting increments of human carrying capacity and one that achieves only temporary supplements, we have made satisfaction of today's human aspirations dependent upon massive deprivation for posterity.

People of one generation have become indirect and unwitting antagonists of subsequent generations. Yet diagnoses of our plight—even ecological analyses—have not made clear one essential point. A major aim of this book is to show that commonly proposed "solutions" for problems confronting mankind are actually going to aggravate those problems. Proposed remedies for various parts of our predicament need to be evaluated by asking whether they will intensify the adversary relationship between people living today and people of the next generation, and the next ...

The overlooked differences between methods that permanently enlarged human carrying capacity and more recent methods that have only enabled us temporarily to evade the world's limits can be seen if we contrast the way people used to seek the good life versus today's substitute expedient. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country"—i.e., go where there is new land to take over, and use such an increment of carrying capacity to prosper. At the start of America's third century, however, it was "Try to speed up the economy"—i.e., try to draw down the finite reservoir of exhaustible resources a bit faster.

Because this book is meant to overcome our habit of mistaking techniques that evade limits for techniques that raise them, it is, in a sense, a book about how to read the news perceptively in revolutionary times. That cannot be done without certain unfamiliar but increasingly indispensable concepts. "Carrying capacity" is one of them. Until recently, only a few people outside such occupations as wildlife management or sheep and cattle ranching have even known this phrase. Its vital importance to all of us has not been as obvious as it is now becoming. The time has come for scholars and everyone else to take a piercing look at the relationship between the earth's changing capacity to support human inhabitants and the changing load imposed by our numbers and our requirements. The direction of recent change makes this relationship just about the most important topic there is for people to know about, and think about. We have come to the end of the time when it didn't seem to matter that almost no one saw the difference between ways of enlarging human carrying capacity and ways of exceeding it.

It has now become essential to recognize that all creatures, human or otherwise, impose a load upon their environment's ability to supply what they need and to absorb and transform what they excrete or discard. An environment's carrying capacity for a given kind of creature (living a given way of life) is the maximum persistently feasible load—just short of the load that would damage that environment's ability to support life of that kind. Carrying capacity can be expressed quantitatively as the number of us, living in a given manner, which a given environment can support indefinitely.

When the load at a particular time happens to be appreciably less than the carrying capacity, there is room for expansion of numbers, for enhancement of living standards, or both. If the load increases until it exceeds carrying capacity, overuse of the environment reduces its carrying capacity. That is why it has become important to recognize the difference between increasing the number an environment can support indefinitely and surpassing that number by "accepting" environmental damage. Overuse of an environment sets up forces that will necessarily, in time, reduce the load to match the shrinkage of carrying capacity.

As these points begin to indicate, in order really to understand our future we need a clear-headed ecological interpretation of history, because the pressure of our numbers and technology upon manifestly limited resources has already put out of reach the previously acceptable solutions to many of our problems. There remains steadfast resistance to admitting this, but facts are not repealed by refusal to face them. On the other hand, even the "alarmists" who have been warning of grave perils besetting mankind have not fathomed our present predicament.

I speak of "predicament," not "crisis," because I refer to conditions that are not of recent origin and will not soon abate.

In brief, that predicament and its background can be outlined as follows: Human beings, in two million years of cultural evolution, have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth's total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures. Each time, human population has increased. But man has now learned to rely on a technology that augments human carrying capacity in a necessarily temporary way—as temporary as the extension of life by eating the seeds needed to grow next year's food. Human population, organized into industrial societies and blind to the temporariness of carrying capacity supplements based on exhaustible resource dependence, responded by increasing more exuberantly than ever, even though this meant overshooting the number our planet could permanently support. Something akin to bankruptcy was the inevitable sequel.

Old Ideas, New Situation

The sequel has begun to happen, but it is not generally recognized for what it is. We have come to a time when old assumptions that compel us to misunderstand what is happening to us have to be abandoned.

We and our immediate ancestors lived through an age of exuberant growth, overshooting permanent carrying capacity without knowing what we were doing. The past four centuries of magnificent progress were made possible by two non-repeatable achievements: (a) discovery of a second hemisphere, and (b) development of ways to exploit the planet's energy savings deposits, the fossil fuels. The resulting opportunities for economic and demographic exuberance convinced people that it was natural for the future to be better than the past. For a while that belief was a workable premise for our lives and institutions. But when the New World became more populated than the Old World had been, and when resource depletion became significant, the future had to be seen through different lenses.

Assumptions that were once viable but have become obsolete must be replaced with a new perspective, one that enables us to see more effectively and to understand more accurately. This book seeks to articulate that needed perspective. It is no easy task, for the new way of seeing must differ sharply from traditional assumptions. Being unfamiliar, the new perspective will initially be distasteful and seem implausible. We shall continue to wish that some of the experiences it enables us to understand more clearly were not happening. But if we have the wisdom implied by the name we gave our own species, we must face the fact that continued misunderstanding of unwelcome experiences cannot prevent them from happening and cannot insulate us from their consequences.

People accustomed to expectations of magnificent progress have been appalled to find that they have lost their confidence in the future. The idea that mankind could encounter hardships that simply will not go away was unthinkable in the Age of Exuberance. This idea must be faced in the post-exuberant world. It seemed at last that it might really be faced when the thirty-ninth president of the United States decided (shortly after taking office) to emphasize energy conservation in response to manifest depletion of once-abundant fuels, rather than resorting to the traditional American urge to "produce our way out" of mounting difficulties. Important options had been lost irretrievably when humanity irrupted beyond the earth's permanent carrying capacity. New and different imperatives now must be faced. Their ecological basis must be seen.

Man is like every other species in being able to reproduce beyond the carrying capacity of any finite habitat. Man is like no other species in that he is capable of thinking about this fact and discovering its consequences. Thinking about other species, man has seen their dependence upon environmental chemistry and upon the energy of sunlight. Man has recognized the many-faceted interdependence of diverse organisms, their impact upon their habitat, their impermanence, and their inability to foresee and evade the processes leading to their own displacement by successors. Thinking about our own species, however, at least until April, 1977, too many of us imagined ourselves exempt, supernatural. Until a president not yet worn down by the compromises inherent in officeholding nudged Congress and the American people into serious discussions of conservation, men and women throughout the United States and many other lands relied on technological progress to cure the very afflictions it had been causing.

Nature is going to require reduction of human dominance over the world ecosystem. The changes this will entail are so revolutionary that we will be almost overwhelmingly tempted instead to prolong and augment our dominance at all costs. And, as we shall see, the costs will be prodigious. We are likely to do many things that will make a bad situation worse. It is hoped that the kind of enlightenment offered in this book may help curtail such tendencies.

The paramount need of post-exuberant humanity is to remain human in the face of dehumanizing pressures. To do this we must learn somehow to base exuberance of spirit upon something more lasting than the expansive living that sustained it in the recent past. But, as if we were driving a car that has become stuck on a muddy road, we feel an urge to bear down harder than ever on the accelerator and to spin our wheels vigorously in an effort to power ourselves out of the quagmire. This reflex will only dig us in deeper. We have arrived at a point in history where counter-intuitive thoughtways are essential.

Plan of the Book

To answer that need, the six parts of this book are intended as integrated contributions to an overdue "paradigm shift." The phrase is from Thomas Kuhn, who recognized that, even in the sciences, fundamental ideas about the way things work may guide our seeing (rather than simply resulting from what we have seen). A paradigm is an underlying basic idea of what kind of thing it is we are trying to understand. Such an idea of the nature of our subject matter prompts us to make certain kinds of inquiries; it also dissuades us from asking various other sorts of questions (or from seeing that we could, or that they would be relevant). So, when we need to ask questions made inconceivable by our old paradigm, we have come to need a new paradigm.

We get some of our fundamental ideas about what things are like and how they work from the kind of language we use in talking about them. As the philosopher Max Black has made clear, the vocabulary we are accustomed to using for describing what happens in the world around us will cause some aspects of reality to be emphasized and other aspects to be neglected. New words can yield new sensitivity, for vocabulary filters experience, shapes perception, and guides understanding.

This book uses an ecological vocabulary in describing and accounting for events that most people have been accustomed to thinking about in quite non-ecological terms. Accordingly, following the present chapter's outline of our topic, the three chapters in Part II should provide a truly eye-opening experience. Chapter 2 describes the process by which Homo sapiens painted himself into a corner. Our conventional, pre-ecological paradigm has prevented us from seeing that that is what we were doing. Chapter 3 shows how woefully misleading are some assumptions bred into us by the culture of exuberance. Chapter 4 outlines the alternative responses of various people to the obsolescence of traditionally exuberant expectations.

Then Part III (Chapter 5) highlights the contrast between the venerable American dream and its sequel. It examines some of the events of America's transformation from a vibrant young nation epitomizing the world's high hopes, into a country fumbling (with the rest of mankind) to come to terms with post-exuberant circumstances. It is especially intended to suggest that our persistent preoccupation with merely political facets of these events blinds us to (but does not protect us from) the enormity of the change.

The five chapters of Part IV spell out the consequences of our unwisdom in mistaking a temporary and unreliable increment of carrying capacity for a permanent expansion of opportunity and a durable form of progress. Chapter 6 sets forth basic principles of ecology, principles which have become as essential as literacy but which are habitually ignored by most leaders. Chapters 7 and 8 show how applicable ecological principles are to man. Chapter 9 corrects the misinterpretation of human uniqueness that has provided the excuse for ignoring these principles. Chapter 10 describes and explains the fateful course upon which we embarked when (understandably, but invalidly) we claimed independence from nature.

In Part V, Chapter 11 describes some common tactics of mental evasion by which people of the post-exuberant world have sought to say their extravagant dreams can yet be fulfilled. Chapter 12 shows how, as the world became post-exuberant, more and more of its people felt the kinds of pressure that dehumanize. Intensified intraspecific competition was undermining hope and decency. Typical responses to pressure aggravated the pressure.

But, as we see in Part VI, the future that was widely thought to be remote and even improbable was already arriving. Events that can be seen from the new ecological perspective to have been ominous previews of our impending de-civilization were not seen that way, as Chapter 13 shows, because of the old blinders we wore. Chapter 14 describes events that began at last to remove the blinders. The final chapter shows that mankind must gamble on an uncertain future, for phenomenally high stakes—and that, ironically, the less optimistic the assumptions we let ourselves make about the human prospect, the greater our chances of minimizing future hardships for our species. To keep from dehumanizing ourselves (and even gravitating toward genocide), we must stop demanding perpetual progress.

Of necessity, unfamiliar words are involved in the presentation of an unfamiliar worldview. A glossary at the end of the book is meant to minimize the inconvenience this terminology might otherwise cause.

Needed Realism

We live in a world where it is becoming increasingly evident that, for quite non-political reasons, governments and politicians cannot achieve the paradise they have habitually promised. Political habits persist, though, and people have seen their leaders continuing to dangle before them the kinds of carrots ordinary men and women know are becoming unattainable. The result has been erosion of faith in political processes. As that faith disintegrates, societies all over the world are floundering, or becoming dictatorial.

Even among Americans, who confront worldwide shrinkage of political liberty with a proud memory of two centuries' experimentation in democratic nation-building, faith in democracy has been seriously strained. That strain may be reduced when politicians are astute enough to discover, and realistic enough to point out to their constituents, the non-political reasons why certain traditional goals are no longer attainable.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Overshoot by William R. Catton Jr.. Copyright © 1980 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

I. The Unfathomed Predicament of Mankind,
1. Our Need for a New Perspective,
II. Eventually Had Already Come Yesterday,
2. The Tragic Story of Human Success,
3. Dependence on Phantom Carrying Capacity,
4. Watershed Year: Modes of Adaptation,
III. Siege And The Avoidance of Truth,
5. The End of Exuberance,
IV. Toward Ecological Understanding,
6. The Processes That Matter,
7. Succession and Restoration,
8. Ecological Causes of Unwelcome Change,
9. Nature and the Nature of Man,
10. Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse,
V. Resistance and Change,
11. Faith versus Fact,
12. Life under Pressure,
VI. Living with the New Reality,
13. Backing into the Future,
14. Turning Around,
15. Facing the Future Wisely,
Glossary,
Indexes,

Editorial Reviews

"The greatest contribution of Overshoot is the translation of ecological understanding into terms directly related to our own society's future. Catton has a very good way with words—ghost acreages, Homo Colossus, Age of Exuberance—which serve to make the challenge of the future clear to anyone reading his book."—Warren Johnson, author of Muddling Toward Frugality

From the Publisher