OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES
NO 2 – March 2008

Let’s Get Serious about (Un)Sustainability
(Or is it already too late?)

By
William E. Rees

This paper is based on the First Annual Natural Resources and
Environmental Studies Institute Annual Lecture presented by Dr.
William E. Rees, on 16 March, 2006. Dr. Rees is with the UBC
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British
Columbia, #433-6333 Memorial Road, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z2
Canada.
The correct citation for this paper is:
Rees, W.E. 2008. Let’s Get Serious about (Un)Sustainability
(Or is it already too late?). Natural Resources and Environmental Studies
Institute Occasional Paper No. 2, University of Northern British Columbia,
Prince George, B.C., Canada.
This paper can be downloaded without charge from
http://www.unbc.ca/nres/occasional.html

Rees y Sustainability

ii

The Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Institute (NRES
Institute) is a formal association of UNBC faculty and affiliates that
promotes integrative research to address natural resource systems
and human uses of the environment, including issues pertinent to
northern regions.
Founded on and governed by the strengths of its members, the NRES
Institute creates collaborative opportunities for researchers to work
on complex problems and disseminate results. The NRES Institute
serves to extend associations among researchers, resource
managers, representatives of governments and industry,
communities, and First Nations. These alliances are necessary to
integrate research into management, and to keep research relevant
and applicable to problems that require innovative solutions.
For more information about NRESI contact:
Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Institute
University of Northern British Columbia
3333 University Way
Prince George, BC Canada
V2N 4Z9
Phone: 250-960-5288
Email: nresi@unbc.ca
URL: www.unbc.ca/nres

iii

CONTENTS
Abstract ....................................................................................................... 2
Introduction: On Alternative ‘Realities’ ..................................................... 3
The Human Nature of (Un)Sustainability................................................... 6
The universal biological drivers ............................................................. 7
Socio-cultural reinforcement .................................................................. 8
Mything Out on Sustainability.................................................................... 9
Reality Check: Ecological Footprint Analysis.......................................... 11
On Social Justice and the Income Gap ..................................................... 13
The material goals of sustainability with equity................................... 14
Toward Resolution: Are Humans Capable of Sustainability?.................. 15
The eco-cognitive bottom line .............................................................. 16
References................................................................................................. 18

1

Occasional Paper No. 2

Abstract
On 16 January 2006 James
Lovelock, author of the Gaia
hypothesis, wrote that “before this
century is over billions of us will die
and the few breeding pairs of people
that survive will be in the Arctic
where the climate remains tolerable.”
In Lovelock’s view, humanity’s
technological hubris has done us in,
our attempts to manage the planet are
failing and, in the face of
accelerating global change,
“sustaining” technoindustrial
civilization is no longer a possibility.
Other scientists, while not
necessarily accepting the harsh
finality of Lovelock’s gloomy
prediction, share his basic diagnosis
on the health of the planet. The
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
(2005) issued a “stark warning” to
world leaders — indeed, to all of us:
“Human activity is putting such a
strain on the natural functions of the
Earth that the ability of the planet’s
ecosystems to sustain future
generations can no longer be taken
for granted.” In this paper I

Rees y Sustainability

examine the biological, cultural and
biophysical factors that have driven
modern society to the point where
such “stark warnings” have become
necessary. I then show why concepts
and policies currently advanced
under the rubric of “sustainable
development” are so generally
ineffective. Finally, consistent with
biophysical and human behavioural
reality, I outline a minimal set of
ecological and socio-political
conditions that would have to be met
for true sustainability. Getting
serious about sustainable
development will require an
unprecedented display of both deep
compassion and hard cold reason as
the international community
considers the dire implications of our
prevailing growth-based global
development paradigm. Abandoning
core cultural values, beliefs and
assumptions that have become
maladaptive may be wrenchingly
difficult but it is also necessary if
humankind is ever to become, in
Lovelock’s words, "…the heart and
mind of the Earth, not its malady."

2

Introduction: On
Alternative ‘Realities’
This paper is about
environmental trends and the human
prospect. My intent is to explore
human biophysical reality, to assess
whether we are actually experiencing
an ecological crisis and—if we are—
to suggest what we should be doing
about it. This seems like a fairly
straightforward objective, but even
that perception is actually part of the
problem. The way we think about
‘the environment’ is conflicted and
much so-called ‘environmental
policy’ is therefore useless or even
counterproductive. Should I have
warned you that “Getting Serious
about Sustainability” requires an
unconventional approach?
We can begin to understand why
this is so if we reflect for a moment
on the nature of ‘reality.’ To begin
with, humans have no direct
experience of ‘reality’—even our
most immediate sensory perceptions
are reconstructions based on various
secondary phenomena. For example,
you don’t actually see ‘me’ up here,
you perceive a synaptic
reconstruction of a complex, multicoloured inverted image formed on
the retinas of your eyes. These
images obviously aren’t ‘me’ and are
formed from only a tiny fraction of
the light that is reflected off me. The
light itself is filtered and bent by the
cornea, lens and aqueous and
vitreous humours of your eyes and
the images have been communicated
via chemical transformations and
electrical impulses to the visual
cortex of your brain. Once there, yet
another mysterious transformational
process reconstitutes all this much

3

filtered and distorted information
into a mere perception, yet this is the
entity that you take to be a physical
object and component of your
reality.
Now if our seemingly most direct
experience of physical things is
really so much at distance from
‘reality’, consider how much more
tenuous and potentially contentious
are our intellectual reconstructions of
abstract concepts, tumultuous events,
and truly complex systems. Different
people don’t even ‘see’ these things
through the same conceptual lenses.
Each of us brings his/her own
personal and educational experiences
and any number of political,
disciplinary, religious and social
biases to bear on our interpretations
of what we see. All of these
culturally acquired predispositions
reflect, filter and distort any new
‘incoming’ data even as we attempt
to make sense of it. Thus, not all new
data are treated equally by equally
intelligent individuals. And it is
entirely possible for different
observers, by selecting and
connecting different bits of
information from exactly the same
sources, to construct rather different
perceptions of the same phenomena
(i.e., ‘the world’) and take these for
‘reality.’
Sometimes, of course, we come
together to discuss, massage and
meld our differing interpretations to
reach a mutually satisfactory
explanation. (Consider formal
inquiries, legal tribunals or courts of
law, for example.) In effect, we
come to a shared version of ‘truth’
by negotiated agreement. This
process is what sociologists call ‘the
social construction of reality’, but
Occasional Paper No. 2

because much of the negotiated
vision may be little more than shared
illusion, it really ought to be called
‘the social construction of
perception’.
The main point is that different
people ‘connect the dots’ in
conflicting ways and even if we
eventually agree on the picture
revealed, we should not assume that
the resulting image is ‘valid’ (in the
sense that it is an accurate depiction
of biophysical reality, for example).
The simple fact is that some pictures
are better than others and some of
the ‘others’ may actually be severe
distortions of reality. This is hardly
an original observation but
sometimes, before we go to the wall
over some constructed belief, we
need to be reminded of it. Linguist
and media theorist Neil Postman
(1999) put the matter this way:
“You may say, if you wish, that all
reality is a social construction, but
you cannot deny that some
constructions are ‘truer’ than others.
They are not ‘truer’ because they are
privileged, they [become] privileged
because they are ‘truer.’”

Philosopher Karl Popper (1953) had
a similar view:
“What the scientist’s and the
lunatic’s theories have in common is
that both belong to conjectural
knowledge. But some conjectures are
much better than others…”

All of which brings us to conflicting
visions of the ecological plight of
humanity.
To some people — let’s call
them the cornucopians — there is no
plight. Their expansionary
‘conjecture’ sees the glass not as
merely half-full but rather as
endlessly overflowing. Economist
Lawrence Summers, then Chief
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Economist of the World Bank,
exemplified this belief (and
displayed a deep disciplinary bias) in
1991 when he utterly dismissed the
notion that there are any practical
constraints on economic growth:
“There are no... limits to the carrying
capacity of the earth that are likely to
bind any time in the foreseeable
future. There isn’t a risk of an
apocalypse due to global warming or
anything else. The idea that we
should put limits on growth because
of some natural limit, is a profound
error and one that, were it ever to
prove influential, would have
staggering social costs” (Summers
1991).

By “staggering social costs,”
Summers meant that to limit growth
would condemn billions of people to
perpetual poverty. In his view,
growing the global economy was the
only way to bring at least material
sufficiency to all, on grounds that “a
rising tide raises all boats.”
The key to belief in perpetual
growth is utter faith in what is
sometimes called ‘the principle of
near-perfect substitution.’ By this
logic nature is replaceable. ‘The
environment’ is mere backdrop on
the stage of human affairs. Human
ingenuity, expressed through modern
technology, is more than sufficient to
overcome any resource shortages or
other environmental problem likely
to come our way. Many economists
and technological optimists think this
way, but the prize for the most
ebullient expression of the faith must
surely go to the late professor Julian
Simon who (often) argued that:
“Technology exists now to produce
in virtually inexhaustible quantities
just about all the products made by
nature…”, and: “We have in our
hands now… the technology to feed,
clothe, and supply energy to an ever-

4

growing population for the next
seven billion years…” (Simon 1995).

This is not a modest assertion,
but buoyant hubris is generally wellreceived by all those who support the
status quo and see nothing but good
in growth-bound ‘progress.’ 1
There are, of course, alternative
‘social constructions’ of the state of
the world. At the polar extreme from
the cornucopian view is the rather
more humble ecological perspective.
Its proponents are increasingly
nervous about observable trends—
some believe that humanity has
actually past a critical tipping point
beyond which returning to ecological
stability and security is no longer
even possible. According to
Professor James Lovelock, for
example, efforts to counter global
warming cannot succeed and
civilisation as we know it is now
unlikely to survive:
“We are in a fool’s climate,
accidentally kept cool by smoke, and
1

5

Challenged on his statement,
Simon replied that there had been
a typo. He had meant to say only
seven million years. This error
represents a thousand-fold
backing down! Even so, seven
million years is a long time. With
a 1995 starting population of 5.7
billion people and just 1%
growth per annum, the human
population after ‘only’ seven
million years would be
2.3×1030410. This is an
unimaginably large number,
about 30,000 orders of magnitude
larger than the estimated number
of atoms in the known universe
(Bartlett 1996). Simon’s ebullient
optimism rests on a laughable
mathematical fiction that should
never have been published but is
nonetheless taken seriously by
true believers in the impossibility
theorem of unlimited growth.

before this century is over billions of
us will die and the few breeding pairs
of people that survive will be in the
Arctic where the climate remains
tolerable” (Lovelock 2006).

Lovelock’s fatally depressing
assertion seems so irreconcilable
with Simon’s over-the-top optimism
that it is difficult to understand how
the two well-known professors could
actually share the same planet. We
should excuse ordinary people if
they seem confused about the actual
state of human affairs.
Unfortunately, ordinary people
will not be reassured to learn that the
scientific community at large leans
rather more toward Lovelock’s
conjecture than to Simon’s and have
been doing so for some time. Here is
what the Union of Concerned
Scientists had to say about human
ecological reality in 1992, the year of
the famous “United Nations
Conference on Environment and
Development” in Rio de Janeiro that
popularized the concept of
‘sustainable development:’
“We the undersigned, senior
members of the world’s scientific
community, hereby warn all
humanity of what lies ahead. A great
change in our stewardship of the
earth and the life on it is required if
vast human misery is to be avoided
and our global home on this planet is
not to be irretrievably mutilated”
(UCS 1992).

It seems that no one heard the
scientists’ warning. Certainly nobody
important to the overall scheme of
things paid it much heed. Global
ecological trends continued to
deteriorate so that, more than a
decade later, the Board of the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
(MEA) — the most comprehensive
sustainability assessment ever
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undertaken — was moved to
summarize that project’s findings
this way:
“At the heart of this assessment is a
stark warning. Human activity is
putting such a strain on the natural
functions of the Earth that the ability
of the planet’s ecosystems so sustain
future generations can no longer be
taken for granted” (MEA 2005).

The MEA’s gloomy prognosis
was scarcely reported in the popular
press and has since dropped entirely
from view. Not so applause for the
surging global economy. Clearly the
global community — or, more fairly,
those in charge — are rather more
taken by Summer’s and Simon’s
blinkers-on optimism than by
Lovelock’s apocalypse or other
scientists’ cautionary realism.

The Human Nature of
(Un)Sustainability
How can we explain this
anomaly? We claim to be a sciencebased culture yet world leaders and
society at large pay little attention to
the critical analyses and collective
assessments of the world’s top
scientists. On the contrary,
politicians everywhere prefer to
stoke the fires of our economic
engines. And for good reason: it’s
the only way to get elected by the
people.
This section develops one
possible explanation. I begin with the
observation (illustrated above) that
H. sapiens is, by nature, a conflicted
species. On one hand we extol our
self-awareness and uniquely welldeveloped capacity for rational
thought and forward planning. These
are all products of the neo-cortex, the
evolutionarily modern part of the
brain that occupies two-thirds of the
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human brain by volume. On the
other hand, much of our individual
and social behaviour is actually
shaped or determined —
unconsciously — by cognitive
mechanisms, emotions, and instincts
dedicated to preserving our
identities, elevating our social status
and ensuring our physical survival.
These latter motivators spring from
the evolutionarily older — and
therefore more ‘experienced’ and
assertive — mid-brain (limbic
system) and reptilian brainstem.
From within this framework, my
analysis starts from two related
premises: First, H. sapiens, has
evolved over time in much the same
way as any other species — we are
the product of natural selection. 2
There is, however, a twist in the
human story. H. sapiens’ evolution
has long been as much or more
determined by socio-cultural factors
(memes) as by biological factors
(genes). Memes are bits of culturally
acquired information and genes are
bits of genetically acquired
information; both help to make us
who and what we are, and both are
passed on from one generation to the
next. The important point here is that
both memes and genes are subject to
natural selection. This means that
flawed memes and genes can both be
‘selected out’ by a changing
environment. History suggests that
nature is as adept at eliminating
cultures governed by maladaptive
memes (beliefs, values, assumptions
2

Indeed, we are still evolving—H.
Sapiens is a work in progress and
the real sustainability question is
whether we will survive flaws in
the present model long enough to
take the next adaptive steps
forward.

6

and technologies) as it is in
eliminating individuals burdened by
maladaptive genes (e.g., see
Diamond 2005).
My second premise is closely
related to the first: H. sapiens is
inherently biased against
sustainability. In particular, I argue
that ‘unsustainability’ is an
inevitable emergent property of the
systemic interaction between
contemporary growth-oriented
techno-industrial society and the
ecosphere. Certain natural,
genetically-determined qualities of
the human species, combine with
certain characteristics of industrial
society, to make the behaviour of the
modern human enterprise
fundamentally incompatible with the
behaviour of the ecosphere that
supports it. In a nutshell, human
genetic coding predisposes people to
potentially unsustainable behaviours
and these behavioural predispositions are currently being
reinforced by maladaptive cultural
factors, particularly various meme
complexes associated with
cornucopian expansionism.
The universal biological
drivers
Humans share certain basic
survival-oriented qualities with all
other species. Two are central to the
(un)sustainability conundrum. Until
constrained by negative feedback, all
species populations:
1) expand to fill all accessible
habitats (all species are
capable of geometric growth
in unconstrained
‘environments’); and
2) use all available resources (in
the case of humans,

7

“availability” is variable and
depends on the current state of
technology).
These qualities have been verified in
dozens of experiments involving
non-human species ranging from
bacteria placed in nutrient media (or
yeast in vats of grape juice) to
reindeer introduced to resource-rich,
but previously unoccupied, islands.
In every case, the introduced
population expands exponentially for
a time until it occupies all available
space, exhausts its food or other
resources, or poisons itself with its
own waste (‘pollution’). At this
point, ‘negative feedback’
overwhelms the ‘positive feedback’
driving the exponential growth phase
and the population crashes,
sometimes never to recover.
The only current ‘experiment’
involving humans is the one we are
doing with the Earth. Here the
evidence so far seems unequivocal
— our species is distressingly similar
to bacteria in its responses to
available habitats and resources but
runs an additional risk because trade
and technology (cultural memes)
delay the on-set of negative
feedback. The result has been
spectacular. Fowler and Hobbs
(2003) recently compared the
biophysical characteristics of
humans with those of dozens of
ecologically similar species. Their
data show that contemporary H.
sapiens falls far above the normal
range of natural variation displayed
by a large selection of non-human
organisms. Humanity’s geographical
range, population size, energy use,
carbon dioxide emissions, and
biomass consumption exceed those
of similar species by orders of
Occasional Paper No. 2

magnitude. Human consumption of
biomass, for example, was two
orders of magnitude greater than the
upper 95% confidence limits for
biomass ingestion by 96 non-human
mammals.
Such studies show that H.
sapiens is, directly or indirectly, the
dominant macro-consumer in all
major terrestrial and accessible
marine ecosystems on the planet.
Indeed, we may well be the most
voraciously successful predatory and
herbivorous vertebrate ever to walk
the earth (Rees 2004, 2006). We are
not simply like other species in our
use of the earth; our supposed
intelligence and advanced
technology makes us much better at
exploiting resources than the nonhuman competition. The problem for
long-term sustainability is that while
“there is considerable variation in
detail, there is remarkable
consistency in the history of resource
exploitation: resources are inevitably
overexploited, often to the point of
collapse or extinction.” (Ludwig, et
al. 1993). As I suggested, humans
tend to use up all available resources.
Socio-cultural
reinforcement
“The masses have never thirsted after
truth. They turn aside from evidence
that is not to their taste, preferring to
deify error, if error seduce them.
Whoever can supply them with
illusions is easily their master;
whoever attempts to destroy their
illusions is always their victim”
(Gustave le Bon 1896).

From the perspective of
sustainability, modern humans may
well be creating the worst of all
possible worlds. The behavioural
tendencies that lead people to deplete
their resources are being powerfully
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reinforced, not only by growing
technological prowess, but also by
the conceptual meme complexes that
comprise our dominant social
paradigms. The problem is that,
because both genetic predispositions
and memetic templates (and their
interactions) operate beneath
consciousness, people are not fully
aware of what motivates their
behaviour at either the individual or
the social levels.
Consider, for example, the role
myth-making. That myth has any
role at all is difficult for some to
accept because the western world, at
least, thinks of itself as a postenlightenment world. People are
supposedly no longer the slaves and
dupes of myth. Humanity has long
moved beyond the groundless fears,
superstitions and unscientific beliefs
that distorted reality and shaped the
lives of earlier cultures. We denizens
of industrial societies like to believe
that, by and large, our actions are
governed by intelligence, reason and
the human capacity for critical
thinking. This is a reassuring story,
but one that is hard to reconcile with
much of contemporary history. It is
time to acknowledge an increasingly
evident paradox. This is nominally
the age of science, but this has not
prevented even industrial society
from being as myth-bound as any
that has preceded it.
The paradox is understandable if
one appreciates the adaptive
advantage that might accrue to mythmaking. Shared stories about life and
death and the mysterious forces of
nature, have always contributed to
the social glue that keeps people
together and enables them to identify
with other members of the ‘tribe.’

8

Moreover, myths and paradigms
comprise important cultural memes
that help to determine how we relate
to each other and to the rest of
nature. Colin Grant recognized this
with his enlightened perception of
myths, not as superstitious lore or
primitive misperceptions, but rather
as shared comprehensive visions
“that give shape and direction to life”
(Grant 1998). From this perspective,
we can appreciate that myth-making
in diverse forms — think ‘political
ideology,’ ‘disciplinary paradigm,’
‘religious doctrine’ — is a universal
feature of human societies, one that
plays a vital role in every culture
including our own. 3 Ironically, the
belief that ours is a myth-free society
is one of our most revealing cultural
myths!

Mything Out on
Sustainability
Our most ecologically significant
myth is ‘the perpetual growth ethic’
introduced at the outset. Virtually all
international agencies and national
governments share a comprehensive
vision of global development
centered on unlimited economic
expansion, fuelled by more
liberalized trade (Rees 2002). This
contemporary compound myth has
been the principal force giving
‘shape and direction’ to political and
civil life in both high-income and socalled developing countries on every
continent for at least half a century.
The expansionist myth is a social
construction on many levels. Even
‘consumerism’ and the so-called
3

9

This ubiquity itself suggests that
the propensity for myth-making
evolved to reinforce behaviours
that enhance survival.

‘consumer society’ are the product of
a story-telling machine deliberately
created to give shape and direction to
industrial economies in the second
half of the 20th Century.
In the years following World
War II, North America found itself
with a great stock of underutilized
capital (i.e., war-time factories) and
large numbers of underemployed
workers (i.e., returned soldiers).
Meanwhile, the general population,
whose economic habits been shaped
by material deprivation during the
depression and subsequent war-time
rationing, was quite used to living
modestly. To take advantage of all
that idle capital, North American
industry, therefore, first had to break
people of their under-consuming
ways and then turn North America
into a throw-away society. The
ultimate goal was to make of
consumption the purpose of
existence and a way of life. As retail
analyst Victor Lebow described the
mission:
“Our enormously productive
economy demands that we make
consumption our way of life, that we
convert the buying and use of goods
into rituals, that we seek our spiritual
satisfaction and our ego satisfaction
in consumption. We need things
consumed, burned up, worn out,
replaced and discarded at an everincreasing rate” (Lebow, 1955).

Today a multi-billion dollar
global advertising industry remains
dedicated to maintaining the
consumer binge, mainly by making
people unhappy with whatever they
have, no matter that it is practically
new and perfectly functional.
According to contemporary
mythology, social status is associated
with style of dress, the make and age
of one’s automobile, location and
Occasional Paper No. 2

size of residence, and diversity of
electronic gadgets and other markers
of conspicuous consumption. (note
that this strategy appeals both to
people’s natural acquisitiveness and
to their instinctive drive for social
status, genetic propensities that
reside in the brain’s limbic system
and reptilian stem). In effect,
globalization and sociallyconstructed consumer values have
succeeded in banishing moderation
and sanctifying greed, thereby
liberating H. economicus from any
moral or ethical constraints on
consumption. The undisputed
success of this most remarkable
example of mass social engineering
ensures that the consumer
bandwagon keeps rolling — the
world economy booms along,
growing at several percent per year.
Of course, even mythic
constructs can have material
consequences and the effects of the
perpetual growth myth are quite
remarkable. During the 20th Century
(mostly the second half of the 20th
Century):
•

the human population
quadrupled to 6.3 billion (it
will reach 6.6 billion in 2007)
and to sustain all these people
with their rising material
expectations;

•

energy use increased 16-fold;

•

industrial production grew by
a factor of 40;

•

fish catches (but not fish
stocks) expanded by a factor
of 35; and

•

water use increased nine-fold,
etc.

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Of course, all economic
production/consumption implies
waste generation, so:
•

CO2 emissions increased 17fold;

•

sulphur emissions are 13
times higher;

•

other air pollutants are
typically up by a factor of five;

•

hypoxic marine ‘dead zones’
are expanding;

•

industrial processes now fix
more atmospheric nitrogen
and inject it into terrestrial
ecosystems than do all natural
terrestrial processes combined;
and

•

our water, food and soils are
burdened by thousands of
industrial contaminants
(including excess nitrogen),
etc.

Meanwhile, half of the land area
of Earth has been directly
transformed by human action, more
than half of the planet’s accessible
fresh water is already being used by
people and climate change threatens
us all, a roiling cloud over
humanity’s future (data from
McNeill 2000, Myers and Worm
2003, Lubchenco 1998,Vitousek et
al., 1997). Are there, after all, real —
biophysical — limits to growth?
Ironically, it is our continuing
allegiance to the myth of infinite
expansion that is forcing humanity to
reconsider the concept of carrying
capacity.

10

Reality Check:
Ecological Footprint
Analysis
“…I say that the power of population
is indefinitely greater that the power
in the earth to produce subsistence
for man.” (Thomas Malthus 1798)

‘Ecological footprint analysis’
(EFA) was actually designed
specifically to rekindle the debate on
human carrying capacity (Rees 1996,
Wackernagel and Rees 1996). EFA
gains much of its analytic strength by
inverting the standard carrying
capacity ratio. If carrying capacity
asks ‘how large a population can a
particular area support’ (a question
that can be rendered seemingly
irrelevant by trade) EFA asks ‘how
large an area is required to support a
particular population’ (a question
that includes those areas that are
effectively ‘imported’ through trade).
Answering the latter question
enables any population to compare
its total biophysical demand on Earth
to the biocapacity of its domestic
land-base, thus revealing the extent
to which that population is living
beyond its local ecological means.
We can do the same at the global
level.
Eco-footprinting is based on
resource consumption and waste
production. Thus, the idealized
‘ecological footprint’ (EF) of a
specified population is the area of
land and water ecosystems required
to produce the resources that the
population consumes, and to
assimilate the wastes that the
population produces, wherever on
Earth the relevant land/water may be
located. We convert the Ecofootprint estimates to ‘global average
hectares’ (gha) to facilitate

11

comparison among different
populations and countries with
differing lifestyles and resource
productivities. 4
EFA reveals how closely
material consumption and waste
output is correlated with income. The
average per capita ecological
footprints of residents of highincome countries range between four
and ten hectares (10 to 25 acres),
while the residents of the poorest
countries survive on less than half a
hectare (Figure 1, data from WWF
2006). Not surprisingly, many highincome regions and even entire
countries (e.g., the US, European
countries, Japan) ecologically
‘occupy’ a land-base scattered all
over the planet that is larger than
their domestic territories (Figure 2).
We say that such countries are
running an ‘ecological deficit’ with
other countries and the global
commons. Only a few countries such
as Canada (i.e., large land base,
small population) seem to enjoy
surplus biocapacity, but such
surpluses are already more than
taken up by ecological deficits of
other countries. 5

4

This allows us to represent all
EFs in a common currency based
on average global productivity.
For example, if an individual’s
estimated actual eco-footprint is
1.5 hectare, but the
corresponding land-base is twice
as productive as world average
land, his/her EF estimate would
be converted to 3 gha, the area of
global average land needed to
support that person.
5
For example, Canada is running down
its forest, soil fisheries and energy
resources mainly in the satisfaction of
export markets around the world.

Occasional Paper No. 2

Figure 1. Per capita ecological footprints of selected countires (2003 data
from WWF 2006).

Figure 2. Biocapacities and ecological footprints of selected countries
compared to the global averages (2003 data from WWF 2006).

Rees y Sustainability

12

Indeed, the aggregate human
enterprise is in deficit with the
ecosphere. The average member of
the human family requires about 2.2
gha to support him/herself, yet there
are only about 1.8 gha of adequately
productive land and water
ecosystems per capita on Earth. (This
represents each person’s ‘fair Earthshare). EFA thus suggests that
human demand for biophysical
goods and services is already
running about 25% ahead of longterm global biocapacity (and, of
anything, this is an underestimate
because EF methodology is quite
conservative).
EFA clearly challenges the
expansionist vision of sustainability.
We are already in a state of global
overshoot and, to bring just the
present world population up to North
American material standards
sustainably, would require four
additional Earth-like planets!
Reverend Malthus may have been
put to rest in contemporary myth, but
his spirit lives on in the real world —
humans invariably press against the
limits of carrying capacity. And yes,
Virginia, there really is an ecological
crisis.

On Social Justice
and the Income Gap
We are finally beginning to
question seriously whether mythpropelled indiscriminate economic
(material) growth is really the best
route to sustainability; this, in turn,
forces us to contemplate the
alternatives. The most obvious
alternative requires that we
purposefully restructure the world
economy to reduce consumption in
high-income countries and redirect

13

economic growth to countries where
it is actually needed.
Certainly available socioeconomic data support the idea of
income redistribution. The world has
never been richer, yet more than a
billion people still subsist on less
than one dollar a day and another 1.5
billion live on only one to two
dollars per day. United Nations data
show that:
•

the richest 20% of the world’s
population take home 75% of
the world’s income (the most
impoverished 20% of people
survive on 1.5%);

•

the richest 10% of the world’s
population enjoy 54% of the
world’s income; and

•

the richest 50 people in the
world enjoy a combined
income greater than that of the
poorest 416 million.

And despite decades of steady
growth in gross world product, the
income gap between rich and poor is
widening, both between nations and
within even rich countries:
•

the average American, who
was 38 times richer than the
average Tanzanian in 1990, is
61 times richer today!; and

•

in 1960, in the United States,
the income ratio between the
top 20% and the bottom 20%
was 30:1 — today it is 75:1
and the poorest of the poor are
relatively and absolutely
worse off than they were two
decades ago (UNDP 2005).

In short, the world is ecologically
full, but remains grossly inequitable
and, while the cornucopian “rising
Occasional Paper No. 2

tide” is still raising the largest
yachts, it is dashing the smallest
rowboats on the reefs of despair.
The material goals of
sustainability with equity
More than a decade ago even the
World Business Council on
Sustainable Development recognized
that, to achieve a necessary 50%
absolute reduction in global energy
and material consumption,
“Industrialised world reductions in
material throughput, energy use, and
environmental degradation of over
90% will be required by 2040 to
meet the needs of a growing world
population fairly within the planet’s
ecological means” (BCSD 1993).

This means that
“…the richer countries need to
dematerialize their technical basis of
wealth—or increase the resource
productivity—by at least a factor of
10 on the average” to create the
ecological space for needed growth
in the Third World (Schmidt-Bleek
2000).

(Our [more conservative] ecofootprint analysis similarly suggests
that North Americans should be
working to reduce their per capita
ecological footprints by 80% from
about nine gha/capita to about 1.8
gha/capita.)
Reductions in energy and
material use on this scale sound
impossible, particularly to a culture
accustomed to continuous growth
and ever-rising material
expectations. No politician has yet
dared to run a campaign based on
promises to shrink or even stabilize
the economy. Nevertheless, many
scientists and economists believe that
such much-reduced resource use is at
least technologically possible
Rees y Sustainability

without significant loss of material
comfort (see, for example
Weizsäcker et al. 1997). Perhaps
more surprising is the increasing
evidence that, even if we are
ultimately required to adopt
materially simpler life-styles, the
accompanying adjustments could
actually produce greater social wellbeing. This is because, beyond a
certain point, there is no further
positive correlation between income
growth and either objective
indicators of population health or
subjective assessments of well-being.
Consider that between 1957 and
1993, US real per capita income
more than doubled to $16,000.
During this period Americans
acquired “twice as many cars per
person — plus microwave ovens,
color TVs, air conditioners,
answering machines and $12 billion
worth of new brand-name athletic
shoes a year” (Myers and Deiner
1995). But all the new ‘stuff’ didn’t
make them any happier. In 1957,
35% of respondents told the National
Opinion Research Center that they
were “very happy.” With doubled
affluence, 32% said the same in
1993. Certainly to judge by “soaring
rates of depression, a quintupled rate
of reported violent crime since 1960,
a doubled divorce rate, a slight
decline in marital happiness among
the marital survivors, and a tripled
teen suicide rate, Americans are
richer, and no happier” (Myers and
Diener 1995). Is seems that people
are working harder in pursuit of the
good life only to be confounded by
“…the strange, seemingly
contradictory pattern in the United
States of rising real income and a
falling index of subjective well-

14

being” (people reporting themselves
as ‘very happy’) (Lane 2000).

Studies in other rich countries report
similar results. In short, people in
rich countries may well have more to
gain than lose by giving up on
growth.

Toward Resolution:
Are Humans Capable
of Sustainability?
“There are indeed potions in our own
bodies and brains, capable of forcing
on us behaviours that we may or may
not be able to suppress by strong
resolution” (Damasio 1994).
“The rise and fall of cultures… has
always been primarily determined by
the tides of human passion, not by
the ebb and flow of reason”
(Morrison 1999).

We can summarize the
sustainability conundrum this way:
against both logic and evidence,
humanity still mainly acts as if
perpetual material growth will solve
all social and ecological problems on
a finite planet. Universal
subscription to this myth is spreading
our socially constructed consumer
culture around the world. The
(predictable) result is the degradation
of the very ecosystems and lifesupport services upon which the
human survival depends. Meanwhile,
we have structured the global
economy so that most income
growth goes to the already wealthy
who don’t need it while those who
would actually benefit from higher
consumption are left behind. Despite
the cascade of data from our best
physical and social science that
humanity is on a collision course
with reality, myth-bound decisionmakers everywhere resist making the
changes necessary to avoid

15

catastrophe. It seems fair to ask:
where is the evidence of intelligent
life on Earth?
A truly intelligent species would
examine the data and adjust its
developmental paradigm to conform
to evident reality. In so doing, it
might ask: “what is the optimal
physical scale for economic activity
on this finite orb (i.e., what is the
highest level of energy and material
throughput that the ecosphere can
safely sustain indefinitely)” and
“how can we distribute the benefits
of the corresponding level of
economic activity in such a way that
it maximizes human well-being and
happiness?” It might even dare to
ponder: “given the limits to material
throughput and to well-being via
material goods, what are the socially
optimal population levels for
communities and the world as a
whole?”
But intelligence is not the
primary determinant of human socioeconomic and political behaviour.
When individual social status,
personal prestige, political survival
or sacred mythology are at stake,
emotions and instinct may well
trump intelligent analysis:
“…only a small fraction of the
population is consistently capable of
applying the most basic rules of
evidence to emotionally-derived or
emotionally-loaded information”
6
(Morrison 1999).

It follows that irrational defence
of the status quo is not uncommon.
Indeed,

6

In other words, the time-tested urgings
of the mid-brain and brain-stem trump
the reasoned analyses of the neocortex.

Occasional Paper No. 2

“For us to maintain our way of
living, we must… tell lies to each
other and especially to ourselves…
[the lies] are necessary because
without them many deplorable acts
would become impossibilities”
(Jensen 2000).

One problem is that, for perfectly
good evolutionary reasons, humans
naturally discount the future — we
prefer short-term gain even at the
risk of long-term pain. US historian
Barbara Tuchman documents how
governments throughout history have
taken policy decisions against their
own long-term interests, or the
interests of their constituents, even
though viable alternatives are known
and available. Sheer “woodenheadedness, the source of self
deception ...plays a remarkably large
role in government. It consists in
assessing a situation in terms of
preconceived fixed notions [e.g.,
myth, ideology] while ignoring any
contrary signs. It is acting according
to wish while not allowing oneself to
be deflected by the facts” (Tuchman
1984). The result of such intransigent
faith in the status quo can be tragic,
including the collapse of entire
societies (Diamond 2005). The latter
is actually a frequent occurrence:
“...what is perhaps most intriguing in
the evolution of human societies is
the regularity with which the pattern
of increasing complexity is
interrupted by collapse…” (Tainter
1995).

Knowing the fates of failed
previous cultures and the reasons for
their failures does, of course, give
modern humans a unique opportunity
deliberately to reinvent global
society. For sustainability, the world
community must commit to the
purposeful creation of a new, more
adaptive development myth that will
Rees y Sustainability

better serve us all. This is an
unprecedented challenge that
requires a dialectic between selfconscious collective reason and the
opposing urgings of more
unconscious individualistic
predisposition. The goal is nothing
less than the imposition of universal
constraints on genetic and cultural
drivers that are still perceived to
serve individual nations well even as
they drive contemporary global
society toward the abyss.
The eco-cognitive
bottom line
Let’s be clear. I am arguing
here that if we are serious
about sustainability, if we
really want civilization to
survive, human intelligence
must learn consciously to
override maladaptive sociobehavioural tendencies on
both the individual and
societal levels. The shortterm logic and survival
instincts that served humanity
well in ancient stable
environments are no longer
suited to the rapidly changing
global environment humans
themselves have created. In
particular, the deeply
ingrained propensity of
nations to favour their own
short-term narrow selfinterest must concede to the
longer-term collective
interests of humanity as a
whole. The evolutionary
imperative would still be
satisfied: survival now
depends on our capacity to
equate our individual selfinterest with humanity’s

16

mutual interest in protecting
the integrity of the ecosphere.
As a starting point, we should
begin a generalized shift in the
values underpinning technoindustrial society away from their
present emphasis on individualism,
narrow self-interest, short-term
vision, growth-bound
competitiveness and nature-asresource-trove, toward insistence on
community and societal values,
cooperative institutions, global
concerns, long-term planning,
steady-state economies and a sense
of participatory consciousness in
nature. Within this new ‘mythic
frame,’ the world’s people would
have to work together to develop a
new class of international treaties
and legal instruments to reduce the
overall human ecological footprint,
share the global commons more
equitably and restrain the

17

behavioural universals that
invariably lead to dominanceseeking through violent aggression.
Finally, let us acknowledge that it is
not too late to act — but act we must.
Avoidance of, or failure in, the task
at hand is literally not a viable
option. As I have written elsewhere,
“Homo sapiens will either rise above
mere animal instinct and become
fully human, or wink out
ignominiously, a guttering candle in
a violent storm of our own making”
(Rees 2002).

Ecological destruction, civil strife,
and resource wars will conspire
against us. And techno-industrial
society, with its complex array of
destructive memes, will be ‘selected
out,’ tossed unceremoniously into
the waste-bin of history (a waste-bin
already brimming with failed cultural
experiments).

Occasional Paper No. 2

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