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Human nature, eco-footprints
and environmental injustice
William E. Rees
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
A
BSTRACT Extreme poverty has been reduced, but 40% of the world’s population still live on
less than two dollars per day and 850 million people remain underfed. Meanwhile, the rich
enjoy unprecedented levels of consumption, and obesity is a significant public health
problem. The standard solution to poverty is economic growth but evidence that humanity
has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth undermines this approach. This paper explores
the distal causes of the crisis. This paper argues that biophysical unsustainability is an
inevitable “emergent property” of the interaction of techno-industrial society and the
ecosphere with deep roots in fundamental human nature and that the problem is being
reinforced by prevailing conceptual frames and cultural norms. With increasing land and
resource scarcity in the twenty-first century, the expanding eco-footprints of the wealthy
will increasingly displace the poor. To avoid eco-violence and the descent into chaos, the
world community must acknowledge the true human nature of our collective dilemma and
act to override innate behavioural predispositions that have become maladaptive in the
modern era. Since the problematic drivers act beneath conscious awareness, the overall
purpose of this paper is to help bring them to consciousness on grounds that they must be
understood if they are to be controlled.
Keywords: human nature; cognitive behaviour; sustainability; eco-footprints; equity;
environmental injustice
Introduction and purpose: towards equality and sustainable consumption
The world has never been richer. Extreme poverty is in retreat and average
incomes are slowly increasing in the developing world. Nevertheless, more than
a billion people still struggle in life-threatening poverty on less than one dollar a
Local Environment
Vol. 13, No. 8, 685–701, December 2008
Email: wrees@interchange.ubc.ca
Paper presented at the Seminar on Inequality and Sustainable Consumption, University of East
Anglia, 4–6 July 2006.
1354-9839 Print/1469-6711 Online/08/080685-17
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13549830802475609
http://www.informaworld.com
day and another 1.5 billion live on only one to two dollars per day. This 40% of
the world’s population constitutes “a global underclass, faced daily with the
reality or the threat of extreme poverty”. One consequence is that fully 850
million people are chronically malnourished – including one in three pre-school
children – all still “trapped in a vicious cycle of malnutrition and its effects”
(UNDP 2005, p. 24).
At the other extreme, wealthy countries – indeed, rich people everywhere – are
enjoying levels of material consumption that not long ago would have been the
envy of royalty. Here the consequence is that, by 1974, obesity had emerged as
“the most important nutritional disease in the affluent countries of the world”
(Anon 1974). Such grotesque disparity is an obvious source of international
tension and constitutes a major pothole in the road to global sustainability.
For much of the past century and particularly since World War II, the preferred
solution to income poverty has been sheer economic growth on grounds that “a
rising tide raises all boats”. A bigger economic pie also produces the politically
convenient side-benefit of reducing grassroots pressure for the redistribution of
wealth. But simplistic theory does not always map well to complex reality.
First, the present form of the growth-through-globalisation paradigm has actually
increased the rich–poor income gap both within and between countries, thereby
exacerbating tensions. Second, enabled by ever more powerful technologies, the
human exploitation of nature has become the most destructive ecological and
geological force on Earth. Consequently, the recent Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment summarised its findings as follows:
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 to (sic) sustain future
generations can no longer be taken for granted. (MEA 2005, p. 5)
Clearly, achieving global sustainability will require that the wealthy branches of
the human family curb their material excesses. We must achieve both sustainable
and equitable levels of consumption. To date, however, most official sustainability
policies remain growth-dependent and rely on enhanced supply-side efficiency
directed at what are really mere symptoms of systemic ecological dysfunction.
Consequently, material growth in even the most efficient economies overwhelms
the positive gains from efficiency, and per capita consumption and waste pro-
duction continue to increase (WRI 2000), trends such as climate change accelerate
(Spratt 2007) and inequality worsens.
By contrast, this paper explores the distal causes of unsustainability. I argue that
excess consumption and material inequity have deep roots in human behavioural
biology and contemporary cultural mythology. These biological and cultural influ-
ences on human material behaviour operate mainly subconsciously. Thus, if these
factors help to explain the gathering sustainability crisis, they need to be raised to
consciousness and understood before they can be controlled. In particular, to
achieve sustainability with equity, global society must work in its collective inter-
est to replace the prevailing growth ethic with a set of socio-cultural norms and
constraints designed to override innate expansionist tendencies that have
become fatally maladaptive. This puts a new spin on the immortal words of
Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
686 W.E. Rees
The human nature of unsustainability
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a
tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about
being in control. (Overbye 2007)
The analysis starts from a set of related premises. The first underpins the others
and, fortunately, is beyond dispute – Homo sapiens is an evolved species and
therefore a product of natural selection. The human story does have a unique
twist, however. The evolution of H. sapiens is now arguably determined as
much by socio-cultural factors (memes) as by purely biological factors (genes).
“Memes” refer to units of cultural information – including beliefs, values, concep-
tual frames and assumptions – that can be passed among individuals and between
generations (Dawkins 1976). A coherent, integrated set of memes that characterise
a particular ideology, paradigm, discipline or worldview is called a meme
complex. People acquire their memetic endowments passively just by growing
up in a particular culture and, once acquired, this cultural programming asserts
considerable subconscious influence over individual and group behaviour. This
is significant because our memes help to determine how societies and organisations
interact with the rest of the world. Most importantly, constructed memes, like
inherited genes, are subject to natural selection – maladaptive cultural traits can
be “selected out” by a changing environment.
The second premise is equally uncontentious: human evolution is incomplete.
We may think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution but H. sapiens is very
much a work in progress.
Consider just the brain. Neurologist Paul MacLean has convincingly argued that
the human brain has evolved in at least three distinct stages, with each correspond-
ing anatomical component having distinct functions, memory and “intelligence”.
He refers to these three quasi-independent sub-brains as the reptilian brain (the
brainstem and cerebellum), the limbic or palaeo-mammalian system and the neo-
cortex or neo-mammalian brain (MacLean 1990):
. The reptilian brain is concerned with sensory perception and related coordi-
nated movement and with autonomic functions associated with the physical sur-
vival of the body (e.g. circulation and breathing). It also influences instinctive
social behaviour (e.g. pertaining to territoriality, social stature, mating and
dominance), executes the fight or flight response and controls other mainly
hard-wired instinctive behaviours.
. The limbic system is the primary seat of emotions (e.g. happiness, sorrow, plea-
sure and pain) and related behavioural responses (e.g. sexual behaviour, play,
emotional bonding, separation calls, fighting and fleeing). It also houses our
affective (emotion-charged) memories and seems to be the seat of our value jud-
gements and informed intuition.
. The neocortex or “rational brain” is the most recent addition and occupies over
two-thirds of the human brain. The neocortex controls voluntary movement and
actions. More importantly, it is responsible for the higher cognitive functions
that distinguish humans from other mammals; it is the seat of consciousness
and sensory information processing and the locus of abstract thought, reason,
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logic and forward planning. The neocortex facilitates language, speech and
writing and, with these, the very possibility of civilisation.
. Of course, the healthy brain generally acts as an integrated whole – the three
sub-brain layers are intricately interconnected, each continuously influencing
the others so that the emergent behaviour and overall personality of the individ-
ual is a melding of thoughts, emotions and instincts. However, under particular
circumstances, one of the sub-brains, with its distinct capacities and limitations,
may assume the dominant role and hence the individual may not be fully aware
of what part of the brain is in control.
This last point is particularly important in the present context. Humans think
of themselves as uniquely self-aware and rational. However, because of the
seeming success of the enlightenment project in giving humans mastery over
the physical world, western society has come to overestimate the power of
mindful intelligence and reason. We seemingly “live” in consciousness conferred
by the human neocortex but remain paradoxically unaware of critical influences
over our individual and group behaviours that spring from the lower brain
centres. The circumstances in which logic and reason dominate may actually
be quite limited and relatively trivial in the grand evolutionary context. Indeed,
a recent work in human behavioural psychology suggests that “most of a
person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intensions and delib-
erate choices, but by mental processes put into motion by the [social] environ-
ment” (Bargh cited in Buchanan 2007). Psychologist Robert Povine suggests
from the weight of available evidence that, until proved otherwise, the starting
assumption in behavioural psychology should be “... that consciousness doesn’t
play a role in human behaviour. This is the conservative position that makes the
fewest assumptions” (cited in Buchanan 2007).
If so much of our routine social interaction is shaped by innate (or acquired) sub-
conscious mental processes, it important to ask what role these processes play par-
ticularly when safety or survival is threatened. For example, in situations of
conflict or resource scarcity, political–behavioural predispositions that operate
beneath consciousness (e.g. in the limbic system and reptilian brain stem) may
well override higher logic and rational thought in delivering a response. “There
are indeed potions in our own bodies and brains, capable of forcing on us beha-
viours that we may or may not be able to suppress by strong resolution”
(Damasio 1994, p. 121). In sum, it is increasingly apparent that humanity is a con-
flicted species. Global society will have great difficulty in resolving the sustainabil-
ity crisis if emotions, instinct and social programming continue to trump reason in
the international policy arena as has been the case historically, particularly in times
of crisis (Morrison 1999).
This leads to my third, more controversial, premise, namely that our
increasingly global modern culture is inherently biased against ecological
sustainability. Today’s state of ecological discord is an inevitable emergent
property of the systemic interaction between today’s socially constructed
techno-industrial society and the ecosphere. The two systems are fundamentally
incompatible (Rees 2002). Both biogenetic and cultural factors contribute to
this conundrum.
688 W.E. Rees
The biological driver and “maximum power”
The primary biological driver is the basic reproductive instinct that humans share
with all other species. Many experiments with organisms ranging from bacteria
cultured in Petri dishes to reindeer introduced to previously uninhabited islands
reveal a universal property of life: unless or until constrained by negative feedback,
all species populations expand to occupy all accessible habitats and use all avail-
able resources (for humans, “available” is determined by prevailing technology).
Of course, H. sapiens has always had to compete with other consumer species
for food energy and related resources. Boltzmann (1905) recognised that the Dar-
winian struggle for existence is therefore mainly a competition for free energy
available for work. Acknowledging Boltzmann, Lotka was the first to interpret
evolutionary success in terms of what is now known as the maximum power prin-
ciple: “... natural selection tends to make the energy flux through the system a
maximum, so far as compatible with the constraints to which the system is
subject” (Lotka 1922, p. 148). In short, systems that prevail in the struggle for
life (i.e. successful individuals, species and ecosystems) are those that evolve to
maximise their efficient use of available energy and material resources.
There is little doubt that modern humans “prevail”. In particular, written
language and cumulative technology (assemblages of memes) have given us a
powerful “leg up” in the Darwinian competition. Fowler and Hobbs (2003)
have recently shown that contemporary H. sapiens fall far above the normal
range of natural variation for a variety of relevant measures among a selection
of ecologically similar species. Our population size, energy use, carbon dioxide
emissions, biomass consumption and geographical range exceed those of similar
species by orders of 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 (Figure 1). H. sapiens is, directly
or indirectly, the dominant macro-consumer in all major terrestrial and accessible
marine ecosystems on the planet and may well be the most voraciously successful
predatory and herbivorous vertebrate ever to walk the earth. The problem for sus-
tainability is that while “there is considerable variation in detail, there is remark-
able consistency in the history of resource exploitation: resources are inevitably
overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction” (Ludwig et al. 1993,
p. 17).
It might be argued that the modern ecological crisis is the product of growth-
based market capitalism and contemporary societal institutions, not biological
drivers, and that earlier cultures were able to develop stable, even spiritual,
relationships with their local ecosystems. Certainly there are many examples of
such long-lived cultures and societies – Australian Aboriginals occupied their
sub-continent for 45,000 years, for example, without destroying the ecological
basis of their existence (Flannery 1994). However, evidence shows that even
pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers actually had major impacts on their habitats
within limits set by their “primitive” technology.
This is the inevitable consequence of the following three biological realities: first
is H. sapiens’ aforementioned natural expansionist tendencies; second, humans
are large animals with correspondingly large individual energy and material
Local Environment 689
requirements; and third, humans are social beings who live in extended groups.
Human invasion of any previously “stable” habitat or ecosystem therefore
always results in the reallocation of resources among species to the benefit of
some (e.g. humans) and the detriment of others (their prey and competitors).
1
Eventually, because of increasing numbers, the extirpation of prey species and
perhaps short-term climate variability, even relatively primitive human hunter-
gatherers tended to overwhelm all but the most productive of natural ecosystems.
In pre-agricultural times, therefore, when a group of human foragers had hunted
out and picked over a given area, they had to move on or develop some sort of cul-
tural accommodation to local ecological reality. The latter might include every-
thing from mystical myths (meme complexes) to cyclical nomadism over an
extensive home range. In short, it is only after long periods of human habitation
and much mutual adjustment that humans settle into a sometimes uneasy
“balance” with their remaining supportive ecosystems.
Of course, such quasi-steady-state systems are very different from the systems
that existed before people arrived. The recent palaeo-ecological, anthropological
and archaeological literature tell a compelling story of the extinctions of large
mammals and birds that accompanied the settlement of their habitats by human
hunter-gatherers (Ponting 1991, Diamond 1992, Flannery 1994, Pimm et al.
1995, Tuxill 1998). “For every area of the world that paleontologists have
studied and that humans first reached within the last fifty thousand years,
human arrival approximately coincided with massive prehistoric extinctions”
(Diamond 1992, p. 355). The species so extirpated include not only those upon
which humans preyed, but also various other predators to whom humans
proved to be competitively superior. In North America, South America and
Figure 1. Human ingestion of biomass compared to that of 96 other species of mammals. The 95%
confidence limits among non-human species are indicated by the right and left edges of the pale grey
shaded area.
Source: Fowler and Hobbs 2003.
690 W.E. Rees
Australia, about 72, 80 and 86%, respectively, of large mammal genera became
extinct in the centuries after human arrival (Diamond 1992, p. 357) although
climate change also likely played a role. The Polynesian invasion of the South
Pacific took a particular toll. “With only Stone Age technology, the Polynesians
exterminated .2000 bird species, some 15% of the world total” (Pimm et al.
1995, p. 348).
The invention of agriculture eight millennia ago took nature–human inter-
actions to a whole new level, further undermining the balance between people
and ecosystems. Hunter-gatherers were essentially dependent on what nature
has to offer but, with agriculture, humans began to alter entire landscapes to redir-
ect the flow of photosynthetic energy mainly to themselves (this is the “maximum
power” principle in practice). Unprecedented food surpluses enabled human popu-
lations to grow and diversify, making permanent settlements and ultimately
complex civilisations possible. However, even though some early agrarian
societies lasted for centuries, they “... did not develop a way of life that was ‘sus-
tainable’ in the long run. They depleted many of the natural resources they
depended upon ... and they eventually rendered no more than a fairly miserable,
hard-working and badly nourished life for most of their members” (Weisz et al.
2001). Indeed, various civilisations have imploded at least partially because of
the failure of their overextended agricultural systems (Diamond 2005; for interest-
ing variations on this theme from both Old and New Worlds, see Drew 1983,
Robinson and Dixon 1988, O’Hara et al. 1993). For these reasons, some scientists
thus call agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”
(Diamond 1987, see also Salonius 2007).
To summarise, human ecological behaviour has always been heavily influenced
by subconscious, innate predispositions rooted mainly in the brainstem and limbic
systems that evolved to ensure human success in the competition for essential
resources. These genetic presets have been uniquely augmented by the continuous
development of technologies that increase production in the short term, but whose
application routinely degrades supportive ecosystems. (Flannery applies the term
“future eaters” to societies that destroy the ecological basis of their own existence.)
Rapid resource depletion and ecosystems degradation have become the ecological
hallmark of techno-industrial civilisation. The sustainability conundrum illus-
trates how genetic traits that were once highly adaptive can compromise prospects
for a species’ survival under changing ecological circumstances. Ironically, it is
humanity’s undisputed evolutionary success that is creating the conditions that
put global civilisation at risk.
The socio-cultural factor
The human tendency to overexploit resources is currently reinforced not only by
powerful technologies, but also by cultural norms (meme complexes), particularly
those associated with today’s globally dominant economic growth paradigm.
Today, virtually all international agencies and national governments share a
sweeping vision of world “development” guided by neoliberal market economics
(Rees 2002). At the macro-scale, this grand global myth is centred on unlimited
economic expansion fuelled by globalisation and more liberalised trade; at the
Local Environment 691
more popular level, it finds its expression in the worldwide spread of consumer
lifestyles.
Interestingly, consumerism itself was a deliberate social construct. In the years
following the World War II, North America found itself with great industrial over-
capacity (wartime factories) and large numbers of underemployed workers
(returning soldiers). At the same time, the general population, having endured
the material deprivation of the depression years and subsequent wartime ration-
ing, was quite used to living modestly. To take advantage of idle capital and to
break people of their under-consuming ways, industry organised to make of
North America a throwaway society and consuming a way of life for its people.
Retail analyst Victor Lebow described the mission this way:
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 ever-increasing rate. (Lebow 1955)
Today a multibillion-dollar global advertising industry remains dedicated to
maintaining the consumer binge, mainly by making people unhappy with what-
ever they have, no matter that it may well be practically new and perfectly func-
tional. This strategy appeals both to people’s natural acquisitiveness and to their
instinctive drive for status (qualities of the limbic and reptilian brain modules).
In today’s material world, one’s social status is very much associated with the
make and age of one’s automobile, style of dress, location and size of residence,
diversity of electronic gadgets and other markers of conspicuous consumption.
In effect, globalisation and consumerism have succeeded in banishing moderation
and sanctifying greed, thereby liberating H. economicus from any moral or ethical
constraints on consumption. All these ensure that the consumer bandwagon keeps
rolling – the world economy booms along, growing at 2 or 3% per year.
Indeed, the combined effect of H. sapiens’ natural expansionist tendencies, inflated
by (mostly fossil-fuelled) technology and growth-based economic policies, has been
truly remarkable. In just the past 100 years (mostly the last five decades), human
numbers have quadrupled to 6.4 billion, energy use has increased 16-fold, fish
catches grew by an unsustainable factor of 35 and industrial production is up
more than 40-fold (Arrow et al. 2004). To produce food and other goods for
people, industrial processes now fix more atmospheric nitrogen and inject it into
terrestrial ecosystems than do all natural terrestrial processes combined. Various
forms of pollution, including greenhouse gases, have reached dangerous levels.
Meanwhile, half of the land area of Earth has been directly transformed by human
action, more than half of the planet’s accessible freshwater is already being used
by people (Vitousek et al. 1997, Lubchenco 1998) and climate change hangs like a
darkening cloud over global civilisation.
Deep causality: locking into maladaptive “frames”
Accelerating ecological degradation has long been recognised by scientists as a
threat to global civilisation, but neither the informed public nor their governments
have been quick to respond. We should not be surprised. History shows that mere
692 W.E. Rees
knowledge of increasing risk or even imminent crisis is rarely sufficient to induce
either individual behavioural change or societal transformation (Kollmuss and
Agyeman 2002).
The reasons for this are complex but one factor is that humans, particularly
humans in groups, are naturally behaviourally conservative. People tend to
resist changes to comfortable ways of being that have stood the test of time. In
the slowly changing “environments” of hunter-gatherers and early agrarian
societies, such behavioural conservatism would actually be adaptive, so any
responsible genes would be subject to natural selection. In fact, recent research
at the interface of neurobiology and culture has revealed the existence of an
evolved mechanism that renders people resistant to social change.
Neurological development is a complicated and highly integrated process that is
partly genetic (nature) and partly social (nurture). A fundamental finding of cog-
nitive research is that, during early life and maturation, social, cultural and
sensory experiences actually contribute to shaping the individual’s brain structures
and synaptic circuitry in the image of those experiences (Wexler 2006). Once
entrenched, these neural structures alter the individual’s subsequent experience
and perception. People thus tend to seek and create experiences that reinforce
their pre-established circuitry and to select information from their environment
that most closely matches these structures. Conversely, “when faced with infor-
mation that does not agree with their internal structures, they deny, discredit, rein-
terpret or forget that information” (Wexler 2006, p. 180). To summarise, “...
people think in terms of frames and metaphors... . The frames are in the synapses
of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts
don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored” (Lakoff 2004,
p. 73). Environmental factors that help to mould peoples’ neural circuitry and per-
ceptual frames include social relations and economic expectations as well as more
abstract elements of prevailing political ideology, economic paradigms and grand
cultural myths.
2
The problem for sustainability is that such neural plasticity diminishes with age.
There is no penalty for this in a stable environment; it may even be rewarded.
However, once one’s neural structures and frames are well engrained, significant
changes in the environment present a major adaptive challenge. To re-establish
psychological consonance between programmed perceptions and new environ-
mental realities requires the restructuring of neural pathways and psychological
states, a process that can be difficult, lengthy and possibly chaotic. Nevertheless,
bringing popular perceptions more in line with ecological reality is a prerequisite
for effective political action.
Eco-footprints: from competitive exclusion to eco-apartheid
Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) was introduced explicitly to reshape percep-
tions of environmental reality and to challenge the perpetual growth myth (Rees
1992, Wackernagel and Rees 1996). The concept has succeeded in reopening
the debate on human carrying capacity and is proving its worth in raising to con-
sciousness the role that personal consumption plays in the quest for sustainability
(Rees 2006).
Local Environment 693
Population eco-footprints are based on material consumption. For any specified
population, EFA estimates of the exclusive area of productive land and water eco-
systems required to produce the resources that the population consumes and to
assimilate its wastes. As consumption reflects income, national per capita eco-foot-
prints are strongly correlated with GDP per capita. Figure 2 shows the average per
capita eco-footprints for a cross-section of countries. The citizens of rich countries
need an average of 4–10 global average hectares (10–25 acres) to support their
lifestyles, whereas the poor get by on less than half a hectare (one acre). EFA
graphically translates socioeconomic inequity into biophysical terms.
As might be expected, densely populated, rich countries such as the UK, the
Netherlands and Japan have eco-footprints several times larger than their domestic
productive areas or biocapacities – these countries are running massive ecological
deficits, mostly with poorer countries, relatively low-density countries such as
Canada, and the global commons (Figure 3). In today’s trade-oriented world, our
eco-footprints are increasingly “wandering” all over the planet but, by separating
production from consumption, globalisation blinds consumers to the fact that their
survival may depend on the sustainable management of land- and waterscapes half
a world away. It also obscures the direct negative feedback dependent populations
normally receive from the degradation of (local) supportive ecosystems.
What has this to do with carrying capacity or sustainability? Unlike abstract
monetary measures such as GDP per capita that have no theoretical limits, eco-
footprints estimate real ecosystem areas that can be compared to finite available
supplies. For example, the average global citizen has an eco-footprint of about
2.2 ha, whereas there are only 1.8 ha of bio-productive land and water per
person on the Earth (Figure 3). The extended eco-footprints of countries in eco-
logical deficit have assimilated the surpluses in other countries and the global
commons. Indeed, the total human eco-footprint already exceeds global biocapa-
city (i.e. humans’ carrying capacity) by over 20% (Rees 2006, WWF 2006). This
means that the world is already in “overshoot” (Catton 1980). The human
Figure 2. Per capita eco-footprints of selected countries (2003 data extracted from WWF 2006).
694 W.E. Rees
enterprise is living, in part, not on sustainable production/consumption but by
depleting “natural capital” and critical ecosystems. It also shows that the lifestyles
of the wealthy cannot be extended sustainably to the poor.
The continuous growth of the human eco-footprint on a finite planet has dra-
matic consequences for other organisms. Habitat and bio-productivity appro-
priated for human use is irreversibly unavailable to other species. Therefore,
contrary to popular mythology, the continuous growth of the human enterprise
necessarily means the depletion of nature. The Living Planet Index (a measure
of biodiversity based on data from 1313 vertebrate species) declined by 30%
between 1970 and 2003, during which period the human eco-footprint increased
by about 74% (based on data in WWF 2006). Human competitive superiority dis-
places non-human species from their habitats often extirpating them locally and
driving them closer to global extinction. (Current biodiversity loss rates exceed
pre-industrial rates by a factor of 1000.)
Regrettably, competitive exclusion is not confined to non-human species.
Impoverished and therefore politically marginalised people are increasingly
being displaced from their ecosystems by the demands of the wealthy for space
and resources. This problem begins with the world’s increasingly unequal
income distribution. According to the United Nations, in 1820 the estimated
income ratio between world’s richest and poorest countries was 3:1, but in
1998, it was 19:1. Today, the richest 20% of the human population earn
Figure 3. Biocapacities and eco-footprints of selected countries compared to the world averages.
Local Environment 695
three-quarters of the world income, whereas the poorest 20% survived on 1.5%.
(The average income in the top quintile is 50 times that of the bottom 20%.)
Astonishingly, the world’s wealthiest 500 individuals enjoy a combined income
greater than that of the poorest 416 million and the gap is ever widening.
Indeed, income disparity is increasing not only between rich and poor countries,
but also within nations. Of the 73 countries for which data are available, 53
(with 80% of the world’s population) have seen a marked increase in inequality
in the past 20 years. Only nine countries (4% of population) have narrowed the
income gap (Martens 2005, UNDP 2005).
It is no secret that wealth insulates the wealthy from the negative ecological
impacts of the very economic activities that produce their consumer goods. (Here
we see “maximum power” playing out among weak and powerful subgroups
within human society.) The rich live in the world’s most ecologically healthy habi-
tats, whereas the poor (particularly racial minorities) are increasingly confined to
urban slums and degraded landscapes characterised by toxic waste, polluted air
and water, and contaminated food (Hardoy et al. 1992, Bullard 1995, McGranahan
et al. 1996). Poor people are losing their livelihoods and lives because of floods,
drought and desertification, toxic spills and dump sites, hydroelectric projects,
strip mines, radiation exposure, clear-cut logging, soil erosion and other forms of
“economic” landscape abuse. In effect, the world is witnessing the emergence of a
new form of “eco-apartheid” characterised by the income-related segregation of
people along environmental gradients (Rees and Westra 2003).
There is little doubt that developing countries, in particular, will increasingly be
affected by large-scale ecological degradation, including escalating climate change.
Recent history hints at the potential cost. Ten thousand people died when hurri-
cane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years, slammed into Central
America in 1998. Worldwide, more than 120,000 people were killed in 1998–
1999 (including 50,000 when a supercyclone struck Orissa, India) and millions
lost their homes. Of course, the First World is not entirely immune – 400,000
mostly poorer people were displaced and 1500 died in 2005 when Hurricane
Katrina drowned 80% of New Orleans. There are already an estimated 25
million environmental refugees in the world, more than the number of political
refugees, but these millions may be just the first trickle of a global flood. Sir
Nicholas Stern’s report to the UK government on the potential effects of climate
change suggested that a quite possible 3–4 8C increase in mean global temperature
in this century could result in a sea-level rise affecting most of the world’s coastal
cities from London to Shanghai and displace up to 5% of the world’s population
(400 million people) from their homes (Climate Group 2006).
Towards resolution: is sustainability with greater equity possible?
[For humanity to survive the sustainability crisis] ...we must rely on highly evolved genetically
based biological mechanisms, as well as on supra-instinctual survival strategies that have
developed in society, are transmitted by culture, and require for their application, conscious-
ness, reasoned deliberation and willpower. (Damasio 1994, p. 123)
Billions of ordinary people, merely expressing their market preferences in a growth
economy on a finite planet, guarantee that resource depletion, biodiversity losses,
696 W.E. Rees
climate change, pollution, ecosystem degradation and myriad other symptoms of
unsustainability will intensify in coming years. To avoid being “selected out” by
nature in convulsion, the world community must reassess the fundamental
beliefs, values and assumptions that underpin today’s expansionist myth. In
effect, global society must reinvent itself. This will involve the conscious construc-
tion of a more adaptive set of cultural memes and cognitive frames that reflect the
core facts of unsustainability:
. The world’s biocapacity and life-support functions are stressed beyond long-
term limits.
. Despite the unprecedented scale of economic activity, the benefits and costs of
growth to-date are grossly inequitably distributed. Much of the human family
remains materially deprived and the victim of environmental injustice.
. It is increasingly plausible that the total costs of growth (many of which go unac-
counted) exceed the measurable benefits. If so, the world has entered an era of
uneconomic growth, growth that impoverishes (Daly 1999, Siegel 2006).
. The world relies on additional economic growth to relieve the political tensions
caused by gross inequity and has no fallback position.
The literature shows that thoughtful people understand our biophysical circum-
stances, appreciate the ravages of inequity and acknowledge our ethical responsibil-
ity to the poor. And yet humanity’s collective actions are not consistent with either
our best science or the moral imperative. Reordering the world is clearly not a simple
matter of applied logic. Whenever people profess a strong social or cultural ethic yet
persistently ignore or violate it, there is a strong possibility that some innate predis-
position is influencing their behaviour (Pinker 2002). This paper argues that both
individual and socio-political behaviours are influenced by both innate and socially
conditioned tendencies that operate largely beneath consciousness.
Scientific logic, rational assessments, and moral and ethical arguments are all
largely products of intelligence, of the neocortex or rational brain. The problem
is that the output of the rational mind can be overridden by the more ancient
(and obviously historically successful) logic of the limbic system and reptilian
brain, particularly where self-interest or survival is at stake. It is well established
that “biological drives ... can be pernicious to rational decision-making in
certain circumstances by creating an overriding bias against objective facts ...”
(Damasio 1994, p. 192). As asserted at the outset, modern society is inherently
biased against sustainability.
To attain sustainable, equitable consumption levels, society must thus confront
the fact that our natural acquisitiveness, tendency to maximise personal advantage
and yearning for social status – all amplified by socially constructed consumer life-
styles and associated neural circuitry – constitute a formidable barrier to effective
corrective action. They are a major source of the psychological denial and political
paralysis that have so far trumped society’s growing ecological anxiety. If crisis per-
sists, they could also override our professed moral concern for both the today’s poor
and future generations. As Gurr (1985) has argued:
... so long as [ecological] decline is seen as temporary, advantaged groups are likely to accept
policies of relief and redistribution as the price of order and the resumption of growth. Once it
Local Environment 697
is accepted as a persisting condition, however, they will increasingly exert economic and pol-
itical power to regain their absolute and relative advantages.
This last point should remind us that, in this crowded interdependent world, the
human capacity for violence is a constant in human affairs, a dangerous ogre always
fitfully sleeping beneath our waking consciousness. Humans do not need to be
deprived of vital resources to be drawn into confrontation. “People make war not
because they are starving, but because they are paying more for gasoline, or because
their national honor has been offended, or because they think it has, or because they
want to prevent someone from making war on them” (Konner 2002, p. 480). The
post-9/11 era is both proof of this reality and a possible harbinger of worse to come.
So, how can a world confronting the prospects of both material shortages and
ecological decline avoids the descent into social chaos and resource wars? In
addition to accepting the core facts of unsustainability, world leaders would
have to organise some kind of forum or process through which they could
acknowledge formally: (1) the complex origins of human behaviour, particularly
those once-adaptive genetic predispositions that have become hazardous on a
crowded planet (including the propensity for defensive/aggressive posturing in
times of crisis); (2) that the world has reached the point where individual and
national interests may be best served by acting in our collective interest; (3) that
achieving sustainability and global security demands an unprecedented level of
international co-operation in service of the common good (i.e. mutual survival)
and to override selfishly narrow predispositions; (4) the need to construct a new
set of cultural memes and a global development framework that address both egre-
gious inequity and recognises ecological constraints on growth. (Note that this
agenda would require that capitalist democracies, in particular, balance – or
replace – the cognitive frames associated with rampant individualism, personal
rights, private property and market efficiency with frames evoking community,
individual responsibility, public policy and social equity. Wither capitalism?)
Admittedly, there is little in the history of our species to suggest that such a
global transformation is likely to occur spontaneously. Indeed, most of my
earlier arguments in this paper suggest that it will not. If the developed world
remains mesmerised by memes and frames associated with continuous growth
and the materialist fantasy, then sustainability will continue to elude us.
Without popular support, the ecologically necessary will remain politically infeas-
ible and the politically feasible ecologically irrelevant.
That said, it is just conceivable that events will conspire in ways that catalyse
effective international action (as happened in the case of the Montreal Accord
on ozone-depleting chemicals). Should this occur, there is little doubt the
world community has the wealth and resources to restore ecological security
and social equity without further global growth, at least in the developed
countries. For example, providing adequate sanitation and clean water to everyone
in need would cost a fraction of the wealth dissipated by the United States alone in
the conduct of the Iraq war. Of course, on a finite planet, honouring the moral
right of the poor to material growth and development necessarily requires more
responsible consumption by the rich. Eco-footprint and climate change studies
suggest that wealthy market (consumer) societies must reduce energy and material
698 W.E. Rees
consumption by up to 80% to vacate “ecological space” needed for consumption
growth in developing countries. This need not be painful – evidence abounds that
income/consumption growth no longer contributes to wellbeing in many affluent
countries and that with the right policies and incentives, wealthy countries could
make the necessary deep cuts in material and energy use in ways that would
actually enhance their quality of life (Lane 2000, Siegel 2006).
There are other reasons to hope that such a dramatic reconstruction of contem-
porary frames and ideologies is at least theoretically possible. “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” (Catton 1980, p. 6). Indeed,
history reveals that various societies facing ecological crisis have pulled through
by reassessing and replacing deeply entrenched core values and beliefs that have
become maladaptive (Diamond 2005). Sustainable societies are resilient societies
in which collective intelligence, long-term thinking and forward planning prevail
over short-term individual and small-group interests.
We even have considerable contemporary success at the necessary social engin-
eering – think consumerism, globalisation and the promulgation of market capit-
alism. It is true that these complex frames reify self-interest, sanctify greed, laud
competition and undermine community – not exactly encouraging – but the
latter qualities occupy only a narrow band at one end of the human behavioural
spectrum. H. sapiens has also an innate capacity for selflessness, compassion,
altruism, community and cooperation, all qualities necessary for a sustainable
future. In this light, we should be redesigning school curricula at all levels to
reflect these latter values in order to take advantage of the neural plasticity of
youth, the next generation of global citizens. And, if the full power of the media
and the Internet could be drawn to the task, we might even succeed in re-educating
or at least reprogramming the present generation of adults.
In the final analysis, sustainability is about abandoning outmoded frames, myths
and ideologies, and embracing reality. In “The Unconscious Civilization”, John
Ralston Saul observes that if we are “unable to identify reality and therefore
unable to act ... then we are not simply childish but have reduced ourselves to
figures of fun – ridiculous figures of our unconscious” (Saul 1995, pp. 21–22).
By contrast, a victory for our uniquely human capacity for “consciousness, reasoned
deliberation and willpower” would elevate H. sapiens to true adulthood – indeed, if
enlightened memes come routinely to override obsolete genes, we will have begun a
unique new phase in human evolution. The alternative is no next phase at all.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by a grant from the University of British Columbia’s Social Sciences
Hampton Fund.
Notes
1. In this respect, H. sapiens is a typical “patch disturbance” species (Rees 2000) and slightly different from
other large animals that, “due to their size, longevity, and food and habitat requirements tend to have a sub-
stantial impact on ecosystems” (Naiman 1988).
Local Environment 699
2. Myth-making is a universal property of human societies and plays a vital role in every culture including our
own (Grant 1998). This ubiquity suggests that the propensity for myth-making itself evolved to reinforce
behaviours that enhance survival.
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