William Catton made a coherent and irresistible case
for overshoot being at the heart of our present-day environmental disasters. In
attempting, via technology, to use our ingenuity and innovative powers to
increase the Earth’s carrying capacity we have succeeded only in reducing it.
We have way overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity, manifesting that in species
extinction, climate chaos, and air, land, and sea pollution as just a few
examples.
Behind the technological reasons for overshoot we can
also identify another category of overshoot.
Our collective ability to innovate, invent, and
fabricate systems, technology, and facilities has overshot our wisdom. What do
I mean by this?
When we innovate, invent, and fabricate we ask
ourselves questions such as: How can we make this happen? What resources do we
need for this?
These are questions that call on our intelligence and
our knowledge. These questions are framed within paradigms of progress and
human exceptionalism.
They are not questions that ask us to reflect upon the
consequences of our innovations, inventions, and fabrications.
They are not questions that call upon our wisdom.
Wisdom would ask, in each and every case: Should we do
this?
There are innumerable instances in our past where we
have not asked this question, or if we have, have ignored the answers. In just
the past 200 years, we have failed to ask such a question of innovations such
as: the internal combustion engine, atomic fission, weapons development,
artificial intelligence, mobile phone systems, monocultural agriculture, “green”
energy, the private automobile, …
Yet, if we were to honestly and robustly look into the
outcomes of each of these, we would find disastrous effects and results.
Towards the end of his book, William Catton asks: ‘What
must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?’
His question has to be answered with – avoid our
desire to continuously innovate, invent, and fabricate.
In the place of these we must give greater emphasis
upon wisdom and the willingness to seriously consider the consequences of our
actions, not just for ourselves, but primarily for future generations.
Furthermore, within those future generations must be included birds, fish,
mammals, insects, trees, fungi, ferns, rivers, mountains, sierras, and all the
other phenomena that go together to make up the natural world.
We cannot afford for our intelligence to continually overshoot
our carrying capacity of wisdom.
Notes
1. William R Catton, Jr., Overshoot, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, 1982
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