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Nature and Society Book review - February-March 2006 Overshoot: The ecological basis of revolutionary change Why would I review for you a book that was published a quarter of a century ago? Three reasons: (1) the passage of time has made it urgently relevant to understanding the present and the future of the human place in nature, (2) I came across the book myself only recently and expect that there are others who have not heard of it and (3) it’s an eye-opener, one of the most significant and fundamental books on NSF themes I’ve read. Seven years in the writing and encyclopaedic in scope, Overshoot synthesises biological, sociological and cultural perspectives in an ecological analysis. William Catton uses his training in sociology to explicate the web our civilisation has woven between humanity and the planet’s ecology and especially between that growing part of our environment and ourselves that we use and abuse. He shows how we are caught in this web and how it must, inevitably, drag our civilisation down. He does this using an ecological vocabulary to describe and account for events that most people have been accustomed to thinking about in quite non-ecological terms. Catton rigorously examines our civilisation in its ecosystem. His conclusion is that:
Catton describes the two basic strategies humans have used to increase the carrying capacity of their environments. The first he calls the ‘takeover method’.
Around 1800, when takeover was pressing rapidly into its last pristine frontiers, the Americas and Australasia, a new ecological strategy began: the ‘drawdown method’.
Using the drawdown method humans rapidly increased – temporarily – the global carrying capacity for humans. The human population had crept to the one-billion mark around 1820; it has since shot up by a factor of six, with most of the greater rate of increase directly or indirectly attributable to drawdown of finite, exhaustible resources. Once the fossil fuels and minerals begin to run out, this transient carrying capacity will vanish as quickly as it appeared. By Catton’s calculations we were using the equivalent of 10 Earths’ energy by the 1970s: this contrasts with 1¼ Earths using the conventional model for the ecological footprint. What is Catton’s solution? Catton does not ignore unpleasant facts nor does he insert the too-customary and distracting Pollyanna-ish optimism where none is called for. He suggests that our expectation of a solution or that a deal or a compromise can be worked out is a non-ecological way of thinking that has been superseded with the passing of what he calls ‘the age of exuberance’.
In fact, we have made our continuance of the takeover method dependent upon expanding drawdown – for example, by producing and fuelling tractors to clear and farm more land.
Some readers may quibble with Catton’s analysis because his predictions appear not to have come to pass quite as soon as an inattentive reader might expect. But Catton was not wrong in his timing. Since he wrote, we have increased our takeover, notably in rainforests and fisheries. But we have also increased our drawdown, most spectacularly with the rise of capitalism in the former communist states of USSR and China. Both are now drawing down their fossil fuels and agricultural soils and contracting their traditional welfare net, ensuring a supply of cheap labour by reducing the opportunities for self-sufficiency. Australia now sucks in cheap Chinese consumer goods, destroying in the process three millennia of accumulated horticultural knowledge and soil fertility; our ecological footprint is crunching beneath it the support systems of China as we play our part in bringing its 1.3 billion people closer to ecological ruin. Readers may also assume that, with rapid developments in technology on the one hand and environmental deterioration on the other, the book would have been superseded by a new generations of writers. Not so: Catton’s ecological principles and his analysis are timeless. More bold than Diamond or Wright, Catton unapologetically paints a picture of the future of humanity and the biosphere as he sees. Like Diamond and Wright he draws on historical examples. But unlike them he does not indulge in the hubris which assumes that past human civilisations provide the only – or even the best – model. Catton would not reject their models but he requires us first to comprehend the biological and ecological constraints of our species and the biosphere before we consider our social and cultural options. Catton dismisses alternative energy sources as unsustainable in the long run. This may be because minerals like copper, lithium, silver and platinum which are critical to many high tech alternatives are already approaching exhaustion of known supplies. Catton makes poetic use of the pluperfect tense, as if he were looking back from an indeterminate date in the future. He carries this trick off very well, underscoring his historian-like detachment. A refreshing aspect of the book is its clarity of language and thought. Reading this book is like learning a new language: it levers the reader into a paradigm shift in viewing the world and human society in it. Overshoot is not a book for those who must have a happy ending. It is still in print and is truly brain food for anyone wishing to understand our predicament without cultural baggage so that we can identify the behavioral changes that will lead to the best possible future, and initiate them. Reviewed by Keith Thomas February-March 2006 edition accessible here
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