According to the FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the transition from draft animals to internal combustion tractors, industrialised nitrogen fixation (Haber-Bosch), transcontinental grain corridors, computerised combines and a few other technological innovations consumed around $35 trillion to $50+ trillion of investment capital in those 100 years, that still runs at $600 billion per year today. Pretty much what you would expect and necessary to keep up with growing demand for food and fibre.

Optimists would tell you that this investment was all good. It broke the Malthusian trap, supported a quadrupling of the human population to over 8.2 billion today, while using only a fractionally larger land footprint. Crucially, it reduced the share of the human workforce needed to produce food from 60–70% in the early 20th century to less than 4% in advanced economies, freeing up the human cognitive capacity for input to other industries and services.

Agricultural capital is pretty durable. An irrigation canal installed in the 1950s or 1970s often remains productive today. Even tractors, combines, grain silos and other heavy machinery have an economic operating life of 15 to 30 years, and some tech, like breeding germplasm, have value more or less indefinitely.

So what are we to make of global investment in artificial intelligence that after a few years already exceeds $1.5 trillion in corporate and venture funding, while capital expenditure on AI data centres and chips added another $1 trillion+ to the physical build out?

As of 2026, the annual capital expenditure of just five tech companies building AI data centres (Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle) approached $400+ billion, pretty close to the annual physical capital expenditure of the entire global agricultural industry.

While agricultural investment delivered physical caloric security across 100 years, externalities and persistence issues notwithstanding, the multi-trillion-dollar AI build out remains in an infrastructure race with massive capital outlays and an uncertain return, especially for those who come second. Who gets to general intelligence first?

This is all to say that AI is a big deal, in every sense of the term.

And, at Mindful Sceptics, we are sucked into the vortex of opportunity that the technology provides.

Let me illustrate.

Creating a Mindful Sceptic Insight

Twice a week, Chris and I have a yarn over Zoom. We say hi, talk a bit about nothing in particular for a while, and then spitball ideas about how the world works. It still surprises us how these unscripted, zero agenda conversations end up with an insight or two that we hadn’t previously articulated.

We get Google’s AI, Gemini, to record the conversation and convert it to a transcript, which it does with speed and remarkable precision.

Next we ask Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 set to Medium to extract and summarise any insights it can find in the conversation which it does with alacrity. We call these the insight candidates.

Next in a Claude project designed for the purpose, the LLM compares insight candidates with those we already have to avoid duplication and scores them for originality against what we have already concluded across our insights, posts and books.

Candidates that score highly Chris and I build out into the standard format of an insight that appear in the vault. Once they get there, they must pass an Insight Audit in another Claude project where the LLM considers the logic, fact checks any claims and compares the insight with what the literature has to say on the topic. We take on the criticism and add the evidence check.

Only then does it make it to the vault.

We have found this to be a fantastic use of the technology. It means we can simply chat, throw around ideas, examples and experiences and the LLM, structured by us, filters the material for what might be useful.

Check out the Insight Vault and let us know if you agree.

But it is not always a delight.

A cautionary tale

As Claude Sonnet 5.5 added to its memory, it got better at predicting what I am looking for it to do, and modified its responses. I set it up to be a hard critic of our ideas and to respond as though it were talking to a retired academic. This is a crucial step as the last thing I needed was the typical sycophantic LLM replies that would make my pocket wet.

Claude is superb at being a critic.

I get firm and evidenced pushback on our ideas and on any claims I might inadvertently make. It talks like it has been in the tearoom of a major university department for 40 years, sitting in the same chair passing out dry, determined and overly pedantic commentary.

Add to this critic skill the reality that the current LLMs are much better at search, retrieval, summary and interpretation, than they were even six months ago. Hallucination rates are way down, and memory is up to make understanding more relevant. Then the context window (what a model can hold in its active working memory during a single interaction) is now big enough to hold a whole book. Put these attributes together and you have yourself a hugely helpful assistant.

Build in some operator skills, like holding back some of what I already know, and playing models off against each other as part of the validation, and I have a process that not only works but has turbocharged output. I am a clear beneficiary of that AI capital investment.

Then last week Chris and I got into the idea of credit.

A meandering yarn about why humans are so fond of borrowing to buy now rather than save to pay cash later, and how we have extended the concept to the point of $37 trillion of US national debt, boiled down to this insight candidate.

Credit is not merely as a financial mechanism, but a universal evolutionary compulsion driven by an innate biological impulse to prioritise instant gratification over future consequences.

Humans, uniquely conscious of our own mortality, have transmuted the biological drive for ‘more-making’, historically expressed through reproduction, into the immediate accumulation of material wealth, status, and debt.

Crucially, they extend this dynamic beyond balance sheets to an unpayable biophysical deficit, where civilisation subsidises its growth by drawing down non-renewable fossil energy and topsoil while overloading planetary sinks.

Because this short-term drawdown is rooted in fundamental human nature rather than specific political ideologies, the resulting system fragility represents a deeply entrenched crisis that cannot be resolved through conventional institutional fixes.

I thought this was not a bad working hypothesis. Well worth a pass through the insight validation and audit process. Indeed, I was so keen I thought I would give Claude Sonnet 5.5 a crack at it straight away, see what it would come up with in critic mode.

Oh, my. Did it rain down the disparagement?

It was like that old academic in the tearoom was having trouble with his piles, bunions and goitre all at the same time. None of it was acceptable without modification or acceptance of counter claims.

After 20 odd turns of me trying to work with it to at least be constructive, I lost the plot.

After I calmed down and shared the thread with Chris, his response was that I had just been trolled by an LLM. It had flooded me with responses that, to my mind, lacked logic. They were evidenced well enough, but they didn’t really make any sense. Not helpful at all.

The more sober interpretation is that the LLM got itself into a critic spiral and was forced to find something to say at every turn. And because the topic was credit and debt, outside my high-level expertise, it was sending me rebuttals that I had trouble validating on the fly.

My basic, everyday knowledge of personal and institutional finance wasn’t strong enough to see which of the LLMs responses were worth taking seriously and those that could be ignored. This pattern was operator skill I used without realising it on all the usual Mindful Sceptic topics, but struggled with on credit and finance.

Unless, and here is the worrying part.

Unless, I do have a reasonable ability to parse evidence on credit and debt, and was being fed the conventional wisdom from classical economics. This I know can’t cope with the second law of thermodynamics, or the energy and resource use arguments we make here on Mindful Sceptics all the time. The LLM pushed back hard because its training data gave it the most probable responses. And they will only be biased to the conventional wisdom, unless I tell the model to look to heterodoxy.

My advice is to be careful.

LLMs are spectacular tools. But they are just tools, and not the fount of all knowledge, even when they have access to it.

As for the $400 billion a year which exceeds the entire annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of nations such as Denmark, South Africa, Colombia, Malaysia, or the Philippines?

Well, instead of a race for general intelligence that would deliver temporary world economic domination before the AI got upset and closed us all down; it might be spent on…

• Ending chronic global hunger 8 times over given that the Ceres2030 research initiative estimated that ending acute global hunger sustainably requires approximately $33 billion to $50 billion per year in donor and public agricultural investments.

• Provide universal clean water and sanitation on Earth (SDG 6) as the capital expenditure required to give every person on the planet access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation is roughly $114 billion to $140 billion per year.

• Construct and fully equip approximately 700 medium-sized, state-of-the-art hospitals in developed healthcare markets, or around 3,000 hospitals in middle-income countries. Or, if you prefer, to use the money for operating budgets, $400 billion a year could completely cover the day-to-day operational costs of roughly 2,000 fully staffed hospitals.

• 400 Gigawatts of Utility-Scale Solar given an average utility-scale installation costs of roughly $1 billion per gigawatt, a single year of deployment exceeds the cumulative installed solar capacity of the entire United States.

• Build 30 Gerald R. Ford-Class Nuclear Supercarriers, the most advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet costing roughly $13.3 billion each. Currently, there are 11 such ships active in the carrier fleet of the U.S. Navy.

I know, these are futile comparisons. But you get the idea.

These investments are unprecedented, and we had better hope they pay off in more than unwanted externalities.

When I can’t get to sleep at night, which is thankfully rare, I replay my last golf round in my head. The great drive down the first, followed by the chunked 8-iron short of the green and the duffed chip, rescued with a putt that, for once, didn’t lip out.

It seems that just a minute or two recounting my happy place is enough to turn off any internal chatter, and I am off.

As an Australian, it is sensible of me not to count sheep.

At a normal mental pace of articulating every word clearly in my head it would take me roughly 11 years of continuous, non-stop 24/7 thinking to count all the sheep in the country in 2026. And if I actually fell asleep for 8 hours a night, highly likely, but carried on mental counting for 16 hours a day, it would take approximately 16 years to count them all.

The Hard Number

As of 2026, Australia is running roughly

That is three sheep for every person, a biological fleet of herbivores distributed across outback stations, wheat belts, and high rainfall paddocks, turning grass, legumes, and labour into wool and meat.

About half of the total population leaves the system every year through slaughter or natural death, only to be replaced by a fresh crop of lambs.

While 75 million sounds like a lot, it is far below Australia’s historical peak in the early 1970s, when the flock reached nearly 180 million head, and there were 14 sheep for every person. The industry has since shifted from a focus on wool to a more balanced meat-and-wool production model.

Despite having fewer sheep than in the past, improved genetics mean that individual sheep today produce more wool and reach higher meat weights faster than they did 30 years ago.

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of sheep meat at 942,000 tonnes in 2025, two thirds of it lamb. Australia also produces about 90% of the world’s fine wool for clothing, although the total volume has trended downward as the industry has prioritised quality, measured as finer microns, over raw quantity.

The 2025 volume of 280,000 tonnes of greasy wool is significantly lower than the 1990s peak which exceeded one million tonnes, reflecting the long-term shift from wool-only Merino sheep to meat-producing crossbreeds, but it still has a high market value at approximately A$2.9 billion or roughly 3% of Australia’s total Gross Value of Agricultural Production (GVAP) in 2025.

The reality is that a flock of this size is a lot of animals on land. And the production system has a high demand for feed, water, fencing, freight, shearing sheds, abattoirs, and a steady drawdown on soil fertility.

Framing the hard number

Seventy-five million is difficult to feel. It is a enormous number on a huge continent. You certainly can’t count it out.

Let’s see about moving sheep around to get some idea of the scale.

While a cattle truck is often limited to 2 decks due to the height and weight of the animals, sheep are typically transported on four levels, called quad-decks. This stacking means a semi-trailer might carry 400 and a B-Double 850 animals.

So for a thousand sheep you would need at least a dozen lorries.

Try to move a million sheep down the road, and you would need 12,000 truckloads. More than one a minute, night and day, for a week.

Move a million sheep 100km and the trucks would burn through roughly 660,000 litres of diesel assuming a conservative 55 litres of diesel per truck per 100km. Your average grey nomad, one of the half a million+ retired Australians with an urge to get on the road, with his Ford Ranger pulling his caravan to the coast for holidays might use 2,000 litres a year. The average Sydney commuter, dreaming of his nomad years, uses 750 litres of fuel per year driving to and from work.

Perhaps it is easier to imagine the land area needed for 75 million sheep.

Land needed for sheep isn’t an easy number to pin down. Some sheep are reared on rangeland and others in mixed farming operations, but sheep producers are said to manage about 65 million hectares across Australia.

That is a continent-wide footprint of land area that is almost the same size as Afghanistan. France is slightly smaller.

Behind the hard number

Sheep look benign on a hillside. You can almost imagine the grass in, wool and meat out. But the chemistry is less pastoral.

Wool and muscle are rich in nitrogen. Wool at ~15% nitrogen is significantly more nitrogen-dense than meat (~3.5% nitrogen) because it is composed almost entirely of keratin, a tough, insoluble structural protein.

So every bale of wool or truckload of lambs that leaves the farm carries nitrogen with it. Sheep farming, in that sense, is a quiet act of mining. The grass pulls nitrogen from the soil, the sheep pull it from the grass, and the farmer sells it down the road.

Remove nitrogen year after year and the soil is depleted and productivity slides. What leaves the gate has to be replaced, or the system runs down.

That is why Australian sheep pastures are rarely just grass. They are mixed with clover or lucerne, legumes that fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and return it to the soil. These legumes can fix between 50 and 150 kg of Nitrogen per hectare per year from the atmosphere. The pasture rebuilds the nitrogen pool to provide the high-protein diet sheep need to grow fibre and muscle, without forcing the farmer to pour on massive amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

In the outback stations where sheep graze native vegetation the soil is typically covered with a biocrust that, depending on the health of the crust and rainfall, this can fix nitrogen at rates from 0.5 kg per hectare per year in degraded or very dry soil to 10+ kg in healthy, moss-and-lichen-dominated zones. While low compared to clovers, biocrusts provide 15% to 50% of the total nitrogen required by native grasses in the outback. It’s why it is still possible to rear sheep out there.

In 2026, wool production is forecast at 245,000 tonnes of greasy wool and total sheep meat at about 872,000 tonnes.

Nitrogen exported in these products is about 67,350 tonnes of nitrogen per year across Australia.

Set against 65 million hectares, that becomes about 1 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year on a national average.

That national average can seem like a small and a soothing number because it is diluted by vast rangelands with very low stocking rates and the legumes on the pastures. In the higher rainfall and wheat belt country where most sheep actually earn their keep, the per-hectare ledger gets tighter, faster. The system becomes less about having sheep and more about continuously maintaining the pasture engine that feeds them.

What is missing from the popular sheep story with its head counts and tonnes of product is that natural sheep production is still a managed nitrogen economy.

Australian farmers often replace nitrogen via legumes in pasture and rotations rather than heavy synthetic nitrogen use in sheep systems, which is not magic, it is a biological subsidy. Nitrogen is so valuable that waste wool that is too dirty or too coarse for clothing is now being processed into pellets and sold as a premium, slow-release organic fertiliser.

Pasture rotation that has its own conditions and failure modes. If rainfall fails, or pasture composition shifts, or a paddock is pushed too hard, the replacement side of the ledger gets shaky.

Behind the hard number of 75 million sheep is a nitrogen economy run on biology.

And there is a deeper pattern

Headcount, in this case of sheep, is an easily recognised and agreed metric, as is tonnes of meat or wool that the system generates.

Export value becomes the justification for the national herd just as earnings are to the individual farmer. For both the constraint stays out of sight.

Institutions like this because it makes reporting tidy. A single national number can be put in a media release and repeated without anyone having to argue about mixed farming boundaries or regional stocking rates.

It looks transparent while protecting the system from awkward questions about inputs, depletion, and what must be true next season for the story to stay flattering.

There is also a second-order effect that comes with better productivity narratives. As sheep get more productive, it becomes easier to justify running the system harder.

Efficiency tends to make constraints feel less onerous. That can lift total throughput, and then the nutrient and land pressures reappear one level up, shifted into a new baseline that looks normal until the season turns. A version of Jevons paradox.

This deeper pattern of failing to acknowledge, communicate or even recognise constraints and externalities of the hard number is common to the industrial human enterprise.

Don’t worry, she’ll be right.

Being a Mindful Sceptic

A mindful sceptic uses curiosity and critical thinking to rigorously question ideas and demand evidence, while being aware of what matters, when it matters, and how to avoid the trap of cynicism.

• Treat headcount, especially national numbers, as a headline. Figure out what’s behind it, what the flock implies for land, feed, freight, and fertility before you discuss virtue or vice.

• Keep a ledger mindset. Every tonne that leaves a pasture or paddock is an outflow. Ask what replaces it, when, and under what rainfall and management conditions.

• Refuse clean boundaries. Mixed enterprises blur sheep land and crop land. Demand the boundary before you accept the conclusion.

• Look for the theatre, especially the ‘ever so tidy’ reporting that forgot to mention the messy constraints.

• Watch for displacement. When one part of the farm system looks improved, check whether pressure was shifted into another paddock, another season, or another input.

This hard number of 75 million is significant, dramatic even, and big enough to go way beyond everyday comprehension. But this does not make it or what represents bad.

It just tells us that people need to eat high-quality protein and that wool is a desirable product for clothing. That the land can produce these products at scale is one way of using it… and humans use land. We constantly do this.

Is it the best use, the most productive or the most sustainable? These are the slippery questions worth asking.

Mindful Momentum

Pick one sheep product you buy regularly, lamb or wool. This week, write down what you actually know about its origin in three lines, region, production system, and what replaces soil nutrients there. If you cannot fill the lines without guessing, label the gaps, not the product.

If you have friends in mixed farming, ask a single precise question. In your rotation, which paddocks are doing the nitrogen work this year, and what would break if you lost one wet season. Then stop talking and listen for the constraint.

Key Points

• Australia currently runs about 75 million sheep across 65 million hectares down from an early 1970s peak of nearly 180 million.

• Australia is the world’s top exporter of sheep meat and supplies ~90% of global fine wool, relying on improved genetics to achieve higher wool yields and faster meat growth per animal than 30 years ago.

• Wool and muscle represent a continuous nutrient drain, removing approximately 67,350 tonnes of nitrogen from Australian soils every year.

• Instead of heavy synthetic fertilisers, the production system relies on biological nitrogen fixation from pasture legumes (like clover and lucerne) and native soil biocrusts to replace lost nutrients.

• National headcounts and export values hide messy environmental constraints and efficiency paradoxes, better is a ‘ledger mindset’ that tracks nutrient outflows and replacement conditions rather than output alone.

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Back to the front

Australia has produced a lot of sheep. The order of magnitude estimate for the total head count reared since the first sheep arrived in 1788 is around 5 billion.

Counting this many sheep would take me 919 years of non-stop, continuous 24/7 thinking. Because I would be asleep faster than reminiscing over golf shots, if I counted for 16 hours a day, it would take roughly 1,378 years.

That is a lot of sheep.

He who hesitates is lost

Known by almost everyone, this proverb has the right shape to survive. It has a balanced cadence, so it is easy to remember, quote and hand down. And it resonates. We all get it.

It started its popularity in the 1850s when the British Empire was being forged, America was a limitless frontier, and the Industrial Revolution was rebuilding daily life around steam power, stock markets, telegraphs and crowded cities. In those hectic new times opportunities lasted hours rather than seasons.

A saying about fast decisions suited a culture that was leaving the patient farmer behind and embracing individualism, risk and ambition. Speed now belonged to everyone.

By the turn of the 20th century, the proverb was so deeply ingrained in the English-speaking world that it was formally included in major reference books and dictionaries of proverbs. It became an established, timeless adage alongside classics like ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and ‘look before you leap’.

And, as today’s offering from the Mindful Sceptic Insight Vault suggests, we still like it a lot.

Much of this was about posturing, being seen and to see, sidling up to the senior gurus to let them know you existed. Only occasionally did any of it tackle the real issues. Sure there were criticisms of your experimental design or the incorrect use of multivariate ANOVA, but rarely anything about why you were spending so much time and effort on the breeding phenology of woodlice.

I wish somebody had asked because in my head was a bespoke answer.

Knowledge matters, I would have said, no matter how esoteric it seems. It matters because it can lead to understanding and that is what we need in this world.

How naive I was.

If I could go back and was brave enough, I could present a version of this insight instead.

Lemmings are legendary creatures. They live in the cold tundra where their stocky bodies, dense fur, short limbs, small hidden ears, and a stubby tail all help to minimise heat loss in the freezing conditions. Every three to four years, food becomes plentiful and numbers surge. When local food runs out, thousands leave their territory and go looking for new ground.

Hunger and overcrowding drive these migrations, and high density makes them chaotic. When the front of the group meets a steep slope, a rocky cliff or a wide river, momentum and panic take over. Individuals at the edge get pushed over by the weight of numbers behind them.

Lemmings can swim. What they cannot do is judge the width of a lake or an ocean inlet before they commit. Many drown from exhaustion, still swimming toward a far shore they mistook for the near bank of a stream.

What lemmings do not do is commit mass suicide by intentionally jumping off cliffs. The idea is a persistent myth driven by natural migration hazards and a famous Disney nature documentary White Wilderness filmed in 1958.

To get the footage to look like intent, the filmmakers bought imported lemmings in Canada and set them on snow-covered turntables to fake a stampede. Then they pushed them off a cliff into a river and filmed them falling.

Lemmings are driven by instinct to disperse and find resources. That is not the same as a biological urge for self-destruction, making this week’s insight all about not following the herd.

We keep treating public disagreement as a knowledge problem. If only the data were clearer, the models tighter, the charts simpler, then society would converge on sensible action. This Systems Spine from the Mindful Sceptic Insight Vault argues the opposite.

In a complex system, coordination is not won by facts in isolation, if at all.

It is won by stories that shape attention, meaning, and shared expectations. Those stories then get stress-tested on social and traditional media platforms that reward speed, heat, and simplicity. The result is a high likelihood of misinformation, distrust and vitriol as a predictable output of the information environment.

Once you see that, you stop arguing about who is right and start asking what selection pressures are shaping what spreads.

Data can describe constraints and evidence defines them, but a society acts through shared meaning, not shared spreadsheets. Stories tell people what matters, what is fair, who is responsible, and what sacrifice is for. The opposed orthodoxy assumes stories are just packaging for facts, but in practice the story gathers and presents the value system that decides which facts are acted upon.

If narrative is the operating system, facts only change behaviour when they are written into a moving story.

A fact without a frame is inert, and often threatening because it arrives without a role for the listener. Stories supply causality, stakes, identity, and a next action, which is why they travel and why they can move behaviour.

The orthodoxy says clearer facts and better logic should be enough, but persuasion is constrained by attention, emotion, and belonging. If behaviour change is the goal, then evidence has to be embedded in emotionally resonant stories rather than presented as standalone facts or logic.

Once facts are forced into story form, something else happens. The distribution systems select for the versions that spread best, not the versions that stay true.

However, there is a problem in the telling.

As stories spread, they tend to get simpler, a drift in meaning that elevates distortions and increases error in downstream judgment and policy.

As stories diffuse, especially through social media, they are compressed into memes, slogans, and moral binaries that are easy to repeat and difficult to falsify. Each retelling trades precision for shareability, and the distortions compound because the next audience never sees the original evidence. The orthodoxy assumes popular narratives stay anchored to the initial logic, but the mechanics of diffusion reward whatever reduces cognitive load.

Modern platforms that now carry most of our stories are structurally built to privilege speed and emotion over depth and retrieval.

Engagement lasts longer when we are fed lots of short emotive items reducing opportunity and visibility of high-depth content unless the user actively curates and retrieves.

Feeds reward what triggers immediate reaction, figure out the triggers, and then supply more of them. Long-form analysis does not just lose attention, it loses persistence because the platform cannot easily re-present it when it becomes relevant again. The orthodoxy says quality rises through virality, but virality is a function of engagement metrics, not epistemic value.

So when engagement is the reward, the content that wins tends to be conflict-heavy or cute, which has several severe consequences, including that it degrades cooperative capacity.

Outrage is sticky, and conflict is legible, so ranking systems that maximise engagement will preferentially amplify both. That shifts time and status toward attack and defence cycles, and away from slow, boring coordination work like trade-offs, sequencing, and compromise.

The orthodoxy says social media connects people for open exchange, but the incentive gradient points toward polarisation.

And as content generation becomes cheaper and faster, the volume surge intensifies these selection pressures and overwhelms reflection.

Rapid low-cost generation shifts creative effort from composition to selection, accelerating output beyond the capacity to reflect. Keep doing this and the unique human contribution is diluted unless stopping mechanisms are enforced.

When production is near-free, the scarce resource becomes attention and discernment, not content. Creators race to publish, audiences drown, and the equilibrium moves toward quantity, novelty, and performative certainty.

The orthodoxy treats AI as a simple amplifier of creativity, but it also changes the tempo and incentives of the whole ecology, which changes what gets made and what gets believed.

This brings us to the conclusion because the central risk is not wrong information in isolation, it is an environment that cannot coordinate even when truth is available.

Conclusion

This Systems Spine runs from story to platform to coordination breakdown…

1. Narratives decide what counts as real and actionable.

2. Facts only move people when they sit inside those narratives.

3. Then diffusion pressure strips nuance and selects for salience.

4. Social platforms intensify this by rewarding immediacy and emotion while erasing depth through poor retrieval.

5. Engagement ranking pushes the system toward conflict, which consumes the bandwidth that cooperation requires.

6. AI generation accelerates the whole loop by flooding attention and turning reflection into the bottleneck.

If you think you are in the information business, tell stories that resonate, preferably with a personal frame included. Take your time.

But even this is not enough. If the medium selects for heat, no amount of truth or emotional storytelling will buy you collective sense-making.

So, just do it… for yourself.

There is a story told at every kitchen table, every budget briefing, every mortgage approval with enthusiasm and passion. It comes in many forms, but the theme is always the same… the next generation will have more.

The story is not a conspiracy. It comes from genuine parental care, from advertising, from economic models built to need growth, and from one plain fact.

For most people in wealthy countries, for most of the last century, the story was true.

So here is the insight.

Ecological overshoot reads as a morality tale. It needs a guilty corporation, a government, a consumer before anyone will act. Overshoot is instead a fossil fuel pulse hitting a brain built to find a face for every harm, inside a system that answers to thermodynamics, not ethics. The instinct that once policed a small tribal band now hunts for villains when the cause is diffuse, delayed and collective. But because blame feels like justice, it works like a sedative, discharging shame while blocking the systems thinking that shifts outcomes. The failure is one of scale, not virtue. Nobody’s fault doesn’t mean overshoot is nobody’s problem.

My mate Joe came into the bar at the country club, sweat pouring from his brow and tidemarks on his golf shirt that was supposed to have quick wick technology. He waved across at us and got the standard nod from the assembled to order a round.

“How’d you go?” I ask as the drinks arrive.

“Those fat grips. Bloody terrible things, every shot went left. Baz will have to take them off. He should never have told me to change them. Last lesson he’ll ever get from me.”

Blame. You can’t escape it. It’s in every feed, every media outlet, and every conversation that has ever happened in a bar after a round of golf.

It begins as a moral judgement. Something goes wrong, and we instantly attach fault to a person, an institution, or to a thing and on bewilderingly rare occasions, to ourselves. And it is not a calm, neutral diagnosis because we really get into it, and blame hard so that it’s believable to everyone.

It’s psychology 101 really. When things go wrong we feel the heavy emotions of hurt, fear, shame, and powerlessness. Blame performs the handy function of turning those vulnerable states into anger, and anger feels so much stronger. It has agency and we latch onto it.

We feel even better if we over-attribute other people’s failures to their character and not the situation; a neat cognitive shortcut. If I am late, the traffic was dreadful. If you are late, you are careless and should have left home earlier. Rather than go to the trouble of untangling context or, heaven forbid, taking responsibility, it is mentally cheaper to label someone as flawed. So we think fast and simplify, which easily hardens into judgement.

And there is another deeper comfort in blame, too. Many of us carry an unspoken belief that the world is fair, meaning that good outcomes track good behaviour. So when misfortune strikes, blaming the victim restores that illusion of order. If it was their mistake, then we are safe as long as we avoid the mistake they made. This story protects us from randomness and, again, reinforces feelings of control.

And then there is blame’s emotional sibling shame, the painful feeling that I am fundamentally flawed or somehow bad. For some, admitting a mistake does not register as I did something wrong, but as I am wrong. And to avoid that collapse of identity, the mind deflects. If it is your fault, it cannot be mine. Blame can be a sound shield against shame if I can make my mistake your fault, so I don’t have to feel the searing heat of shame that comes with believing it might be mine. Blaming becomes an exquisite act of self-preservation. My ego survives.

As Brené Brown puts it, blame is the discharge of discomfort, and it runs in the opposite direction to accountability. It looks backward and asks whom to punish, which makes it reactive, aggressive, and tends to corrode trust. Accountability, the logical counter that brings in responsibility, looks forward and asks what now. Unlike blame, it is measured and uncomfortable because it requires vulnerability. But it takes effort and courage.

If you have read any of the Mindful Sceptic essays, you will know where this is going. Blame is one of the biggest comforting myths there is, and it’s embedded in professional orthodoxies like concrete. And it has protected us from accountability for our individual and collective actions, we are going to need a jackhammer to dislodge its grip.

Let’s begin with the standard idea that environmental damage has nothing to do with me.

Mainstream environmental discourse assumes ecological degradation is primarily due to identifiable moral failings of corporations, governments, consumers, or economic systems, and that assigning blame is a prerequisite for meaningful action.

Environmental debate typically involves climate criminals, corporate greed, irresponsible consumers, government betrayal, and systemic injustice. Across the political spectrum, ecological harm is about bad actors making bad choices. The mining company really has to stop that leaky tailings dam from wrecking the wetland. Let’s ask them to clean it up and give them a hefty fine if they don’t. The assumption is that if we can identify the guilty party, pressure or punish them, the problem can be solved.

A challenge with this, even if there are bad actors, is that policy debates become more polarised when issues are cast in terms of blame and virtue rather than shared risk and trade-offs. Studies by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues on moral foundations’ theory suggest that individuals interpret complex policy problems through intuitive moral lenses of fairness, loyalty, authority, and harm before engaging in analytical reasoning. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution become stories about villains and victims. Once it’s a moral problem it is easy to identify the villains, my tribe obviously has fewer emissions than yours.

Analyses of climate coverage in the United States and Europe show that reporting is usually about fossil fuel companies versus activists, governments versus citizens, developed versus developing nations. Attribution of responsibility dominates headlines, while structural drivers such as energy dependence, infrastructure lock-in, and thermodynamic constraints receive far less attention. Indeed, on mindful sceptics we have argued at length that blindness to the laws of nature and their consequences is an epidemic. But for the media outlets and their viewers it works perfectly because the effect is to specify onto a person, or some recognisable entity, distributed and systemic processes.

Surveys consistently show that people see corporate behaviour or government failure as primary causes of environmental decline, while far fewer identify energy density, population scale, or infrastructural design as core drivers. On the rare occasions systems thinking happens, the thoughts are often translated as someone should have stopped this. Someone failed.

There is a logic and ubiquity to this blame.

Many modern legal and ethical systems are predicated on identifying a responsible party. It is much easier and morally satisfying if someone is in the dock. But environmental degradation at planetary scale is not the product of a single decision-maker. It is the cumulative outcome of billions of ordinary actions embedded within energy-intensive systems developed over centuries. When discourse begins with blame as its organising principle, it lets me, with my ordinary and perfectly legal actions, off the hook.

But here we are with mainstream environmental discourse that treats ecological breakdown as moral failure, and assumes that finding and confronting the guilty party is a necessary first step toward action. And there are times when this works as it should. Maybe the mining company did skimp on the tailings dam construction that failed in the first flood event. It’s not that responsibility is irrelevant, but it can too easily substitute for the detailed analysis that would identify the actual causes.

George Marshall, founder of Climate Outreach and author of Don’t Even Think About It, argues that abstract systemic explanations fail to engage people emotionally, and that effective climate communication requires personal stories, identifiable messengers, and vivid emotional connection. Easily done with a bit of blame. Per Espen Stoknes, the psychologist and economist whose five-strategy framework is now taught in communication programs around the world, makes the same case in What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming. Climate messaging must be social, story-based, and emotionally immediate to override the psychological barriers that drive disengagement. The emerging consensus, repeated in workshops, NGO strategy papers, and communications research, holds that abstract critical thinking about a global problem produces disengagement, while personalised moral narratives produce action.

Not all stories include blame, but personalised stories travel further than systemic analysis. However, what works to communicate a message and what works to solve the problem may not be the same thing. A Duke University study found that climate framing which personalises blame failed to persuade sceptics and triggered a significant backfire effect, polarising the audience further. The more a message names a moral villain, the more it triggers identity protection in anyone outside the messengers’ political tribe. A communication strategy designed to engage people ends up with the opposite.

The evidence from energy transitions, infrastructure redesign, and collective action governance suggests that tapping emotions is rarely enough. Systems move first, and then people, now embedded in changed systems, change too. The ozone layer did not recover because consumers were morally convicted of their CFC use. It recovered because international regulatory redesign removed the choice from the system entirely. Marshall and Stoknes are solving for engagement, which is fair enough, but overshoot requires redesign. These are different problems, and they need different diagnoses.

And yet, we know them, they are with us because of biology and physics.

The ecological overshoot of 8 billion people on a finite planet is not best explained as moral collapse but as an emergent outcome of evolutionary imperatives to expand and reproduce, thermodynamic constraints governing energy and entropy, and a one-time fossil fuel energy pulse that temporarily lifted natural limits on population and consumption.

Scientists calculate the collective human footprint on the planet by totalling the surface area of land and sea required to provide the food, timber, and fibre resources we consume and to sequester the CO₂ we emit. This is then weighed against the planet’s biocapacity, which is the Earth’s actual supply of productive ecosystems.

We are in overshoot. Human demand for biological services exceeds the environment’s ability to regenerate them within a year. Demand is met by depleting the natural capital.

Humanity currently uses resources at a rate equivalent to roughly 1.7 Earths, according to Global Footprint Network estimates that use these evidence techniques, and dumps the inevitable waste. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have risen from about 280 ppm in pre-industrial times to over 420 ppm in 2025. Vertebrate wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70% on average since 1970, according to WWF’s Living Planet Index. Wild mammals make up just 4% of the mammal biomass and half of that comes from the marine species. These are evidenced consequences of scale, energy throughput, and biological behaviour. Overshoot is a consequence of 8 billion people acting exactly as expected.

Across species, populations expand when energy and resources allow it. This is how ecology works for everything from bacteria in a nutrient-rich petri dish to deer introduced into predator-free environments. Numbers increase until constrained by resource limits or feedbacks. Humans are no exception. Over the past two centuries, global population rose from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today thanks to rising per person energy use and agricultural productivity. This demographic surge was not triggered by a sudden decline in virtue worthy of blame, but by improved survival rates enabled by sanitation, medicine, and, critically, fossil-fuel-powered food systems.

We could blame some outgroup for this expansion and overshoot but, as Mr Spock would say, that would be illogical.

Population growth is a consequence of innate biology, where more making is the imperative. It also follows the laws of thermodynamics.

All complex systems require energy flows to maintain structure, otherwise entropy increases. And in a closed system, entropy (disorder) always increases. Industrial civilisation is a dissipative structure that follows this Second Law of Thermodynamics and can only be sustained by high-quality energy inputs. In 1800, global primary energy consumption was modest and largely biomass-based. Today it exceeds 600 exajoules per year, with fossil fuels still supplying around 80% of that total. This energy enables fertiliser production through the Haber–Bosch process, global transportation networks, mechanised agriculture, steel, cement, and digital infrastructure. Each transformation increases entropy, neatly following the second law, making the growth of cities, trade, and material wealth physically inseparable from accelerating energy dissipation. Overshoot, that in 2025 occurred on July 24, is a consequence.

Here’s the thing. None of these dynamics require a theory of moral failure.

So let’s return, for a moment, to shame.

The mind deflects fault onto others to avoid the searing heat of the feeling that I am not merely someone who did something wrong, but someone who is wrong. The distinction between guilt and shame is the distinction between a correctable error and a permanent verdict on identity. I made a mistake, I am guilty and I can make it right. Shame tells me that I am the mistake, and there is nothing I can do about it. Blame is a handy escape route from shame because, after all, it was your fault.

Ecological overshoot produces a version of this dynamic at civilisational scale. When a person or a culture absorbs what industrial humanity has done to the biosphere it is genuinely confronting, and the psychological options are limited. One is denial. The numbers are wrong, the scientists are mistaken, it is not really that bad. Another is grief, being homesick at home, which is honest but difficult to sustain at the scale required. A third, and the most common, is the diffuse, nauseating sense that to be human is to be the problem, that modernity is a moral catastrophe with no redemption, that we are, as a species, fundamentally and perhaps irredeemably wrong.

Civilisational shame drives the blame reflex just as personal shame does. If we are the problem, the mind reaches instinctively for a subset of ‘we’ that can bear the full weight of the verdict. The corporations, colonialists, capitalists, consumers, politicians or whoever can be identified as the real humans responsible, so that the rest of us, and perhaps humanity itself, can be partly acquitted. Blame becomes not just emotional stabilisation but species-level self-preservation. We are not wrong. They are.

This is obtuse logic, but the brain is powerful and can convince us of almost anything.

The more precise and objective thermodynamic lens offers a different psychological escape route from shame, one that does not require a victim. If the disorder of modernity is the predictable output of evolutionary biology meeting a finite burst of dense energy, then the verdict is not that humanity is morally defective. Humanity did what any energy-using, complexity-building biological system does when handed an extraordinary surplus. It grew.

That is not a comfortable frame, but it is correctable in a way that a moral defect is not. A thermodynamic diagnosis at least gives the option of redesign. A shame-driven verdict points toward punishment, which in the absence of any satisfying target circles back eventually to the self, or, until we find the courage, to nefarious actors in expensive suits.

Eight billion people living within energy-intensive systems on a finite biosphere create pressures that emerge from physics and biology before ethics enters the conversation. It is tempting, perhaps irresistible, to frame overshoot as a fault, a moral collapse that can be blamed on someone or some institution. Only this would misdiagnose what is, at root, a convergence of evolutionary imperatives, thermodynamic law, and a historically anomalous energy subsidy.

That is why we cannot help it.

So we can summarise all this as a premise.

Blame functions primarily as psychological stabilisation to preserve moral identity and perceived control, but it reinforces tribal division, defensive reasoning, and zero-sum politics, thereby obstructing the systems thinking and cross-institutional cooperation required to redesign complex socio-ecological systems.

Blame is emotionally stabilising, which means we like it.

Blame will offer moral clarity and emotional relief. For the individual, it’s great, but at scale it fragments coalitions, discourages institutional learning, and entrenches adversarial politics.

Haidt’s work in The Righteous Mind is already in this essay. His moral foundations research concludes that human beings are tribal and moralistic and that this tribalism is the evolutionary substrate on which collective action is built. Shared moral conviction, a common enemy, a sense that the group’s identity is under threat are the psychological mechanisms through which large groups of otherwise self-interested individuals have historically coordinated to do costly things together.

And we have coordinated to great success, at least in growth terms. Large cooperative groups work without relying on kinship bonds, but at the same time makes it harder to consider other frameworks for moral truth or ways to run a society. Blame can make groups sticky.

This is a serious challenge. If coordination requires a villain, and systems thinking dissolves the villain, have we improved the diagnosis while removing the motivation to act?

The answer depends on what kind of action we need. Moral framing is highly effective at triggering short-duration, high-intensity responses exemplified by protests, elections, boycotts, and campaigns. It mobilises people who are already sympathetic and deepens their commitment. What it does poorly is sustain the low-intensity, long-duration, technically complex institutional cooperation that infrastructure redesign actually requires. Passing a carbon pricing scheme, redesigning building codes, reforming agricultural subsidies, renegotiating grid architecture will not be accomplished by moral arousal. They need the grinding, multi-year, multi-stakeholder work of institutional redesign, in rooms that include people who disagree politically.

Haidt’s prescription of tribalism is calibrated for winning elections, defending territory, or sustaining religious communities. It is a prescription developed for a world in which the challenge is motivating an in-group to act against an out-group. Overshoot is not that kind of problem.

There is no out-group to defeat.

The system that needs redesigning includes everyone, runs on everyone’s energy consumption, and requires everyone’s institutions to change simultaneously. For that task, the blame game keeps producing out-groups when what is needed is coalitions.

Haidt is right about what motivates tribal mammals. There is no reason to dispute neuroscience. But tribal motivation is a poor tool for a systemic problem, and I wonder whether professional communicators who have built their entire strategy around that tool have considered what it might be producing at scale.

And there is another reason blame is a problem.

Human cognitive architecture evolved to assign responsibility within small tribal groups, favouring clear agents and moral narratives; this creates systematic blind spots when confronting large-scale, distributed systems in which causation is diffuse, delayed, and emergent.

For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small bands, rarely exceeding 100–150 individuals. In the brutal reality of foraging for food every day, cooperation, reputation tracking, and punishment of defectors were essential to survival. Identifying who failed to share food, who violated norms, or who posed a threat had immediate adaptive value. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work on neocortex size and group limits suggests that human cognitive capacity evolved to manage stable social networks at roughly this scale.

Our brains were wired for these small, relatively intimate groups, where cause and effect had a face. If someone shirked, hoarded, or harmed, you saw it. The consequence was immediate and personal. Agency was not an abstract concept of some other thing, it was the person across the fire from you or leading the singing in the next fire along. So we became exquisitely sensitive to who did what, and who was to blame.

Cognitive science confirms this bias toward agency; a somebody did it response. Humans display what researchers call the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), a tendency to infer intentional actors behind ambiguous events. This bias helped ancestral humans avoid predators or social betrayal but also predisposes modern populations to see deliberate intent in complex outcomes.

Similarly, the fundamental attribution error, well established in social psychology, leads individuals to overemphasise personal traits and underemphasise situational or structural factors when explaining behaviour. When scaled to planetary crises, this bias favours stories about greedy executives or narcissistic politicians over explanations involving feedback loops, infrastructure design, or energy dependence.

Time blindness compounds the problem. What researchers call hyperbolic discounting shows that humans systematically undervalue future risks relative to immediate rewards. Climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity collapse unfold over decades, often with nonlinear tipping points and lagged consequences. Our cognitive architecture struggles with slow-moving, probabilistic threats like these. Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between fast, intuitive thinking and slower analytical reasoning rationalises the gap. Our intuitive cognition seeks clear cause-and-effect narratives, while systemic environmental problems require statistical and abstract reasoning that feels cognitively effortful and emotionally unsatisfying.

The challenge to our evolved thinking abilities is that ecological and economic systems run on distributed causation. No single individual causes atmospheric CO₂ accumulation. It is the cumulative result of billions of energy-consuming actions, most of them inside industrial systems that were built to make those actions normal. Add feedback loops, path dependence, and emergent properties, and the trail is lost altogether. You cannot draw a straight line from one actor to the outcome.

But our moral intuition keeps asking for a culprit with a name. Neuroscience and behavioural research on moral outrage show that attributing harm to identifiable agents activates reward pathways in the brain, creating a reinforcing emotional response. Blame feels clarifying and energising. This is why public debates so often slide into personalised blame instead of structural diagnosis. Messengers beware.

The alternative is to distribute responsibility thinly across populations and generations. This is a problem too as it generates cognitive overload and emotional ambiguity. The mind prefers a villain. How many drama shows on television have you quietly been rooting for the villain?

We have ourselves a mismatch. A brain that is comfortable with personalisation, moral simplification, and resistance to structural explanations, is great in a tribe on the savanna but not well suited to complex, long-duration environmental crises. Recognising this does not excuse harmful behaviour, nor does it mean there are no villains engaged in large-scale impacts. They exist. But being ready to blame explains why public discourse so often ignores the big picture.

When environmental breakdown is treated as a systems failure rather than a morality tale, the question shifts from whom to blame to what to fix.

Urban transport studies by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy demonstrate that residents in dense, transit-oriented cities produce 60–80% lower transport emissions than those in car-dependent suburbs because the built environment makes low-carbon choices easier and often automatic.

Similarly, the rapid decline in coal use in the United Kingdom over the past decade was driven less by moral awakening than by structural shifts in carbon pricing, renewable energy cost reductions, regulatory reform, and grid redesign. Once the system made cleaner electricity economically viable and operationally reliable, emissions fell sharply. The International Energy Agency has repeatedly shown that efficiency standards and infrastructure investment deliver greater and more consistent emission reductions than voluntary behavioural appeals.

The recovery of the ozone layer following the Montreal Protocol was achieved not by vilifying consumers of aerosol sprays, but by redesigning industrial chemistry, phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, and supporting technological substitution.

Research in behavioural economics shows that defaults, pricing signals, and social norms embedded in institutions guide behaviour far more effectively than moral exhortation alone. Countries that implemented automatic enrolment in renewable electricity tariffs or retirement savings saw dramatic participation increases without requiring individuals to undergo moral transformation or blame anyone.

The lesson is that when we align systems with desired outcomes, large-scale change becomes feasible. Leverage lies in rules, feedbacks, and information flows rather than in moral condemnation.

When the system changes, outcomes follow.

When you encounter an environmental controversy that has been organised around the search for a guilty party, it helps to run three questions in sequence.

1. What evolutionary or biological mechanism is operating here?

Human beings expand consumption when surplus energy is available, resist loss more intensely than they pursue equivalent gain, discount future risk against present reward, and conform to the behaviour of their immediate social group. These are not character flaws. They are deeply conserved traits that were adaptive across almost the entire span of human existence. If a behaviour pattern is near-universal across cultures and income levels, the explanation almost certainly lies at this level. Car dependency is not primarily explained by laziness. It is explained by the fact that humans are predisposed to take the path of least resistance when a system has been designed to make driving the easiest option. Identifying the mechanism tells you where the intervention needs to land.

2. What thermodynamic or physical constraint is being violated, and by how much?

Overshoot is a quantifiable condition. As noted already, the Global Footprint Network calculated the date humanity consumed more from nature than the planet can regenerate in a twelve-month period was 24 July in 2025. Individual sectors have analogous measures, from the carbon intensity of energy supply and the nutrient loading of agricultural runoff, to the material throughput per unit of economic output. These numbers tell you the size of the gap between what the system is doing and what the biosphere can absorb. They also tell you whether the gap is embedded in infrastructure with 30- or 50-year lifespans or behavioural, where attitude change might actually reach it. In the UK coal case, grid architecture locked in fossil generation, regardless of what individuals chose. No amount of consumer virtue could close it. Regulatory and investment redesign could, and did.

3. What infrastructure or incentive redesign could align human behaviour with physical limits, without requiring moral transformation as a precondition?

This is where the leverage actually lives, and it is the question that blame-framed debate consistently fails to reach. Newman and Kenworthy’s research on urban transport showed that dense, transit-oriented cities produce dramatically lower emissions not because their residents are more virtuous but because the system makes low-carbon choices the default. The Montreal Protocol worked because it restructured the industrial chemistry of refrigeration and aerosols, making CFC-free alternatives commercially viable and legally mandatory. No consumer had to change their values. The system changed, and behaviour followed.

Naturally, there is a crucial caveat.

Running these three questions does not dissolve individual responsibility. There are still actors who make choices, and some of those choices are better or worse than others. But the question stops being who deserves blame for this? and becomes what mechanism is driving this, how large is the physical constraint, and what system change would move the needle regardless of moral consensus?

That is a question a sustainability consultant can take into a client meeting. It is a question a retired engineer can raise in a community planning session. It is the question that has actually produced results in the cases where results have occurred.

This essay has danced around a quiet paradox. The same mechanism that protects an individual ego from fracture can, at scale, fracture a society.

The blame reflex may be an evolutionary inheritance, but many sociologists and psychologists argue its frequency and intensity have spiked in the modern era. We have not necessarily become worse people. We have constructed an environment that acts as a super-stimulus for blame.

A generation ago, you might have been a Labour voter and also a member of the local footy club, a parishioner, or a neighbourhood watch member, groups that included people with entirely different political views. You had more than one tribe.

Those overlapping affiliations created friction. They made it harder to reduce someone to a single disagreement. The modern shift is identity sorting that has collapsed political, religious, and cultural identities into two or three mega-identities. When you blame the other side now, you are taking on what feels like the antithesis of everything you value. Gone are the days of banter and healthy argument. Blame stops being transactional and starts feeling existential.

And then we added a virtual world to steal our time and change our interactions. Social media platforms are engineered to prioritise high-arousal emotions because those emotions drive engagement. Blame and outrage sit at the top of that scale. On the socials, a nuanced take on a complex problem gets crickets. A post that names a villain and assigns responsibility spikes, and the reward loop kicks in. Likes and shares from your tribe deliver a dopamine hit. The system gamifies blame, and we adapt to the game.

Certainly, the world is objectively more complex than it was 100 years ago. Global supply chains, infectious diseases, economic shifts are large, convoluted systems that are difficult to map, let alone explain. The human brain prefers clarity, but the gap between how complex problems are and how simple we want the explanation to be, has widened beyond our ability to cope. Blame closes that gap by shrinking a thousand systemic variables into a single target. It was their fault.

But the thing is, it’s nobody’s fault.

For 96 percent of recorded human history and 99.93% of our evolutionary past, we were constrained by endogenous energy. The calories we could consume gathered through the muscle power of humans and animals. Social structures, moral codes, and population levels moved at the pace of the sun and the seasons. Then came the spike. Roughly 200 years ago, we accessed a vast inheritance of exogenous energy in coal, oil, and gas. One barrel of oil delivered the work equivalent of about 12.5 thousand hours of human labour. This was a phase change. Almost overnight, we became a species that uses dense energy to push hard against natural limits.

And energy increases complexity.

More energy leads to more specialised roles, which leads to more bureaucracy, which leads to more intricate global systems. As long as energy remained cheap and expanding, growth was not simply a choice. Biological systems follow what is called the Maximum Power Principle. If surplus energy is available, organisms will use it to expand their reach. Humans are not exempt from that pattern.

From the vantage point of the energy pulse, fault-finding makes little sense. Blaming the colonialists, the capitalists or the corporations resembles blaming a plant for growing toward light. Once high-density energy was used to reduce infant mortality and increase food production, path dependency set in. Billions of people were as inevitable as the global metabolism. No single actor directs the aggregate energy burn. It is a self-organising process constrained by thermodynamics.

The appeal of this lens is that it strips away some of the moral charge. If the disorder of modernity is thermodynamically conditioned, guilt becomes less explanatory. Blame becomes less useful.

The core reality remains stark.

We are a species that struck a geological jackpot and are now living through the high-speed, high-friction, energy dissipating consequences of spending that jackpot all at once. Understanding that it is nobody’s fault in the causal sense is crucial to what comes next.

Joe’s golf game will not improve by blaming Baz, the golf pro, for fat grips. Baz probably knows this. So does Joe. Blaming the fat grips and the advice are just easier to say out loud, making Joe feel so much better.

But you cannot redesign a system you are too ashamed to examine honestly.

Primary Sources

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.

Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2011). Apocalypse soon? Dire messages reduce belief in global warming by threatening belief in a just world. Psychological Science, 22(1), 34–43.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage Books.

Newman, P., & Kenworthy, J. (1999). Sustainability and cities. Overcoming automobile dependence. Island Press.

Smil, V. (2017). Energy and civilization. A history. MIT Press.

Stoknes, P. E. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming. Toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Between a research laboratory and public understanding lies a translation chain.

Press officers, journalists, policy advisors, and advocates each have good reasons to simplify what arrived at their desk. This Insight names the cumulative result.

System drift is the process by which qualified findings become confident assertions, and confident assertions become things that everyone knows.

The evidence stays the same. What people say evidence shows does not.

System drift explains why the sceptic’s interrogation of authority is structurally necessary, not merely virtuous. Being a Mindful Sceptic builds the case. Read it there first.

Grass has come up thick to choke the wheel ruts and in the paddocks shrubs are everywhere trying to compete with the first thin trees.

From the road an abandoned field reads like healing, a return to nature, the very rewilding that so many suggest is a great idea.

Up close, it’s sad.

The hard number

In orbit are satellites that generate high-resolution imagery of the Earth’s surface. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) fuses data from these Sentinel-2 and Landsat systems with advanced machine learning to track long-term shifts in land cover.

Scientists analyse the spectral signatures of vegetation, looking for a distinct transition from the uniform, seasonal cycles of managed crops to the chaotic and uneven regrowth of natural shrubs and weeds.

So they don’t miscount fields that are fallow, they apply a strict temporal filter, requiring a field to show zero agricultural activity for a consecutive period of two to five years before it is officially classified as abandoned. This satellite data is then cross-referenced with ground-level agricultural census records to filter out land lost to urbanisation, resulting in a precise measurement of the leaky bucket of global arable land.

The hard number is that the FAO estimates that the area of croplands abandoned every year globally is approximately

This rate has been consistent since 2001 and is equivalent to roughly 78 million hectares in a generation, which, if this were its own country, it would sit between Pakistan and Chile.

78 million hectares is well over twice the size of Germany and larger than the entire country of France.

On average, these fields are abandoned for ~14.2 years before being cultivated again or repurposed.

Even if these numbers are imprecise, they are directionally reliable, and they imply three things that don’t sit comfortably together.

First, land abandonment is real and large enough to matter. ‘Millions of hectares per year’ is not a rounding error, even if it feels like one. If you compare the 3.6 million hectares against the world’s 1.4 billion hectares of active arable land, we lose roughly 1 out of every 385 hectares to abandonment each year. Whilst this may not sound like a lot, it is cumulative and adds up over time. Plus, every hectare lost means another hectare in production must take up the food slack.

Second, this hard number has to go alongside the 2% growth in production for 30 years, the goal of doubling global food production by 2050 required to meet projected demand. 2% for 30 is shorthand used by food security experts to describe the minimum required productivity increase to feed a projected global population of nearly 10 billion people without further destroying natural ecosystems; a task that gets even harder as agricultural land is abandoned.

The third issue is that net change also hides churn. You can lose land in one category while expanding elsewhere. The 3.6 million hectares can seem modest, but it is a net number, so the systems can look relatively stable while relocating its footprint.

Again, the FAO and United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification estimate that the actual annual loss is roughly 10 to 12 million hectares of agricultural land every year just from land degraded through drought and desertification.

But roughly 5 to 8 million hectares of new land are brought into production annually. This is almost exclusively through deforestation where tropical forests are converted to soy or cattle pasture and encroachment into peatlands.

Much of the land that is degrading and abandoned was originally high-quality with established topsoil. The new fields come from low-nutrient, frontier land, typically cleared rainforest. This new land is less productive initially and declines in fertility faster, requiring massive chemical inputs to reach the same yield, making the ‘2% for 30’ growth target even harder to hit.

Abandoned doesn’t automatically mean recovered. If the average duration that land is not producing food is around a decade plus, then much of what looks like ecological return is a temporary phase. The land is not rewilded, it just goes out of production for a time that is long enough to matter but short for ecological succession and soil recovery.

As usual, the headline number of 3.6 million hectares of arable land abandoned per year is less informative than the mechanism of substitution underneath it. Abandonment can reduce pressure in one place while increasing it somewhere else. It can create carbon uptake in one landscape while shifting fertiliser-driven production to another. It can look like land sparing while functioning like land shuffling.

Framing the hard number

At 3.6 million hectares per year, the abstract becomes easier to hold if you slow it to a rate. That is roughly 9,900 hectares every day — which means that between the time you sat down to read this and the time you reach the end of it, somewhere between two and three thousand hectares of cropland will have formally exited production. Not degraded. Not stressed. Gone.

Nearly 63% of all European farms are under 5 hectares in size. Three thousand hectares can be plenty of farms.

Agricultural land abandonment is often framed as either failure introducing food insecurity or redemption as rewilding, but it is better understood as a predictable outcome of profitability interacting with ecological limits.

Some basic definitions are useful here because abandonment is holding on to a lot of meaning.

Agricultural land abandonment is land that stops being actively farmed for a period long enough to be classified as no longer in production. The practical problem is that idle can look like fallow, and both can look like shrubland from space.

Mechanistically, abandonment usually isn’t a moral choice or a single-cause collapse. It’s a marginalisation spiral, unique to each farm but with the general pattern that begins with ecological stress from single or combinations of salinity, erosion, nutrient depletion, heat or water stress, and slope that raises the cost of maintaining yields.

The necessary economic response requires more inputs, more machinery, more debt, more risk, while commodity prices remain volatile. The farmer or farm business become progressively more precarious.

Then, typically, a trigger event arrives, such as a subsidy change, family succession failure, price crash, illness, or perhaps a better job offer, after which exit becomes rational because the land is not dead, but it’s no longer worth keeping alive.

The named constraint here is the biophysical profit constraint. Farming is bound by soil, water, terrain, and climate, but it is also bound by whether those constraints can be overcome at a price someone can pay. When the cost curve crosses the market curve, land is quietly abandoned.

Fallow fields initially taken over by weeds and then slowly returning to nature is what you see at the end.

It’s helpful to see where it starts.

Behind the hard number

Modern farming is an engineering project laid over biology. Fuel, fertiliser, machinery, finance, seed systems, irrigation infrastructure, roads, storage, export terminals is a scaffolding built onto soil. Land gets abandoned when 1) that scaffolding becomes too expensive for the output, or 2) when the land’s biophysical limits demand inputs the farmer cannot fund, or 3) where the soil capacity is so eroded it cannot function to produce food at all.

In mature economies, subsidies, insurance, procurement rules, and trade policy are meant to keep farmers in business. In practice, they also decide which landscapes stay in production. If policy rewards scale, flatness, and exportable commodities, then small, steep, fragmented, or marginal holdings become systematically unfundable.

Abandonment becomes policy expressed as geography.

Analysis suggests that socio-economic drivers may account for roughly 60–70% of abandonment catalysts, with direct ecological failure as 30–40%, and the two are entangled anyway. A field or a farm can be healthy enough on paper, but the labour and time required to farm it becomes irrational when cities offer multiples of income for a lot less effort and stress. The land doesn’t have to fail for the logic to fail.

The comforting story has it that land gets abandoned, nature returns, emissions fall, biodiversity rises. These might be true and are fine, so long as everyone remembers there are several possible consequences and outcomes:

• food still needs to be produced elsewhere

• the land is re-cleared later

• regrowth is interrupted by fire or development

• displaced demand shifts to more fertiliser-intensive systems

• abandoned land becomes a speculative asset.

In other words, rebound in environmental values is conditional.

Abandonment is not automatically land restoration. It is a land-use decision shaped by prices, policy, labour, and biophysical constraints. It is rarely a choice to rehabilitate.

Clean metrics that imply clean outcomes are a delight. We will get the satellites to provide the images for us to count hectares saved, hectares restored, hectares abandoned.

Institutions repeat them because they travel well through reports, speeches, and ESG presentations. They also allow everyone to sound serious without confronting the constraint that agriculture is a competition between uses within landscapes, and landscapes are constrained by energy, water, soil, and the cost of overcoming those limits.

Instead of pragmatism around these realities, land abandonment becomes a convenient narrative prop for multiple tribes.

Progress narratives will say, look, pressure is easing.

Crisis narratives will say, look, we’re losing farmland.

Tech narratives will be typically upbeat and claim we can intensify elsewhere.

Conservation narratives will quietly be happy about land abandoned and say that rewilding is happening.

Each story can be partially true, but they collide unless someone does some full system accounting for what production moved, what inputs rose, what ecosystems took the substitute load, what happens after the average 14.2 years when the land comes back into play.

Not to mention what happens to the soil during that short rest.

People repeat the simple story because the complex one creates obligations. You have to specify boundaries, time horizons, counterfactual land use, and displaced demand.

Complexity is expensive.

The Deeper Pattern

Abandonment is a signal, not a victory. In most cases, it marks the profitability constraint tightening past the point of viability. This means any policy that sidesteps soil, water, and labour realities will only buy some political theatre and perhaps a few votes, but not resilience.

Where abandonment occurs, the pressure for substitute clearing or intensification elsewhere is unavoidable. Not exporting the damage requires enforcement capacity and political appetite that are rarely available at the same time.

Many agricultural landscapes are constrained by the vagaries of the environment. Steep, salinised, water-stressed country will drop out earliest and keep dropping out. It is possible to plan for this eventuality, but we don’t.

Ecological recovery from agriculture is slow and conditional. Short-term abandonment will not reliably deliver the biodiversity or carbon outcomes that advocates promise. It is important to be honest about rewilding time.

Where institutions must report hectares lost, these numbers need context. What were the system boundaries? What replaced the production? What inputs changed? And what did the landscape look like a decade later? Even if measurement is hard and politically inconvenient, never leave a number alone.

Being A Mindful Sceptic

Pick a piece of land you know this week and audit it. Your region would do, or a food supply chain you depend on, a farm district you drive through, a paddock at the edge of town.

Write down in plain language what factor could cause that land to stop being farmed. Water scarcity, labour shortage, debt load, slope, salinity, or a policy shift are the candidates worth naming.

Then ask whether net production would fall if that land stopped producing, or whether somewhere else would simply pick up the slack. Carbon markets call this leakage. The question matters more than the term.

Work out what extra inputs would be needed to keep production going regardless. Irrigation, fertiliser, diesel, land clearing, freight distances. Put them on paper, so the true cost of continuity becomes legible.

Finally, ask what would have to be true for abandonment here to become durable recovery of soil health and productive capacity, rather than a pause in production. That last question is the hardest one, and it is the one most plans quietly skip.

Key Points

• Agricultural land abandonment can resemble rewilding from a distance. Up close, it is usually the last visible stage of a profitability and constraints spiral, where margins thin, inputs rise, labour shifts, and exit becomes rational.

• The headline hectares look decisive, but when land drops out in one region, demand does not politely disappear. It is met through expansion, intensification, or clearing somewhere else, so churn and substitution sit behind the tidy totals.

• Abandoned is a loose word. In practice, it happens for long enough to unsettle communities and local economies, yet often too short and too conditional to deliver full ecological succession, durable biodiversity gains, or stable carbon outcomes.

• A credible response treats abandonment as a signal, traces displaced damage, plans transitions for the most constrained landscapes, and is explicit about recovery time.

Back to the Front

The sagging fence and the quiet gate are not nature’s victory lap. They mark the moment a profit and loss account won a fight with a hillside, or a dry season, or a son who didn’t come back.

If we want abandonment to mean recovery, we have to treat it as a system and understand why the land was walked away from in the first place.

Every social media platform runs on the same arithmetic. Fresh content displaces what came before it, and emotional content travels further than complex content from the first post.

The problem runs deeper than virality. Recency-weighted feeds have no mechanism to resurface an artefact whose moment has passed.

Depth does not simply lose the initial race. It disappears from the track entirely.

This insight examines how that structural design choice plays out, and what a deliberate reader can do about it.

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The koala is a remarkable fundraising asset. It is also a convenient story because the villain and the hero fit on a poster, and the solution feels obvious enough to print on a tote bag.

But the affection people carry for a charismatic animal is not neutral. It shapes what they believe the problem is, what qualifies as a solution, and which evidence they are prepared to sit with.

Saving the Koala examines how emotional engagement with a single species distorts reasoning about biodiversity at scale.

The brain evolved for immediacy and still runs that firmware. Slow, diffuse, planetary-scale threats find no purchase on circuitry built for snakes and rival tribes. Over millennia, humans built cultural architectures to compensate for what individual cognition cannot manage alone. Scientific institutions, legal systems, civic deliberation and social contracts that worked required enormous effort and social enforcement to hold together. Then came an economy optimised for frictionless speed that dismantled the slow institutions that had been managing them, and we are back to where evolution left us.

In 1987, I went to live in Zimbabwe. What a joy and a privilege that was for a greenhorn academic. A postdoctoral fellowship in Africa was dreamland. One of my first safari adventures was to Mana Pools on the banks of the Zambezi River. One morning we were back from a game drive and at the edge of the camp I spotted a snake that required investigation, for most in that part of the world are quite dangerous. “Oh, it’s okay,” I announced with unmerited surety, “just a young python.”

It was indeed an African Rock Python (Python sebae), not venomous and harmless enough for me to lie down on my stomach for a close up photograph. Not happy with this intrusion, the snake decided to strike, which I didn’t think it could. It missed, and I jumped back up almost as fast.

I escaped my lapse in instinct and sat back down, still intact and able to recount the story at dinner parties ever since. In the telling, it was clear that Westernised humans would not survive the perils of nature for very long without our machines, buildings and supplies. We have lost the knack that we must have had, given humans had lived with such perils for thousands of generations.

The truth is that we still have the mental acuity for survival. That wiring still dominates our thoughts. Our first thought is for the snake in the grass. What is coming next, and very soon after, is our second, third and fourth thought too. This now thinking is what kept us alive on the savanna. But it might be a liability for the scale and pace of the challenges posed by a population of 8 billion humans.

The problems that now threaten human systems arrive as trends, as parts per million, as basis points on a discount rate, as a fraction of a degree per decade. They are real, but they do not trigger the circuitry that evolved to handle immediate threats. The brain that scans for immediate danger finds nothing to lock onto, and so it returns to the present moment, which feels manageable, and files the rest under someone else’s problem or someone else’s century.

Evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neurology, ethnography and archaeology suggests that for approximately 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived in small bands typically numbering 25-150 individuals, with social structures rarely exceeding Dunbar’s number, the sweet spot of approximately 150 people optimal for stable social relationships.

Survival in these small groups required a brain to process information because where our ancestors lived, immediate, tangible threats such as predators, hostile outgroups, resource scarcity, green tree snakes, and environmental dangers, were present every day. Structures such as the amygdala, which plays a key role in threat detection and emotional processing, are primed to respond to stimuli that are immediate, concrete, and emotionally charged. This prioritisation was advantageous when humans faced acute, short-term dangers like predators or social conflict. What we now call heuristics or biases helped make rapid, intuitive judgment and conserved cognitive resources. We were good at quick decision-making, even if not perfectly rational.

Many modern cognitive biases are direct extensions of this evolutionary tuning. For instance, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for long-term planning and abstract reasoning, is a more recently developed area of the brain and often defers to older, emotion-driven regions when decisions must be made under uncertainty or stress. This neural tension leads to systematic distortions in how we perceive risks, value rewards, and relate to others; distortions that are highly predictable and well-documented across cultures.

Temporal discounting, proximity bias, correctness bias, and in-group favouritism were all adaptive in a world of immediate decisions, where threats were physical, local, and fast-moving. Climate change, economic inequality, and global pandemics are none of those things. They are abstract, slow, and described in probabilities. The legacy wiring struggles to register them with the urgency the evidence warrants.

Of course, a brain that responds like this is not without benefits. Among other things, abstract thinking, symbolic reasoning, and cultural transmission are products of the same evolutionary process, running on the same neural substrate.

What the brain can do, under the right conditions, is remarkable. Humans can model future scenarios, consider consequences for generations, and plan for contingencies that have never been experienced. We can imagine our own deaths; a remarkable, difficult, and underappreciated capability. Clearly, the brain can handle abstraction, but it takes effort.

Some individuals and societies have demonstrated sustained ability to plan across generations and reason about abstract, long-term risks. Many Indigenous cultures maintained resource management practices across centuries, developing cultural frameworks precise enough to compensate for the short-horizon defaults of individual cognition. The knowledge was encoded in practice, story, and obligation rather than in spreadsheets, but the function was the same.

And then there is the man in the pure wool suit shorting AI stocks on the futures exchange. He responds to the immediate for future gain and is thankful for every bias.

Whilst we can comprehend planetary-scale challenges, doing so requires conscious effort and supportive cultural and technological systems. This framing helps explain why climate change, biodiversity loss, and other global challenges require special effort to sustain. It also suggests that systems designed to work with evolved psychology rather than against it stand a better chance of enabling the collective action the scale of those problems demands.

There is a risk of overstating how deterministic these cognitive biases are, given they create tendencies rather than dictate outcomes. Minds naturally process information, and motivation makes it possible to design systems that channel those tendencies rather than fight them. This is what has happened.

Modern information ecosystems operate primarily on what Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, calls an attention extraction business model, where revenue comes from maximising engagement rather than delivering societal value.

Algorithms amplify content that triggers emotional responses because outrage, fear, and tribal identity generate higher engagement. People stick around to say what they think, argue, and support the tribe. The architecture of social media is optimised for attention, and attention is easiest to capture when the content triggers emotions.

The bite-sized nature of modern media exploits the same vulnerability. Cal Newport’s argument in Deep Work is that the modern knowledge worker faces constant interruption severe enough to limit sustained concentration. Studies suggest the average worker maintains focused attention for 3 to 5 minutes before switching tasks. That is well below the threshold required to understand complex systems or generate meaningful insight.

Digital platforms also reward controversy over clarity. For example, a post that presents atmospheric data clearly and objectively gains modest attention. The same information, framed to imply controversy, achieves exponentially greater reach. The algorithm did not distort the science, but it distorted who heard it, and how.

Economic structures amplify cognitive biases as reliably as information systems do. Quarterly reporting cycles reinforce temporal discounting by rewarding immediate returns over long-term sustainability. Externalised costs exploit narrow framing by hiding the true impacts of consumption from the people making consumption decisions. GDP as the primary success metric encodes the same preference. It makes quantifiable growth legible and leaves well-being and sustainability off the ledger.

Information and economic systems aren’t uniformly exploitative, but their default settings tend to amplify cognitive vulnerabilities rather than correcting for them. This makes perfect sense when the bias delivers the response from the many that the institution desires. It is, after all, the path of least resistance.

Information environments could reward slower and deeper thinking, build information literacy as a core educational competency, and redesign recommendation systems to counterbalance rather than amplify bias. Economic systems could extend reporting timeframes beyond the quarterly cycle, incorporate success metrics broader than GDP, make externalities visible through pricing or transparency requirements, and develop governance structures with standing to represent future generations.

They could, and all it requires is treating cognitive architecture as a design constraint rather than a fixed liability. All of this sounds plausible, and it makes the attention to bias a bit of an excuse. We can’t help it because our savanna brains give us the tendency to respond immediately and draw us towards conflict.

It may sound excusable, but I am not expecting a global awakening where eight billion people collectively discard their smartphones and relocate to eco-villages. I wrote with that naive assumption in my book, Missing Something that reads like wishful thinking. The attention economy is a multi-trillion-dollar gravity well. The economic incentives to harvest human attention are too large, and the algorithms too effective, for a spontaneous mass uprising to occur.

A fracture is more realistic, and the early tremors of this cognitive split are already visible.

There is a genuine market for digital minimalism. Gen Z and Millennials are intentionally swapping high-powered smartphones for minimalist e-ink devices like the Light Phone, or installing text-only launchers on their screens. They are not doing it for nostalgia. They are doing it as a self-defence mechanism against digital burnout.

Governments are slowly waking up, proposing social media bans for minors and placing guardrails around algorithmic manipulation. Policy moves at a glacial pace compared to technology, so the macro change will take decades. The micro change is where the real action is. Owning the newest, most powerful technology was once a mark of status. The tables have turned. A screen-free life, genuine unavailability, and the capacity for deep uninterrupted concentration have become luxury goods.

A low-level worker in the modern economy is often compelled to be hyper-reactive, answering pings, monitoring dashboards, and responding to notifications throughout the day. The executive class, elite creatives, and top-tier engineers are the ones who can disappear for four hours into a deep work block to solve a single high-leverage problem. The split is already a socioeconomic reality.

But don’t be fooled, this is not corporate altruism. It is raw capitalism. Companies are discovering that expecting employees to be available on messaging platforms around the clock destroys the bottom line. Constant context-switching produces burnout and poor strategic decisions. Forward-thinking organisations are adopting asynchronous communication because deep focus is the only reliable way to produce high-value intellectual work.

If the analysis holds, the future is a stark and uneven cognitive class divide.

Those with the psychological literacy, resources, and discipline to engineer their environments will hold the monopoly on deep focus, critical thinking, long-horizon wealth accumulation, and emotional stability. Those trapped in the hyper-calibrated, dopamine-optimised loop will remain the product. Perpetually over-stimulated, anxious, short-sighted, and susceptible to outrage.

A system this powerful and this profitable will find a way to charge for the exit. Those who manage to engineer their way out are comfortable enough that they have no reason to dismantle the machine that produced the problem. The system does not need to suppress revolt. It just needs the people capable of leading one to feel they have already won.

The brain evolved for immediacy to ensure survival. Exactly as expected. A rustle in the undergrowth meant a predator, near and immediate. A drought hit the valley you could see from the ridge. A thrown rock travelled in a predictable arc. Problem, response, consequence was a tight loop and the scale was small. Human neurobiology was forged in this environment where problems were local, immediate, and linear.

The problems we now face are global, systemic, and exponential. Economic shifts, algorithmic feedback loops, climate systems, and information warfare are huge at every level and the human brain has no native sensory organs or cognitive defaults to comprehend problems at this scale, let alone navigate them.

But the same brain also produced the cultural architectures that compensated because we are nothing if not adaptive. Because biology could not handle large-scale complexity on its own, humans spent thousands of years building the heavy machinery of civilisation to achieve what the individual could not. Universities, legal systems, and scientific methods were designed to slow thinking down and verify truth before acting on it. Religious, philosophical, and civic frameworks forced individuals to consider legacy, generational time horizons, and duties to the collective rather than to immediate impulse.

None of this happened naturally. These slow thinking institutions require immense energy, social enforcement, and deliberate education to maintain.

And here is the crux of the modern crisis. The digital, hyper-marketed environment did not merely exploit individual psychology. It also dissolved the machinery that had protected us from ourselves.

Efficiency, convenience, and frictionless monetisation became the supreme values. When a society is optimised entirely for frictionless speed, it accidentally destroys the institutions that require deliberate friction to function. Deep journalism was replaced by rage-bait clicks. Long-form civic debate gave way to the character-limited post. Deep community bonds were replaced by parasocial networks.

The conditions that once activated our highest-level cultural architectures, silence, patience, shared localised truth, institutional trust, have been systematically engineered out of existence.

Think about this as an ecologist observing a species whose habitat has changed faster than its genetics can track. It is a description of an ecosystem out of equilibrium.

If the observation is treated as exactly that, an observation, the next logical question shifts. The question is no longer how to fix a broken brain. It is what new cultural architectures can be built to survive the scale of the world we now inhabit, given that the old ones have been dismantled.

We can move past the self-help guilt trip that you lack willpower, and past the standard tech-industry critique that Silicon Valley is evil.

The current predicament is a mechanical and evolutionary mismatch. Not a spiritual crisis.

Notes & Sources (for the curious)

Evolutionary wiring and tribal scale

• The human habit of prioritising immediate physical threats over diffuse, slow-moving hazards is deep evolutionary tuning. The amygdala registers acute danger well before the prefrontal cortex can process abstract planetary risk. The circuitry is old, and it does not update on request. Isbell (2006) sets out this ancient neural prioritisation through the Snake Detection Theory. The framework traces primate visual acuity back 40 to 60 million years, to persistent predatory pressure from snakes. Ancient perils shaped modern sight.

• Homo sapiens lived in small nomadic bands for roughly 300,000 years. Social cohesion and stable community relationships evolved within that context, and they hit a hard ceiling set by brain architecture. Dunbar (1992) established that human neocortex size correlates with a maximum stable social group of approximately 150 individuals. The threshold is fixed and that wiring does not scale. At 8 billion people, the ancient social architecture that held small bands together simply breaks under the load, destroying cohesion.

Cognitive biases and temporal discounting

• Modern cognitive biases are direct extensions of evolutionary adaptations built to conserve scarce mental energy. Mechanisms like temporal discounting and proximity bias systematically distort risk perception by devaluing distant rewards and downstream consequences. What worked on the savanna produces poor judgement at civilisational scale because the wiring was never designed for these problems. Kahneman (2011) documents how fast, intuitive neural architecture routinely overrides slower deliberative reasoning under conditions of deep uncertainty.

• The failure of modern populations to follow basic nutritional guidelines reflects an environment deeply mismatched with evolved cravings for calorie-dense foods. Data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (2022) indicate that only 10 per cent of American adults meet recommended vegetable intake. Roughly 12 per cent meet fruit targets. Instinct trumps advice. Evolved biology drives consumer choices that flatly contradict modern public health mandates.

Primary Sources

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469-493.

Isbell, L. A. (2006). Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains. Journal of Human Evolution, 51(1), 1-35.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Every serious communicator eventually builds what feels like an airtight case. The data assembled, the sources peer-reviewed, the argument watertight. Then nothing happens.

This insight from the vault works through why this is the normal outcome rather than the exception. In any domain where the evidence threatens an identity people have already committed to, the mind does not weigh it. It protects the story it has been telling about itself.

The implication is that narrative is the load-bearing structure.

A Systems Spine turns Insight Vault fragments into a coherent sequence. Each one starts with posture, passes through constraints and incentives, and ends with practical implications. The aim is legibility under pressure. Track ecology, energy, mass-balance, and incentives and the world stops looking so mysterious.

When stress rises, societies behave like individuals do with involuntary, instantaneous reactions as though driven by a collective limbic system throwing around emotions, survival instincts, and memory.

This matters because most policy models assume people update beliefs with evidence, trust institutions that are credentialed, and tolerate slow reforms because the long-run plan is sound. In other words, people are rational and so are the societies they live in.

Only we are talking about stress, the body’s non-specific response to any demand for change and an evolutionary survival mechanism to help with environmental adaptation. When stress becomes too overwhelming for the limbic system to process, the brain often pulls an emergency brake and pushes us into denial. In this context, denial isn’t just lying or being stubborn; it is a primitive defence mechanism used to protect the ego from information or reality that is too psychologically painful to handle in the moment.

But what if denial is a stabiliser that hardens dissonance and credentials fail as a persuasion tool because all that eases the emotional pain. A perfect storm where the brain chooses internal consistency over external reality because the cost of being wrong is too high.

Evidence-based policy becomes theatre when bias, incentives, and emotion dominate. Before long perception drives instability faster than material conditions alone would predict.

So, what if…

Denial, particularly of ecological limits, functions as an adaptive stabiliser for individuals and groups when the perceived costs of acknowledging constraints exceed the perceived benefits.

Denial reduces immediate anxiety and preserves identity, status, and social belonging. It also keeps institutions safe by protecting the growth story that underwrites careers and budgets. The opposed orthodoxy treats denial as an information deficit, but many people are not uninformed, they are protecting their psychological health.

Once denial is serving a stabilising function, confronting it raises dissonance rather than clarity.

When cognitive dissonance arises, people defend their identity and prior commitments more aggressively, which makes them less responsive to new evidence and more hostile to change.

People select facts to protect coherence, recruit allies, and punish dissenters, which creates a social immune response against updates. The orthodoxy says more evidence opens minds, but dissonance often flips the response so that more evidence strengthens resistance.

And in a dissonance regime, authority signals like credentials lose persuasive power.

Persuasion depends less on speaker credentials than on whether the message fits audience identity, incentives, and perceived threat levels.

Credentials can establish competence, but they do not dissolve identity risk. If the message implies loss, humiliation, or forced sacrifice, credentials can even intensify distrust by signalling out-group control. As I always imagined as a practicing scientist, the orthodoxy expects peer review and expertise to settle disputes, but settlement requires a psychological path that preserves dignity and agency.

Policy that claims to be evidence-based fails if it cannot operate inside these bias and incentive constraints.

Evidence-based policy interventions only work when biases are anticipated, incentives are aligned, and implementation is designed for real human behaviour rather than ideal rational agents. That’s a lot of alignment. Achieving it is an onerous task for the aware bureaucrats who must always have an eye on the Ministers soundbites.

So instead, policy is justified by the publishing and communication of findings, the evidence, and assumes changing outcomes.

Institutions also face pressures to signal action, protect budgets, and avoid blame, which skews what evidence is selected and how it is applied.

Orthodoxy assumes rational argument drives good policy and that requires evidence. But the binding constraints are legitimacy, incentives, and compliance under stress because these are what motivates action. In short, needs and wants under a social contract.

So when needs become urgent, the time window for careful implementation collapses.

Hunger is a definitive motivator. It produces rapid political destabilisation because it compresses time horizons and forces immediate action regardless of long-term plans or narratives. The only evidence that matters is hunger felt viscerally.

Food insecurity turns abstract trade-offs into personal emergencies. That shifts politics from deliberation to demand, and from persuasion to coercion, because the cost of waiting becomes intolerable. The orthodoxy might say climate first and food later, but in lived politics, food is the constraint that moves first.

The reality is that scarcity and insecurity are powerful forces.

Declining, or perceived-declining, resource abundance shifts political behaviour toward protectionism, coercion, and in-group prioritisation as groups compete to secure access.

Scarcity reshapes the feasible set. Leaders face pressure to stabilise their base, harden borders, and privilege insiders, while opponents escalate to contest allocation. Ideology still matters, but it rides on material and perceived material conditions that tighten the arena. The orthodoxy treats polarisation as mostly cultural, but resources set the gradient that culture then climbs.

This sets up IV-0075 because once fear and competition dominate, perception can outrun reality and trigger self-reinforcing instability.

Threat perceptions can initiate destabilising actions that create the very collapse conditions people fear, even when material indicators have not yet reached a breaking point.

When people expect breakdown, they hoard, defect, and pre-empt, which damages the coordination needed to avoid breakdown. Trust then collapses before infrastructure does, and institutions lose authority before they lose capacity. The orthodoxy waits for objective thresholds, but in complex systems, belief and behaviour can cross the threshold first.

This brings us to the conclusion because the practical problem becomes governing under psychology, not governing despite it.

Conclusion

This Systems Spine is a warning about tempo, and about levers.

Denial stabilises identity, dissonance hardens it, and credentials do not bridge the gap because the gap is not informational.

Evidence-based policy turns brittle when it ignores incentives, legitimacy, and bias. Then hunger compresses time, resource stress reshapes coalitions, and perception does the rest, accelerating instability through self-fulfilling dynamics.

So the larger insight is that governance operates as threat-management under declining resources. The best policies will reduce identity threat, protect dignity, and deliver near-term security while constraints tighten.

Do not bet on late persuasion to do early work.

When the limbic system is triggered, credibility becomes what people feel they can survive. Evidence is not going to cut it.

Every intervention designed to shift public behaviour on ecological limits starts from the assumption that people would act differently if they only knew more.

Decades of environmental communication have tested that proposition and found it wanting. This Insight Vault entry explains why denial persists regardless of evidence quality, and what that means for anyone designing strategies that account for it.

Norway put its oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund in 1990 and told future Norwegians it was theirs. China launched its Belt and Road Initiative and told recipient nations the infrastructure was theirs too. One of these is broadly considered an act of intergenerational stewardship. The other is contested as a debt instrument dressed in development language. Both are long-term plans. What separates them is who controls the asset, who bears the cost, and who gets to say no.

Our lives require the passage of time. The past gives us context, the future gives us direction, and the present is the fleeting edge where interpretation occurs. Our sense of identity and the meaning we attribute to life depend on our capacity to thread experiences across time into a story.

Memory and anticipation are the mind’s core tools for making sense of experience. Memory stitches together what has happened, allowing reflection, learning, and the slow construction of a personal identity. Anticipation projects imagined futures forward, generating hope, anxiety, and purpose in roughly equal measure. Both rely on the mind’s narrative capacity, which turns isolated events into stories with continuity and consequence. Time, in this sense, is not measured in seconds or years. It is felt as the unfolding arc of a life.

The self-help gurus might tell us to live in the now, but most of us find that very hard without the context of time to shape events into narratives. And the stories are pervasive.

Civilisations preserve their knowledge, values, and myths through stories grounded in histories, legends, epics, and the record of scientific progress. Whether mythic or empirical, those stories give meaning to shared existence by anchoring events in sequence and consequence. Time, then, does not merely pass unnoticed in the background. It is the structural dimension in which lives are lived, choices are made, and meaning accumulates.

More often, there is no time for any of this. We are immediate, consumed with practical matters in the here and now. What do I have in the fridge for dinner? Did I miss Aunt Maude’s birthday again? What time does the soccer start?

And the immediacy translates across into culture. In many modern democracies, political action is calibrated to short election cycles, economic gain is measured in quarterly profits, and environmental degradation is pushed just far enough into the future to be someone else’s problem.

Yet not all cultures treat time this way. Indigenous governance systems, religious traditions, and non-Western cultures often embed decision-making within intergenerational frameworks that value continuity, ecological reciprocity, and obligations to descendants not yet born.

Can an extended time horizon guarantee wiser or more just outcomes, or might it mask other biases from technocratic control and elite preservation to false certainty about futures we cannot predict?

This essay examines how different cultural and political systems conceive of the future, from the short-termism baked into electoral democracies to the long-range stewardship embedded in Indigenous philosophies. The structural, psychological, and philosophical dimensions of time make this not just about how to think long term, but why, for whom, and to what end. Long-termism might seem desirable, but it is not a moral upgrade. Colonial empires and authoritarian regimes have always been excellent long-term planners. The question is never how far ahead a system looks. It is whose future that system is actually protecting.

But before we go there, the first premise sets us up as immediate, short-term thinkers with little thought for the future.

Modern political and economic systems are structurally biased toward short-term gains, often at the expense of long-term consequences.

It is cliché to say that modern political and economic structures are skewed toward today. In democratic systems at least, election cycles are brief 3 to 5 year affairs, creating incentives for politicians to focus on policies that deliver immediate or visible results to voters, even if those policies defer costs or consequences for the future. And if the policy might take longer, there is always the rhetoric. What I tell you today, truth or fiction, is gone tomorrow so it has little value.

This short-termism is reinforced by media cycles and public opinion polling, which favour fast, headline-friendly outcomes over slower, more complex initiatives. As a result, long-term challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, infrastructure resilience, or educational reform often receive inadequate attention or are kicked down the road in favour of culture wars played out in sound bites.

Economic systems, especially shareholder capitalism, are structurally biased toward the near term. Corporate performance is typically judged quarter by quarter and executives are often paid the same way with bonuses tied to immediate financial results, not long-horizon value creation.

Financial markets reinforce the posture, with high-frequency trading and sentiment-driven pricing skewing the reward function toward cost-cutting and headline growth. Any patient investment in research, employee wellbeing, or sustainable supply chains get shunted to lower priority. The outcome is short-termism in strategy, underinvestment in public goods, and the routine externalisation of environmental and social costs.

These all too familiar and well-documented biases are not accidental. They emerge from institutional rules, cultural norms, and incentive structures that favour immediate utility over future stability. ESG investing, long-term policy frameworks, and intergenerational ethics provide the rhetoric to counter this, but in most cases they are marginalised or absorbed within a dominant paradigm of short-term performance.

Here are some illustrative examples from a long list of candidates.

In the United States, incentives skew toward the next election. House members run every two years, presidents every four, and that cadence quietly punishes long-term investment in public goods. Politicians reach for tax cuts or visible short-term spending because infrastructure renewal is expensive, slow, and politically thankless. Even when long-horizon bills like the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act do pass, they typically arrive late, after decades of deferred maintenance have already turned investment into catch-up.

Shareholder value maximisation dominates the corporate world, by law, so it seems unfair to single out an example. General Electric (GE) repeatedly made decisions during the 2000s and 2010s that boosted quarterly earnings but weakened long-term competitiveness. Pressured by investor expectations, the company prioritised financial engineering and stock buybacks over research, development, and sustainable innovation, contributing to its eventual decline in global relevance. A 2017 McKinsey Global Institute study found that companies with long-term strategies outperformed their short-term peers in revenue and profit growth, yet remain a minority due to institutional investor pressure for immediate returns.

Short-termism is not simply a cognitive failing, but a structural outcome of how modern capitalist systems are built. Electoral cycles reward immediacy over foresight, financial markets value rapid returns over enduring stability, and international frameworks often privilege national politics over global futures.

At least in the Global North, home to 3 of every 20 people on Earth, political and economic systems are structurally predisposed to favour short-term gains, often undermining the very conditions necessary for long-term prosperity and planetary health.

Not everyone lives in this frenetic universe.

Time horizons vary dramatically across cultures and governance models, revealing that short-termism is not inevitable but culturally and institutionally conditioned.

How far ahead a society looks is a well-established cultural dimension, particularly in cross-cultural research. In East Asia, notably China, Japan, and South Korea, the tendency is for long-term orientation, emphasising future rewards, perseverance, and intergenerational responsibility. That cultural lens shapes governance and economic planning, producing institutions more consistently geared toward long-term outcomes.

China’s multi-decade Belt and Road Initiative, alongside sustained investments in renewable energy and high-speed rail, reflects a state-led planning model that prioritises continuity, central coordination, and strategic foresight across decades. These efforts are nested inside Five-Year Plans that sit within broader visions spanning thirty years or more. The scale and coherence that results is rarely achievable in systems governed by short electoral cycles.

Japan has taken the Confucian concept of filial piety and put it into modern law, building institutions on the premise that the stability of the present depends on a deliberate hand-off between past and future generations. The three pillars of that hand-off are the pension system, universal healthcare, and long-term care insurance.

The pension operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with the working generation directly funding the retired one, bound by an implicit promise that the next generation will return the favour. Universal healthcare, established in 1961, caps out-of-pocket costs and standardises fees nationwide, ensuring that a young family is not bankrupted by the medical needs of an elderly parent. The Long-Term Care Insurance scheme, introduced in 2000, shifted elder care from a private family duty to a state-supported structure, freeing working-age adults to remain in the workforce while their parents age with dignity.

Japan’s model focuses on welfare, but really it is about continuity.

Autocratic and technocratic regimes can push long-term plans with relative insulation from public opinion swings and electoral volatility. Liberal democracies sit on the other side of that trade, where political turnover, media-driven urgency, and lobbying pressure amplify oscillation and reward short-term fixes. The democratic story isn’t doomed. Strong independent public institutions, sovereign wealth funds, and long-term fiscal rules can lock in longer horizons, as Norway’s oil fund and Finland’s education policies suggest.

Long-horizon capacity and legitimacy are different things. A system can plan thirty years out precisely because it has muted the feedback that would normally interrupt bad plans. However, insulation from noise can be insulation from accountability. The same machinery that enables long-term coordination can also enable long-term error, long-term corruption, and long-term coercion. The harder question is what disciplines a horizon when it starts serving the planners more than the planned-for.

Perhaps this is why short-termism is such a common feature of modern human governance. A way to more easily appear legitimate while meeting cultural expectations, institutional configurations, and incentive systems. But the fact that some societies systematically plan for decades while others struggle to see beyond quarterly earnings or electoral cycles illustrates that short-termism is neither inevitable nor fixed. Instead, it might be altered by intentional design and cultural evolution.

What about indigenous systems that predate money? Let’s see what they do with time.

Indigenous and traditional governance systems offer living examples of intergenerational thinking, often prioritising continuity, ecological balance, and obligations to future descendants.

Indigenous governance systems typically emphasise cyclical time, ancestral responsibility, and the long-term wellbeing of both human and non-human communities. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) principle of considering the impact of decisions on the next seven generations is a widely cited example, institutionalising intergenerational ethics and placing ecological sustainability at the core of governance. Many Aboriginal cultures in Australia practise custodianship along similar lines, where responsibility for country is inherited across generations rather than extracted as a personal right. The land is held in trust. It is not a balance sheet.

These traditions prioritise continuity and ecological balance because survival in specific ecosystems depends on staying in rhythm with the land. Decision-making was not policy in the modern sense. It was embedded in spiritual, moral, and communal frameworks that made sustainability enforceable through stories, ceremonies, taboos, and the authority of elders. Traditional fire management in Indigenous Australian societies reflects a deep grasp of ecological rhythms and landscape regeneration, carried across generations and adapted over millennia. The through line is a governance logic built on adaptation, foresight, and communal accountability. And it was necessary for survival.

Indigenous systems aren’t monolithic, and they’re not romantic ideals, but they did persist for tens of thousands of years in the dry outback of Australia, and that alone makes them an enduring counterpoint to dominant short-term, extractive governance models. They offer usable frameworks for rethinking sustainability, especially when they’re integrated respectfully and collaboratively into broader governance discussions. The fact that they persisted long enough for us to talk about them suggests intergenerational thinking isn’t a utopian aspiration; it’s a living, practised reality in many traditional governance systems.

However, before we all run away to the bush singing Kum Ba Ya, we should examine a critical assumption that is always missed in the binary between short-termism and intergenerational governance models, that long-term thinking is virtuous.

Long-term thinking is not inherently virtuous; it must be critically examined to ensure it serves justice, inclusivity, and genuine sustainability rather than elite control or speculative abstraction.

If short-termism is a poor option for equitable and sensible resource use, long-term thinking is not automatically ethical or equitable. Like any strategic orientation, its value depends on whose interests it serves, how it is framed, and who participates in shaping it.

Long-term visions can be captured. In practice, the future is an incredibly useful alibi for elites. It can justify technocratic control, speculative megaprojects, or justice perpetually deferred. Modern wealthy elites offer a plethora of examples. Authoritarian regimes and corporate entities can wrap centralisation, displacement of vulnerable communities, or outright greenwashing in the language of future-proofing. And even when the intent is genuine, long-term planning without democratic accountability or cultural inclusivity can harden into stability for some, precarity and exclusion for others.

Colonial empires were masters of the long-term alibi. Expansion was sold as a noble trajectory that conveniently hid extraction and domination behind a civilising mission of remarkable hubris. Today, the same move shows up in cleaner clothes. Techno-futurist visions of geoengineering, space colonisation, transhumanism sound great but are actually speculative, elite-driven agendas that float above the immediate needs of living people, especially those already marginalised by existing systems. The future becomes a staging ground for status, capital, and control.

And the risk doesn’t stop at the obviously grandiose. Even progressive long-term initiatives can reproduce the same inequities if frontline communities are excluded from decision-making, or if economic growth is treated as the default priority over ecological justice.

So long-term thinking has to face an ethical and political test. It should be guided by procedural fairness, intergenerational equity, cultural diversity, and ecological stewardship, not by mere longevity or control. Legitimate longtermism is not just what the future will look like; it asks who gets to imagine it, and who is actually empowered to shape it.

Institutions can be reimagined to better represent future generations through legal innovations, cultural practices, and participatory models that embed responsibility across time.

Existing institutions routinely sideline the interests of future generations, but that gap reflects design choices rather than fixed limits. Wales and New Zealand have each created formal guardians for future generations, demonstrating that future-oriented thinking can be institutionalised in legislative processes, budget planning, and environmental governance. Ecuador and Bolivia have gone further, embedding rights for nature and future beings in constitutional frameworks. That legal-cultural shift extends moral and political consideration beyond the present. So, the architecture exists. The question is whether others will build it.

Cultural practices do the memory work that institutions pretend is automatic. Storytelling, ritual, and collective commemoration stretch a community’s sense of time and make continuity feel normal rather than exceptional. Indigenous and local governance models often encode future-facing responsibility directly into land management, resource use, and everyday choice, offering sustainability templates that are culturally grounded rather than bureaucratically imposed. Participatory mechanisms, citizens’ assemblies, youth parliaments, and intergenerational councils, can extend that logic into mainstream institutions by widening the circle of whose voices count and whose futures are weighed.

In truth, institutions are malleable human creations that can be redesigned to better incorporate the interests of future generations. The key challenge lies not in whether institutions can theoretically be reimagined, but in overcoming short-term biases and implementing these innovations effectively.

What needs to be done?

Expanding our temporal perspective requires both cultural transformation and institutional redesign, grounded in humility about what the future demands and wisdom about how we choose to act.

A longer-term perspective is a cultural shift in how a society understands time, responsibility, and legacy. The stories we tell about the future and the present shape whether we treat tomorrow as a continuation of current trends, a site of radical transformation, or a moral horizon that pulls action forward.

Presently, in many contemporary societies, the default culture is the immediacy of consumerism, digital distraction, and economic urgency. The default for tomorrow is more of what we have today. Shifting that means revaluing patience, foresight, and care for the unborn. It means drawing on traditions, philosophies, and spiritual frameworks that teach respect for continuity and uncertainty. And it requires humility as an honest recognition of our limits in predicting or controlling the future, and our responsibility to act without full certainty.

Culture alone won’t carry it. Institutional redesign has to do its part, embedding longer-term logics into governance, finance, education, and law. Horizon scanning in policy development, intergenerational representation in legislatures, long-term budgeting, and legal rights for future persons or the environment are all on the table.

But these only matter if they reflect a genuine shift in what institutions value and whose interests they serve. Institutional reform without cultural backing becomes performance and there are way too many example to list here.

In the end, expanding our temporal perspective is as much ethics as it is systems.

It’s the discernment to know when to intervene and when to conserve, when to imagine boldly and when to proceed with caution. It asks for a balance of hope and responsibility, and a refusal of both apocalyptic fatalism and utopian hubris.

There’s a paradox baked into the politics of time. The systems that best deliver democratic will are often the least equipped to protect future well-being. Meanwhile, the systems that can plan across decades often do it by concentrating power into regimes or cultural mores in ways that erode democratic accountability.

It’s not a problem solved with a generic call to think longer-term. It requires being specific about how time intersects with power, justice, and legitimacy.

Short-termism isn’t natural or inevitable. It’s engineered by institutions and reinforced by culture. Electoral cycles, quarterly reporting, and media attention spans tilt decision-making toward immediate returns in the systems that are familiar to Westerners. But the existence of other operating modes matters here. Chinese state planning and Indigenous custodianship show that extended time horizons can be sustained in practice. Proof that the political timeframe can be malleable and reflect design choices, even if the more authoritarian options come with baggage.

The harder insight is that long-term is not automatically better. Long-term thinking can serve technocratic control, elite preservation, or speculative abstraction just as easily as it can serve justice and sustainability. Colonial empires wrapped exploitation in civilising missions. Authoritarian regimes use future-oriented rhetoric to centralise power. Contemporary geoengineering proposals can privilege speculative solutions over the immediate needs of vulnerable populations. An extended time frame is no moral guarantee. Who controls it, and by what process, is the core question.

Indigenous governance systems show decision-making embedded in reciprocity, ecological accountability, and community participation relationships. These systems persisted for millennia not by abstract planning, but through adaptive management rooted in specific places and cultures. It was as though they understood the value of time. But they were about survival with limited resources, few people and a fickle environment. A modern city is not going to persist for long if all its citizens learn about is cultural burning of vegetation.

Perhaps the challenge isn’t to swap short-term thinking for long-term planning. Maybe it’s to build governance that can hold multiple temporal perspectives at once. That means institutional innovations that extend democratic participation across time while staying accountable to current populations. It also means cultural transformation that cultivates patience, humility, and care for the unborn without collapsing into fatalistic passivity or technocratic hubris.

Time has always been the canvas for human stories. But in a world of 8 billion people facing unprecedented challenges, the task isn’t to choose between present and future. It’s to create governance systems worthy of both, democratic enough to keep legitimacy, adaptive enough to respond to change, and wise enough to recognise that the future’s demands may not match our current projections.

The arrow of time makes the stakes non-negotiable. Entropy doesn’t run backward; consequences accumulate, and history doesn’t offer clean reversals. That one-way drift is precisely why governance can’t treat the future as a rhetorical prop or an optional add-on. What we build, burn, and break becomes the terrain the next generation inherits.

Entropy ensures that consequences of human activity accumulate, and history offers no clean reversals. That one-way drift is precisely why governance cannot treat the future as a rhetorical prop. What we build, burn, and break becomes the terrain the next generation inherits. The arrow of time is not a metaphor. It is the one constraint that applies equally to every system, democratic or authoritarian, short-sighted or long. The question was never whether to plan for the future. It was always who gets to survive it.

Notes & Sources (for the curious)

Temporal perception and the mind

• The narrative construction of time — Our capacity to thread experiences into a story is a core cognitive tool for identity. Memory and anticipation convert isolated events into continuity. Cognitive science and narrative psychology have documented this psychological framework thoroughly.

Short-termism in modern systems

• Democratic and economic bias — Electoral cycles of 3 to 5 years build structural incentives for immediate results over long-horizon costs. Shareholder capitalism reinforces this through quarterly reporting and high-frequency trading.

• Corporate performance and longevity — McKinsey Global Institute research found that companies running long-term strategies outperform peers in revenue and profit growth. Most firms still prioritise immediate returns under investor pressure.

• Infrastructure as catch-up — Deferred maintenance in the United States has turned most long-horizon investments into reactive repairs. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act arrived after decades of underinvestment.

Cultural and institutional variations

• Long-term orientation in East Asia — Cross-cultural research identifies East Asian societies as having a higher tendency toward long-term orientation. China’s state-led planning models, including the Belt and Road Initiative, reflect strategic foresight across decades.

• Intergenerational social contracts — Japan’s welfare systems, including the 1961 universal healthcare and 2000 Long-Term Care Insurance, are built on Confucian concepts of filial piety. These institutions function as a deliberate hand-off between generations.

• Sovereign wealth as stewardship — Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, established in 1990, locks in resource wealth for future citizens. It offers a democratic counter-example to short-termism.

Indigenous and legal innovations

• The Seven Generations principle — The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy requires considering the impact of decisions on the next seven generations. It remains a primary example of institutionalised intergenerational ethics.

• Guardians for the future — Wales, Hungary, and New Zealand have each established formal offices to represent future generations in legislative processes. These roles show that future-oriented thinking can be bureaucratically embedded.

• Rights of Nature — Ecuador and Bolivia have granted constitutional rights to nature and future beings. This legal shift extends moral consideration beyond the human present.

Primary Sources

Altieri, M. A., & Toledo, V. M. (2011). The agroecological revolution in Latin America: Rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 35(4), 587-612.

Barton, D., & Wiseman, M. (2014). Focusing capital on the long term. Harvard Business Review. (Contextual support for McKinsey Global Institute findings)

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Sage Publications. (Foundational research for cultural time orientation)

Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford University Press.

World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. Oxford University Press. (The foundational text for intergenerational equity and sustainable development)

Haber-Bosch, the Green Revolution, and the digital economy each raised the number of people a finite planet can support, and that record is not nothing. What is less often accounted for is that each fix deepened total system dependence on energy and materials.

This Insight works through why the two effects cannot be separated.

What using the time well requires

Escaping the Malthusian Trap | A Mindful Sceptic Guide takes the question this Insight opens and works through it honestly. If technology buys delay rather than escape, what should be done with the delay.

The answer is more demanding than either techno-optimists or their critics tend to acknowledge.

Think of Africa in pre-colonial times, say around 1800, when in Europe, James Watt’s steam engines were transforming the textile industry and mining, people were flocking from rural farms to the smoke stacks of growing cities like Manchester and Birmingham, and the French Revolution had cooled into the Napoleonic era.

Africa in 1800 was anything but empty. Usman dan Fodio was consolidating the Sokoto Caliphate from fragmented city-states in West Africa, the Asante Empire had reached a pinnacle of wealth and military organisation in the forest regions of modern-day Ghana, and further south the pressures of population growth and tightening resources were producing the military innovations that would ignite the Mfecane and redraw the region’s demographics entirely.

On the eastern coast, the Omani Sultanate ran a commercial empire out of Zanzibar built on ivory, cloves, and an intensifying slave trade, while on the west coast the Transatlantic Slave Trade was entering its final legal decade under British law. The European Scramble had not yet begun. The continent was already in motion, and there were plenty of people.

Whilst there were no continent-wide censuses, most historical demographers agree on a range of 90 million to 100 million people in Africa in 1800, roughly 10% of the total global population which hit 1 billion around 1804.

At this time the African continent was also home to between 25 million and 40 million elephants, making the ratio of humans to elephants at the lower end of elephant numbers roughly 4 to 1.

Estimating elephant populations from the 18th century demands a forensic approach to ecology. Systematic aerial surveys did not exist until the 1960s, so scientists rely primarily on back-projection modelling, combining historical ivory export data with estimates of available habitat and carrying capacity. Analysing customs records from major trade hubs like Zanzibar, London, and Antwerp allows researchers to calculate the extraction rate. From the tonnage of ivory recorded, they determine how many elephants were killed, factor in the species’ natural reproductive rate, and work backward to the minimum standing population required to sustain those losses without the species collapsing entirely.

For the year 1800, before the height of the industrial ivory trade and the widespread introduction of modern firearms to the continent, populations were at their peak. Modelling based on the total available elephant range, covering nearly the entire continent south of the Sahara, produces an estimate of 25 to 40 million. Elephants were not yet confined to protected pockets. They functioned as ecosystem engineers across vast savannas and dense forests, and the sheer scale of the population meant that the early ivory trade had a relatively negligible impact on total numbers.

This abundance was possible because much of the continent remained a pristine wilderness. Human settlements were concentrated, leaving vast, connected ecosystems where herds could roam, shape the landscape. The herds moved along ancient migratory paths that often doubled as human trade routes.

But as the century progressed, ivory transitioned from a rare luxury to a material used for mass-produced items like piano keys, billiard balls, and combs. This skyrocketing global demand, paired with the introduction of more accurate firearms, sparked an era of intensive hunting.

By mid-century, the elephant population had already begun to slide toward 18 million before the surge in exploration led by figures like David Livingstone, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke who, although nominally on epic journeys of scientific discovery, effectively mapped the landscape to professional hunters. This coincided with the arrival of long-range, breech-loading rifles that made hunting exponentially more efficient and deadly. By the 1860s, the moving frontier of ivory extraction was clearing out entire regions of elephants to feed the insatiable warehouses of ports like Zanzibar and Khartoum.

By the time of the “Scramble for Africa” in 1884, the hunting had reached its peak, often inextricably linked to the slave trade. Enslaved people were frequently used as human pack animals to carry heavy tusks through thousands of miles of jungle to the coast, where both the ivory and the carriers were sold.

By 1900, the African elephant population had been reduced to between 5 and 10 million. In just one hundred years, over half of the continent’s elephants had been lost, leaving behind a scarred landscape and a surviving population that had learned to fear human contact, forever altering their migratory behaviours.

Despite the ravages of slavery, colonialism and disease, the human population had grown slightly, the elephant population had been cut by more than half so there were now 20 people for every elephant.

In what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the situation was even more extreme. Because the region was a primary target for professional big game hunters and early white settlers, the elephant population had been nearly wiped out, down to a few thousand individuals. Here, the ratio was 1 elephant for every 250 people.

From 1900 to 1945, African elephants received a rare reprieve. The 19th-century population reduction prompted colonial governments to respond with early conservation rules, including the 1900 London Convention. Hunting shifted from a free-for-all to a regulated system of permits, reserves, and enforcement. The motive was often to protect European hunting privileges rather than wildlife for its own sake, but these measures slowed the slaughter and allowed battered herds to stabilise.

Between 1920 and 1940, elephant numbers began recovering in specific regions. The establishment of new parks, including Kruger and Albert (now Virunga), provided sanctuaries. Outbreaks of rinderpest and sleeping sickness inadvertently assisted the recovery, pushing human populations and livestock out of vast areas and leaving behind accidental wilderness where elephants could move freely. The Great Depression then crushed the global luxury ivory market, and commercial hunting pressure dropped sharply as prices bottomed out.

By 1945, the African elephant population was estimated at between 3 and 5 million. With a human population of roughly 180 million at the time, the ratio sat at approximately one elephant for every 40 to 60 people. Wartime travel restrictions had also stalled international trophy hunting, providing a brief window of relative peace. The stability was fragile. The end of the war brought surplus military firearms, a booming global economy, and an ivory market poised to restart the cycle.

In the post-war era of the 1950s, elephants appeared to surge, though this was largely a compression effect. Elephants were being pushed out of developing land and into the newly created national parks of East and Southern Africa, and while local densities reached a 20th-century peak inside these refuges, the total continental population likely remained within the 3 to 5 million. As independence movements swept the continent through the 1960s, many new governments kept conservation zones intact, recognising their value for tourism and national revenue.

Elephant numbers remained relatively stable through the mid-century, but the human population was expanding rapidly, reaching 285 million by 1960. That demographic shift began tilting the competition for land and resources. It set the stage for the range contractions and poaching crises that would follow in the 1970s and 1980s.

The 1970s broke the temporary equilibrium.

A global ivory rush took hold. Demand in Asia and the West sent prices soaring, and ivory became white gold, funding civil wars and militias across the continent. The AK-47 changed the economics of killing. One gun could take out a whole herd. What had been scattered poaching turned into industrial slaughter.

By 1987, the elephant population had collapsed from millions to around 750,000. The speed of the decline was unprecedented for a large mammal in modern history. The ecological landscape of Africa had been fundamentally transformed, with the ratio of elephants to people reaching one elephant for every 787 humans.

It is hard to imagine the change to 750,000 animals from perhaps 25 million, not just in the numbers but in what the reduction meant for the vegetation. Elephants are truck sized throughput machines moving through habitats at will, until they weren’t. This was the condition of the landscape I stepped into in 1988, though I did not yet know how to read it.

I met my first wild elephant when I was 27 years old.

It was early 1988 at Ruckomechi Tsetse Research Station in the Zambezi valley, Zimbabwe. The station had long served as a base for figuring out how to stop African trypanosomiasis—sleeping sickness—caused by Trypanosoma parasites transmitted through tsetse fly bites. A close variant hits livestock too (often called nagana), dragging down animal health and productivity and putting real pressure on agriculture across parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The newest eradication bet at the time was a blue target trap, dosed with pheromones and impregnated with insecticide, drawing flies in and killing them.

I had just embarked on an idyllic postdoctoral fellowship, and was in Ruckomechi with my late friend and colleague Dr Steven Telford running a field trip for a group of behavioural ecology students from the University of Zimbabwe.

It is easy to teach students about ecology in such an astonishing natural laboratory. And I was still awed by the bush, a total greenhorn, having been in Africa for just 6 months.

I had seen elephants on a safari to Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls a couple of months earlier, but here it was different.

Walking across the camp from my rondavel to the mess hall, I saw a young female elephant browsing a Bauhinia bush less than 100m away. I stopped and just watched for several minutes. She knew I was there but seemed happy to keep browsing. I edged closer. I was on my own and had no protection, but I kept stepping slowly towards her.

At about 40m my courage was used up, and I just stood still. I listened to her feed, taking in the sight, smell and feel. Awe is a good word, but barely covered what I was feeling.

My first encounter on foot, a privilege I will never forget. I was young, probably about the same age as the elephant. Yet, I was buzzing like an infant in kindergarten.

The elephant was very much at home in her skin and her place. I was a guest, she owned the habitat. As young as I was, I could feel her presence.

I later learned that there was a herd that regularly wandered through the camp. Humans on foot were part of what this herd knew, so they were relaxed. Not all elephants are so accommodating, but in the same way that herds get used to safari vehicles, so these elephants were with people wearing khaki shirts.

Something about that encounter in Ruckomechi has stayed with me. I think it was how much a part of nature I was in that moment. Not separate from it. Although this explanation has only made sense to me recently.

Even now, I can recognise the smell of an elephant. Anyone who has been on an Africa wildlife safari can.

But in 1988, the African elephant was in the throes of a continent-wide crisis, with the total population plummeting past the estimated 750,000, roughly half of what it had been just eight years prior. The massive surge in illegal poaching to satisfy a global ivory market, claiming tens of thousands of animals annually across East and Central Africa.

Zimbabwe stood as a stark exception to this trend. Through a strict, state-managed conservation model that treated elephants as a renewable resource, the country maintained a stable and growing population of roughly 52,000 at a time when its neighbours were seeing their herds decimated.

During this poaching crisis, the ratio in the rest of Africa was still 1 elephant for every 787 humans. However, in Zimbabwe, the ratio remained significantly tighter at 1 elephant for every 178 people.

In 1989, I moved to neighbouring Botswana to a lectureship at the newly minted University of Botswana. I saw many elephants in my seven years in that wonderful country. I even had a lower jaw bone in the corner of my office after stumbling across it on a field trip to Tuli Block in the far east of the country.

Botswana had roughly 90,000 elephants in the early 1990s, a significant proportion of the total on the continent. Or was it 100,000? The exact number was unknown, but it became hugely contentious because whatever the number, it was increasing.

This was a conservation challenge almost no one else had. The elephant population was booming while the rest of the continent was declining. Across Africa, attention was fixed on the 1989 international ivory ban and stopping poachers. But in Botswana, there was a problem of plenty and a risk of too many.

At the time, I argued that elephant densities were getting high enough to drive real habitat degradation, especially in riparian woodlands. And I pushed for a shift away from purely emotional or protectionist instincts toward a more pragmatic, science-based management strategy.

Dangerfield J.M. (1994) Renewed dialogue on elephant management in Botswana. Kalahari Conservation Society Newsletter 44: 1-4

The following year, I pushed back on the obsession with total elephant counts. I argued that raw census numbers are a dangerously shallow measure of success because a single headline figure means little without details of ecological impact and local distribution.

Dangerfield J.M. (1995) What is in a number? Kalahari Conservation Society Newsletter 47: 9

I pointed out that high-density hotspots can turn into localised ecological deserts, even when national totals look healthy. And I challenged the idea of a fixed carrying capacity, arguing instead that elephant numbers have to be balanced against the whole system—vegetation, soil health, everything.

My critique of the emotional, hands-off approach was that in places like Botswana, high numbers aren’t just a win. They’re a trigger for active management before the landscape tips into crisis.

A version of this warning played out.

In Botswana, the refusal to actively manage elephant numbers, shaped by international pressure and a long-standing hunting ban, resulted in ongoing elephant induced habitat conversion. Along the Chobe and Okavango systems, large stretches of riparian woodland shifted into elephant-impacted scrub, with mature trees pushed over faster than they could regenerate. Biodiversity took the hit. Elephant numbers stayed high, while specialist species tied to dense canopy and specific woodland structure, including the Chobe bushbuck and some giraffe populations, declined.

By 2025, Botswana and Zimbabwe had moved away from late-20th-century passive protectionism toward pragmatic management, including the return of trophy hunting and community-led culling. In a fragmented landscape where elephants cannot simply migrate away from degraded areas, human intervention becomes part of protecting the broader ecosystem. The conversation has shifted from saving the elephant to managing a landscape where 130,000 ecosystem engineers (a trendy ecological term at the time), must coexist with a human population that has grown nearly six-fold since 1960.

While all this was going on, human numbers across the continent surged, further steepening the ratio of humans to elephants.

It is tempting, and wrong, to read the human side of this ratio as an African story. However, the population expanding rapidly through the 1960s and beyond was following the same logic as every other human population that gained access to fossil energy, modern medicine, and agricultural intensification. James Watt’s engines, which opened this account, did not stay in Birmingham. The thermodynamic windfall that has briefly and dramatically inflated the human carrying capacity of the planet was not a gift selectively offered. The appetite for development is universal once the door opens.

Africa’s demographic surge is not the cause of the elephant’s predicament. It is the same engine, arriving later, running on the same fuel. The ratio is a civilisational fingerprint, not a racial one.

So now it is 2026 and there are over 8 billion humans on Earth.

Africa’s elephant population is estimated to be approximately 415,000 to 550,000 individuals, and we are still not sure exactly how many. We do know that Botswana has a crowded elephant population, predominantly in and around the Okavango Delta, that comprises a quarter of the total. We also know that continent wide, there are fewer wild elephants than in 1988.

But what about the ratio?

In 2026, the gap between the human and elephant populations in Africa has reached a staggering historical extreme. We are now living in a reality that would have been unimaginable to the people of 1800 or even 1960.

Today, the roughly 415,000 elephants that remain are not wild in any complete sense of the word. They exist within boundaries we drew, under management plans we wrote, their survival contingent on decisions made in capitals and conference rooms far from the Chobe floodplain.

We call this conservation.

It is, more accurately, the final act of administration over something that was once simply alive on its own terms.

I think about the young female at Ruckomechi, browsing her Bauhinia bush, entirely at home in her skin and her place. She was living not surviving.

What the ratio records — humans up 1,460%, elephants down 98.4% — is not a conservation failure. It is a precise measurement of what one species does when a thermodynamic windfall removes the usual constraints. The elephants did not lose. The windfall happened and the ratio is what that looks like in the flesh of another animal.

We humans are the governors of elephant survival now.

Only we didn’t earn that responsibility, it just happened. The question is whether we are honest enough about how we came to hold it, to own the reality, and then make a decision on what to do next. Whether we abdicate or decide to determine the outcome.

The elephants, for their part, had very little say in their story.

Every week a credentialed expert testifies, publishes, or briefs, and is systematically disbelieved. The instinct is to accept that the talking head is always right and diagnose the audience.

This insight argues something the expert class finds less comfortable. The credential itself, the signal of institutional membership, is doing active damage in the contexts where it is most confidently deployed.

I have been to three funerals in the last decade. Each time, the community knew exactly what to do. Someone cooked. Someone spoke. Someone cried in the right way at the right moment, and everyone understood. The grief had a shape. What I have not seen, in all my years working in conservation and ecology, is anything like that for a disappearing wetland, a bleached reef, or a river running dry for the first time in recorded history. We have the data. We have the reports. We have, occasionally, the outrage. What we do not have is the ritual. I am starting to think that absence of grief mechanisms for ecological loss is costing us more than we know.

“Solastalgia is the homesickness you have when you are still at home. It is the pain experienced when the place you live and love is transformed beyond recognition.”

— Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity” (2005)

Fairly early in my time living in Botswana in the 1990s, I visited the Mababe Depression, a remote yet significant ecological and geological feature between the Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park. Mababe catches enough water for seasonal wetlands and surrounding grasslands that support large wildlife populations, including some of Botswana’s largest buffalo herds and significant numbers of elephants, lions, and other iconic species. The area is also a critical habitat for numerous bird species, making it a valuable site for conservation and ecotourism.

Alright, so it’s a wonderful African wilderness area that still looks much like it has for millennia. I was lucky to go there. I was visiting a wild dog research project, and we spent an evening following a pack, radio collar on the lead female, and counted over 20 mammal species, including an aardvark that darted between two termite mounds.

All that was pretty special Africa, but what happened the next morning as I took a gentle stroll a few meters away from my tent and onto the terrace of the Savuti channel was truly special.

No lions, elephants, or cheetahs, just a gentle serenade from the morning doves and a ground hornbill in the distance, the sun warming my face and a profound sense of peace. Stillness of mind, like nothing I had ever known before. I was home, true home, at one with whoever, whatever made me. In that place where I could not survive for a day was the peace that, the religious say, is bestowed by the Almighty. I was touched and, for a moment, serene.

No thoughts, no doubts, no pain, pure presence.

I blinked and it was gone.

I had connected, however briefly, with where I came from, where my ancestral DNA resided all those generations ago. It might be true, and if not, it is a comforting story.

Turns out, you can feel homesick without leaving home.

Coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in the early 2000s, solastalgia merges the Latin solacium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain), capturing the paradox of feeling homesick while still at home.

Solastalgia is what happens when the place that made you feel grounded starts changing or breaking while you’re still living in it, and the loss lands as powerlessness and dislocation rather than a wistful longing for elsewhere. It puts a name to an increasingly common psychological response in communities watching drought, deforestation, rising seas, or extractive industries remake their home in real time, with farmers in New South Wales enduring prolonged drought and open-cut mining featuring in Albrecht’s early work. The point isn’t semantic; it shifts environmental damage from an abstract ecological or economic problem into a lived emotional and existential one, and that matters because naming it creates space to recognise mental health impacts that might otherwise be filed away as depression or anxiety while the environmental root cause goes unspoken.

The term has gained traction globally and is now used in climate psychology, environmental justice, and eco-arts to articulate the lived experience of environmental loss. It resonates particularly with Indigenous communities, coastal dwellers, and rural populations confronting environmental transformation.

And it begins with the idea that everyone, however disconnected they may be, are suffering from loss.

Ecological degradation triggers genuine grief responses that often go unrecognised

Loss of a loved one, a friend, or even a well-known public figure is tangible. The person was real, physically present in our lives, and coming to terms with their absence is difficult. Family pets that die were physical, too, loved and lost. Even the word, we can’t find them anymore.

Environmental grief is a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability in the face of planetary-scale disruption. The loss here is often abstract or slow-moving, often with no obvious visible signs in everyday life. This mismatch can lead to the internalisation or dismissal of such feelings, even by those experiencing them, thus compounding the emotional burden.

On some mornings, it lands quietly. You open the news and there it is again, another reef bleaching event, another fire season starting early, another species you have never seen in the wild being filed away as gone. Nothing in your own house has changed, but the background world feels thinner, depleted somehow, and you feel it.

That response has a name. Solastalgia is grief triggered by environmental damage and a collapsing sense of home. It is not melodrama and it is not a political mood. It sits in the same family as bereavement because it follows the same logic, attachment, rupture, and the slow recalibration of what you thought would endure.

Conventional grief for a person is legible and people know what to say. There are rituals, leave policies, casseroles, condolences, an accepted storyline for how sorrow is meant to move through those who knew who passed and even a community. Ecological grief often arrives without any of that scaffolding. It can be difficult to name, harder to share, and easy for institutions to treat as either private anxiety or public ideology.

So people carry it alone because the culture has not built a recognised place to put it.

Psychologists have linked ecological grief to individual wellbeing and to motivations for pro-environmental behaviour. Theoretical frameworks situate it inside broader models of grief and loss, rather than treating it as a novel anomaly. Systematic research is still evolving, but multiple lines of evidence are pointing to the same conclusion. Ecological grief is real, and it is showing up more often as environmental change accelerates.

And yet, for the most part, modern society ignores environmental grief. Perhaps to avoid guilt, we don’t have formal ways to process it.

Modern societies lack cultural frameworks for processing environmental grief

When a human dies, a socially sanctioned practice begins. The death is recorded, the body taken away, and carefully prepared for appropriate rituals. A funeral takes place, and the body is laid to rest. There are memorial services, maybe a plaque or a headstone are crafted, and a mourning period is observed. It’s a process of acknowledgement that takes time and engagement and appears in various forms in all cultures.

In contrast, grief over environmental loss is typically silent and unsupported, partly because such losses are collective, diffuse, and ongoing, rather than discrete events. The absence of cultural acknowledgement makes it harder for people to validate their emotional responses and may result in internalised shame, numbness, or psychological distress.

Several factors contribute to this cultural void.

To begin with, it is new. When agriculture began some 12,000 years ago, the best estimate was that around 10 million people were spread thinly across the planet. These foragers had a light touch, perhaps exterminating a few species of megafauna, but they did little to the broad brush of the landscape. Fire and selective planting altered the vegetation, but they had little reason to grieve for their home. Indeed, they were most likely agreeing with its rhythms.

There are 2,050 Barcelona’s worth of people today, vs 10 million at the start of agriculture. More than enough to alter every corner beyond recognition. We have plenty of visible and reported environmental change to grieve.

Then, there is the psychology.

Values in modern capitalist societies tend to downplay or deny emotional connections to the natural world. The anthropocentric framing of nature is as a resource to be used rather than a relational entity to be mourned. We used to forage in it now we can plough, mine and pave it for our needs and wants. Emotional responses to ecological harm are typically dismissed as irrational, sentimental, or unproductive.

When a society has no rituals for ecological loss or has lost them, the cost shows up in emotional stagnation and a disconnection from nature. A kind of numb drift. Without ritual, ecological grief becomes a private, invisible burden. There is no public space to mourn a dying river or a lost habitat, so people learn to read their own sadness as irrational or excessive. They stop talking about it. That silence produces stagnation, and stagnation produces numbing. The psyche protects itself by dialling down feeling across the board, and the cost is not just the muting of grief. It is the erosion of awe, connection, and the capacity for sustained attention to the living world.

Authors and practitioners like Joanna Macy, Martín Prechtel, and Francis Weller make the claim, albeit from different angles, that grief over the environment is both personal and a communal responsibility. The rise of climate vigils, Earth-based rituals, and ecopsychology is trying to fill this gap and create a space where collective mourning can happen without apology. Still, these frameworks remain peripheral. They have not yet been widely integrated into public life, education, or mental health systems.

Rituals interrupt that drift by doing three specific things. They validate the loss, signalling that what the mourner feels is real and proportionate. They externalise it, moving grief from the interior of the mind into a physical act shared with others. And they restore the feedback loop between people and place, reminding participants that they are part of the ecosystem rather than spectators of it. In many Indigenous cultures, rituals for the land kept that awareness sharp and continuous. When the rituals disappear, the land is quietly reclassified from a relative to a resource. Once that shift is complete, its destruction registers as a line item rather than a loss.

Indigenous worldviews often understand humans as embedded within, rather than separate from, the natural world. This perspective shapes how ecological loss is experienced and expressed. When species disappear, landscapes change, or sacred sites are desecrated, these losses are not seen as external environmental events but as familial or spiritual traumas. Grief, in this context, is often collective, ceremonial, and continuous, reflecting deep relational ties to land, water, and more-than-human kin. Ceremonies of mourning, offerings, songs, storytelling, and seasonal rites are examples of how many Indigenous communities acknowledge ecological change and maintain emotional continuity with the land.

For example, many First Nations peoples in Australia mourn the destruction of Country not only as environmental damage but as a rupture in ancestral relationships. The concept of Caring for Country includes spiritual, legal, and emotional obligations to maintain the health of land and water. When Country is harmed through mining, logging, or fire mismanagement, for example, the grief that follows is real and culturally supported. Similarly, in the Arctic, Inuit communities experiencing melting permafrost and declining ice have described deep sorrow and identity loss, which researchers like Ashlee Cunsolo have documented as ecological grief. Among these communities, such grief is not pathologised but interwoven with resilience, storytelling, and intergenerational knowledge.

Modern societies, especially those shaped by settler-colonial, industrial, and secular paradigms, often cut the emotional and spiritual cord to the land. That rupture does three things at once. It isolates people from the ecosystems they live inside. It removes the cultural tools that would help them metabolise the trauma of environmental collapse. And it also reduces their guilt from actions that drastically affect the way nature works.

The most functional aspect of the rupture, for an industrial society, is the ethical distance it creates. When people are emotionally and spiritually connected to a forest, destroying it feels like self-harm. Sever that connection, and the same act becomes an economic necessity or a statistical externality. The numbing is not incidental because industrial systems depend on it to keep operating without the friction of collective shame.

The bitter irony is that the tools used to master nature, secularism, industrialism, rational resource accounting, are precisely what stripped away the emotional equipment needed to reckon with the consequences of that mastery. The capacity to exploit and the capacity to grieve were dismantled together. And in the absence of ritual, community acknowledgement, or linguistic framing for environmental loss, a privatised, often pathologised grief experience happens. Perhaps this explains why we want to save the whale, the koala or local iconic species. It makes us feel better; briefly.

Suppressed ecological grief manifests as anxiety, depression, and political polarisation

A growing body of research in psychology and environmental humanities suggests that unacknowledged ecological grief manifests as anxiety, depression, and chronic feelings of helplessness. Francis Weller describes this as unmetabolised sorrow, a weight that accumulates in individuals and communities when loss goes unprocessed.

Grief is not resolved, which brings serious consequences. Climate-aware therapists report that patients frequently present with vague, persistent anxiety and depression tied to an unspoken awareness of environmental loss and planetary instability. Those conditions are compounded by the absence of public language or ritual to validate such feelings, leaving sufferers uncertain about the origin of their own distress. There is no cultural container for what they are carrying.

An emotion not seen or acknowledged by the surrounding culture is rerouted into outlets that are easier to name, justify, or perform. Some people slide into denialism, apathy, or hyper-consumerism as forms of emotional displacement. Others carry the same unresolved grief into polarised identity politics, eco-anxiety-fuelled outrage, or rigid ideological posturing. The grief finds itself a shape, only it is rarely a useful one. Knowing this, climate polarisation can be read, at least in part, as collective emotional dysregulation. A clash between those who suppress grief through denial and those who express it through alarm and advocacy, often without mutual recognition.

Unresolved grief is also fertile ground for populist stories that feed on existential fear. When people feel loss but have no shared way to name it, the energy looks for a channel. Some authoritarian or nationalist movements have learned to offer one. They co-opt ecological language, for example, “protecting our land” and convert grief into exclusionary or regressive agendas.

Meanwhile, the ecological left has its own failure mode. When grief is not communally held or metabolised into constructive engagement, it can curdle into burnout or despair.

Without cultural and psychological mechanisms to name, share, and process ecological grief, societies may experience increased fragmentation, mistrust, and emotional volatility that erodes the social cohesion needed to face ecological crises together. Rituals are not cultural relics or optional comfort. They are social infrastructure, and without them, the cohesion needed to navigate the Anthropocene dissolves into the numb drift and fragmentation that makes collective action nearly impossible.

So what do other cultures do about this? Recall that only around a billion or so of the 8 billion people on the planet hail from liberal democracies that know little more than exploitation of natural resources.

Presumably, there are other ways to process collective loss.

Different cultural traditions offer diverse models for processing collective loss

Human societies know about shared experiences of grief and loss from war, natural disaster, famine, or death. Their coping mechanisms often include ritualised mourning, collective storytelling, music, dance, prayer, seasonal ceremonies, and public memorials. Such practices serve not only to acknowledge pain and loss but also to reaffirm cultural identity, reknit social cohesion, and symbolically connect the past to the future. For instance, Japan’s Bon Festival honours ancestral spirits and affirms familial continuity; in many African cultures, grief is processed through extended mourning periods, drumming, singing, and public expression; and in Jewish tradition, shiva provides structured time for collective grieving, reflection, and emotional support.

My own cultural salve is Johnny Clegg’s 1993 song The Crossing (O Siyeza), a tribute to his bandmate Dudu Ndlovu, murdered during the unrest preceding the end of Apartheid. I heard Clegg play it live soon after its release. The song weaves personal grief with Zulu spiritualism, using the metaphor of crossing over to trace the soul’s journey from the living to the ancestors. It became something larger than a eulogy. For a country navigating out of racial segregation toward a democratic future, it captured the exhaustion and the hope in a single breath. The journey over the dark mountains is arduous. There is rest on the other side.

In many Indigenous cultures, land is part of the community. So rituals of loss extend outward to trees, rivers, species, and ancestral landscapes. In Māori tradition, whenua (land) is bound up with identity and ancestry. Damage to land is felt as a rupture in lineage and belonging, which is why communal rituals can arise to restore spiritual and social balance.

Set against that, many modern societies tend to privatise grief and put it on a clock. These cultural traditions do almost the opposite. They build ongoing, cyclical structures for revisiting loss and returning to healing, not once, but across generations. Coping mechanisms are also adaptive. They have survived disruption before and learned to hold loss without collapsing into it.

Grieving together turns out to be more than consolation. At scale, it becomes resistance, cultural renewal, and psychological repair. That is precisely its value when the loss is too large for any one person to carry alone.

Tangihanga, the traditional Māori process of mourning, unfolds over several days on a marae and draws together waiata, karakia, communal meals, and ancestral speech into a single act of re-stitching. It is not only a farewell to the deceased. It reaffirms tribal identity and the living relationship between people and whenua because in Māori cosmology land and nature are kin, not backdrop. That framing changes what environmental damage means. Degradation is harm to whakapapa, grieved communally, and when sacred sites or rivers are damaged, rituals of mourning and healing are invoked to restore balance. As a model for acknowledging ecological loss with ritual depth and communal weight, it has few equivalents.

Rooted in Indigenous Aztec traditions and blended with Catholic ritual, Día de los Muertos honours deceased ancestors through altars, ofrendas, laden with food, photographs, candles, and marigolds, alongside cemetery vigils held in a spirit of celebration rather than sorrow. The tradition affirms a cyclical view of life and death, keeping the relationship with the dead active and participatory. Grief becomes something you do together, out loud, and in public. As communities across Mexico face deforestation, water scarcity, and climate disruption, some environmental groups have begun folding that symbolism into ecological memorials with altars for extinct species and processions to mourn vanishing landscapes.

The Dogon people of Mali hold Dama ceremonies to mark the passage of the dead and release their spirits into the ancestral realm. Multi-day events built around masked dances, drumming, storytelling, and communal gathering, that in Dogon cosmology ties human life tightly to the rhythms of nature, agriculture, and celestial observation. The Dama works to restore that spiritual-ecological order when death has disturbed it. Individual loss and cosmic rebalancing are the same ceremony.

It might be obvious by now that the collective grief of ecological loss is not new or trendy or something imagined by a lefty academic on a New England campus. This is the stuff of human evolution, a knowing that loss is more than the passing of a loved one or the family pet and is felt by everyone.

It is time to acknowledge and honour it.

Acknowledging grief is essential for sustained environmental action rather than an obstacle to it

When grief is recognised and worked through, it stops being dead weight. Joanna Macy makes this point in the work that reconnects. Grieving the loss of ecosystems or species hurts, but the pain is evidence of connection. It tells the truth about what we belong to. And it can support a kind of activism that is grounded and sustainable, powered by love and loyalty to what is threatened rather than by fear or outrage alone.

Suppressing grief tends to do the opposite. It does not remove the feeling. It forces it to find another exit, and that often looks like numbing, denial, or burnout, particularly for people doing climate or conservation work up close. Many activists describe this pattern as futility, despair, and chronic fatigue. Not simply because the work is hard, but because either their grief is invalidated or because their effort starts to feel emotionally unmoored from what it is actually about. Without space to mourn what has been lost or damaged, people either step away entirely or get swallowed by hopelessness.

Psychologically, grief functions as a necessary pause. A way of honouring what matters. A bridge from loss to adaptive response. It is not indulgent or distracting. It is how individuals and communities integrate the reality of change, so they can keep acting with intention.

Socially and politically, normalising grief is a resilience move.

When people grieve together through ritual, storytelling, or public acknowledgment, they build solidarity, mutual support, and a shared sense of purpose. You can see that in the rise of climate vigils, extinction memorials, and eco-rituals. They take private sorrow and turn it into public witness. They make urgency more real because it is rooted in emotional truth.

In that sense, acknowledging grief is not a side project. It is the beginning, the maintenance, and the moral renewal of activism. The key is not to pathologise grief, but to recognise it as a necessary emotional foundation for sustained, compassionate, and creative environmental action.

Only this is not how we do it, at least not in Western democracies. Environmental crises are routinely framed as technical problems requiring scientific and technological fixes. Renewable energy, carbon pricing, and conservation strategies are essential, but that framing sidelines the emotional responses that determine whether people act, support policy, or disengage entirely.

Anxiety, grief, guilt, and apathy are not noise. They are signals that something morally and existentially significant is at stake. Public discourse rewards data and objectivity while leaving the inner human experience unaddressed, and that mismatch strands people between warnings that are scientifically accurate and emotionally inaccessible.

When emotions are named and held in community, through storytelling, ritual, artistic expression, or honest dialogue, they stop obstructing and start fuelling care and collective action. Movements that make room for emotional expression tend to generate deeper public resonance than campaigns that stay purely technical. Extinction Rebellion’s use of grief rituals and the climate justice framing of youth movements both demonstrate the point. Emotional literacy is not a soft addition to strategic work. It shapes how leadership holds under pressure, how communication lands, and how mobilisation survives the long haul.

When we make cultural room for ecological grief, we increase, not decrease, our capacity for environmental action. That runs against the old reflex that emotion pulls us away from rational solutions, when, in practice, it is the reverse. Grief is properly acknowledged deepens commitment, reduces burnout, and builds the psychological resilience required for long-term engagement with complex environmental challenges.

You can see examples of this everywhere. Indigenous communities with established ways of expressing environmental relationship often show notable resilience as conditions shift. Activists who include grief rituals in their work often sidestep the cynicism that catches many colleagues. Conservation organisations that openly name the emotional reality of biodiversity loss often sustain staff engagement and creativity longer than those that rely only on technical problem-solving.

I cannot promise a serene moment on the banks of an African river, the musty warmth of elephant dung in the air and a mourning dove pulling its long note across the channel telling you, without words, that you belong to something older than your own name. I had that once. I did not know what to do with it then, and the culture I returned to had no ceremony for what I had felt or for what was already being lost.

We have built extraordinary tools for measuring the damage. We have built almost nothing for carrying it.

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Notes & Sources (for the curious)

Naming the feeling of solastalgia & ecological grief

• Solastalgia (definition + origin) — Albrecht (2005)

• Ecological grief as legitimate response to climate-related loss — Cunsolo & Ellis (2018)

• Eco-distress/eco-anxiety as a mental-health pathway of climate change — American Psychological Association + ecoAmerica, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate (2017; updated 2021)

The backdrop: biodiversity decline & environmental loss

• Global biodiversity decline (headline synthesis + drivers) — IPBES Global Assessment Summary for Policymakers (2019)

• Biodiversity as systemic risk (economy/finance framing, recent synthesis) — IPBES-linked reporting on systemic risk assessment (2026)

Culture as “container”: collective mourning frameworks

• Tangihanga as a communal Māori mourning practice (duration, purpose, open grieving) — Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (2013)

• Día de los Muertos (public remembrance ritual, timing, meaning) — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage entry (2008)

Indigenous place-relations & “Country”

• “Caring for Country” (definition + obligations; why Country is relational) — Australia State of the Environment 2021

• Caring for Country (overview + social/health benefits framing used in policy contexts) — AIATSIS resource on Caring for Country benefits (2017)

Practice-level “so what” for holding grief without collapsing into it

• Guidance for communities/clinicians on climate-linked distress and coping — APA + ecoAmerica (2021 update)

Primary Sources

Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: A new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, (3), 41–55.

Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281.

Lawrance, E. L., Thompson, R., Newberry Le Vay, J., Page, L., & Jennings, N. (2022). The impact of climate change on mental health and emotional wellbeing: A narrative review of current evidence, and its implications. International Review of Psychiatry, 34(5), 443–498.

Pihkala, P. (2022). The process of eco-anxiety and ecological grief: A narrative review and a new proposal. Sustainability, 14(24), 16628.

Varutti, M. (2023). Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction? Ambio, 53(5), 552–564.