Western education was calibrated for a story of continuous growth and narrowing specialisation. Energy shocks, resource constraints, technological upheaval and sever geopolitical instability are breaking that calibration. More useful learning of systems thinking, emotional resilience, and ethical reasoning can be taught at any level, but getting there requires structural redesign. AI is commodifying technical knowledge fast, which makes education’s real job the human capacities machines find difficult, especially moral judgement and evaluation under uncertainty. The hard part is that reform requires abandoning a paradigm built for a world that no longer exists.

Back in 1987, I was a usurper.

Standing in front of the class I had taken as a student two years earlier, I was bright-eyed with a bushy tail of enthusiasm, and immediately became an advocate for radical student-centred learning. Without formal training, and before I finished my PhD, I was teaching ecology to undergraduates.

As a novice lecturer, I abandoned structured lessons for open-ended inquiry, breaking educational rules by asking students to design experiments from scratch with minimal context and relying only on their wits. I intuitively knew, and then demonstrated in the ten weeks that the students spent observing woodlice in various combinations of contrived conditions, that curiosity-driven learning creates a more profound understanding than traditional, structured teaching ever could. I was so excited that I described the experience in my first peer-reviewed scientific paper, published in the Journal of Biological Education.

Dangerfield J.M., Boar R.R., Montgomery P.S. (1987) Teaching ecology to undergraduates: a practical course using projects. Journal of Biological Education 21(4): 251-258

I went on to teach ecology and biodiversity at three other universities before ending my academic career prematurely to try my hand at ecological advice in the real world of commerce and consulting.

And that was a lot harder.

What my naive enthusiasm gave me in the ivory tower did little for the hard-nosed, conservative and siloed people who were expecting me to advise them on science. These good folk were not interested in radical, innovative, or self-centred ideas, especially because free thinking invariably impeded their career advancement and put their comfort at risk. They also balked at having to think for themselves.

Most only gave me the time of day because their company or government agency had an obligation to know some ecological detail or to gather some environmental data for compliance reporting. Naturally, I explained to them how such knowledge benefited the bottom line in terms of cost savings, risk reduction, and a competitive edge in a crowded market, but this barely registered.

Why was this? These environmental officers, sustainability managers, policy experts, and analysts were highly educated and intelligent individuals. Many had completed a modern education system that conventional wisdom told me was designed to prepare individuals to participate productively in society by gaining knowledge, developing skills, and cultivating responsible citizenship.

What had the education system done to them? Perhaps, not enough.

The thing is, and now more than ever, education isn’t mainly about transferring knowledge; it’s about building the human capacities we’ll need to navigate a world that’s getting less predictable.

And so we arrive at the first premise…

Modern education was built during a strange, temporary boom time. Fossil fuels let economies expand without hitting the usual brakes, technology kept patching over scarcity, and the environmental bill was treated as someone else’s problem. So we trained students for a world that could keep growing forever.

That logic sits inside the whole pipeline from school curricula and university programs to vocational training. The job is to produce roles that keep the growth machine fed through ever-increasing specialisation. Engineers build more infrastructure, finance manages ever-larger portfolios, marketing turns attention into demand. The specialised expert became the ideal.

Ironically, the marketers, finance people, engineers, and tech bros this system was built for are also the easiest to swap out. When complexity can be outsourced to LLMs, specialisation stops looking like security.

But initially, specialism wasn’t easy.

After thousands of years of accumulation, a great depth of knowledge had developed across many subjects. Plumbing to the bottom of them was difficult unless you learned a great deal about a little. You specialised at school, and when you reached higher education, you found academics divided into increasingly narrow disciplines, each with its vocabulary, methodologies, and perspectives that you had to learn just to join in. You went to universities organised into departments that rarely communicated with each other. And just like in school, college assessment systems rewarded depth of knowledge in particular subjects rather than understanding connections between fields.

I will spare you the pain I experienced when, later in my career, I briefly returned to academia as an adjunct professor at a major Australian university, where the worst aspects of all the above gave me, an outsider with weird ideas, the cold shoulder in the corridor.

Funnelling students into increasingly narrow fields of expertise, through standardised testing, rewards depth over breadth and predictability over adaptability, assuming a future in which technical mastery and career stability remain viable goals. This was the world of my parents, which emerged from the world wars into a period of rapid economic expansion in the West. It was also my world, and that’s why my attempt at student-centred learning was radical, even for a modern university with the motto Do Different.

How does specialisation that was useful for a time stack up today?

The accelerating pace of technological change, climate disruption, geopolitical instability, and economic volatility are reshaping the nature of work and life, not to mention the sheer volume of candidates for every role. Jobs are being automated, industries are being disrupted, and traditional career paths are fragmenting. The core skills most needed today, from critical thinking, adaptability, collaborative problem-solving, to emotional resilience, are not consistently emphasised in conventional schooling.

Likewise, systems thinking, which enables individuals to understand and respond to complex, interconnected challenges, remains a peripheral rather than central component of most curricula.

All this means that the premise generally holds. Preparation assumes a post-war boom carries on indefinitely.

Current educational systems are primarily designed around assumptions of continued economic growth, technological advancement, and occupational specialisation. Only this is not the future, which is already uncertain, complex, and rapidly shifting.

The assumption behind the premise is wrong. The future is not one of continuous growth and endless specialisation into narrow silos, which prompts the second premise…

It’s trite, but true. The future will be nothing like today or yesterday. Yet, I present it here as a premise because it is worth the confirmation that future generations will face novel challenges unprecedented in human history.

While humans have always adapted to change, declining EROI, the breaching of multiple planetary boundaries, technological disruption, and social transformations will be disruptive at best, and more likely catastrophic to the status quo. Young people will need new technical skills and enhanced capacities in systems thinking, adaptability, and psychological resilience, which our current educational models typically undervalue.

The reality is that 8 billion people are still increasing at 8,000+ per hour, and already face genuine biophysical constraints at a global scale. Unlike previous generations who could expand into untapped resources and energy, tomorrow’s adults will contend with diminishing conventional energy returns, accelerating climate instability, and biodiversity decline that combine to undermine ecosystem services we’ve taken for granted.

The food system is instructive.

Today’s students study agriculture primarily as a technological domain, learning to maximise yields through industrial methods. But tomorrow’s farmers will operate in a world where nitrogen fertiliser is increasingly expensive, phosphorus supplies are dwindling, climate patterns are destabilised, and pollinators are disappearing. The tractors will not run on diesel and the Haber-Bosch fertiliser production process will decline, forcing much rapid innovation in intensive agriculture, which will have to persist at least through a demographic transition. Understanding and addressing this situation requires fundamentally different skills, not just sustainable farming techniques, but also all the complex ecological relationships and resilience strategies necessary for highly variable conditions.

And it is happening already.

In 2025, Bolivia’s agricultural sector grappled with a severe diesel fuel crisis that threatened to undermine food security across the region. In Santa Cruz, the country’s agricultural heartland, farmers received only 700,000 litres of diesel daily—barely 21% of the 3.3 million litres needed for normal operations. This dramatic shortfall created kilometre-long queues at fuel stations, with farmers sometimes waiting days for limited supplies.

The 2025 Bolivian diesel crisis serves as a brutal energy reality check, marking the definitive end of the nation’s era of subsidised, cheap growth. What began as a paralysing diesel shortage caused by depleted foreign reserves and falling gas production, evolved by early 2026 into a structural cost-of-living crisis following the government’s decision to end long-standing fuel subsidies. While this shock therapy successfully restored fuel availability by allowing market prices to take hold, it replaced kilometre-long queues with massive inflation and razor-thin agricultural margins. Bolivia has essentially transitioned from a system defined by waiting in line to one defined by paying the true price, forcing its economy to finally reckon with the high cost of energy that it can no longer afford to externalise. And I suspect they didn’t teach any of this in school.

Challenges usually get back to energy, but there is also the rapid technological evolution restructuring how we work, communicate, and organise society.

When I began teaching at university, computers were dumb terminals connected to a mainframe. The first desktop word processors only arrived in the last year of my PhD. Today’s students not only carry supercomputers in their pockets that can access most of human knowledge, but they also come with an AI assistant that can do all the heavy lifting.

The traditional education approach views technology as merely a skill set to master, rather than a force reshaping cognition and social structures. Today’s five-year-olds will graduate into a world where artificial intelligence has transformed knowledge work, virtual and augmented reality have blurred physical and digital realms, and biotechnology has redefined our relationship with natural systems. A virtual world might be the only safe one.

It’s happened before, perspective has merit. People have always needed to communicate effectively, solve problems collectively, and adapt to changing circumstances. The Industrial Revolution dramatically transformed society, yet humans adjusted. We may overstate the uniqueness of current challenges.

Critical thinking, creativity, and social intelligence have always been valuable because the capacity to find meaning amid difficulty remains a fundamental human capability, regardless of the technological or environmental context. Yet most educational models implicitly assume a stable, predictable future in which knowledge accumulates linearly, and career paths follow predictable trajectories. Students are taught to master existing knowledge rather than navigate profound uncertainty.

Future-relevant education would foster capacities for psychological flexibility, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to find purpose amid changing circumstances. These aren’t soft, nice-to-have skills, but essential foundations for functioning in a world of discontinuity.

Without spending days assessing the literature or naming every study, I will establish this premise…

When I wrote about my experience as a novice ecology lecturer for the Mindful Sceptic newsletter, a commenter put me onto the studio school model, an innovative educational approach that integrates academic learning with real-world work experiences through project-based learning.

Studio schools are deliberately small (typically around 300 students), emphasising personalised learning, strong relationships between teachers and students, and the integration of academic subjects with hands-on, real-world projects. Exactly the training for innovative problem-solving we are going to need. The curriculum combines core qualifications in English, maths, and science with applied learning and extended work placements that are central to the school experience rather than supplementary.

According to the latest available data for 2025, 27 Studio Schools operated in England. These schools had a combined capacity of approximately 8,100 students. However, enrolment figures indicate that they were operating at about 54% capacity. Given that there are around 10 million pupils in schools in England, students in Studio Schools represent approximately 0.05% of the total student population. They are training a tiny fraction of each cohort in the systems thinking needed.

Similarly, Montessori education, which emphasises self-directed learning and mixed-age classrooms, is primarily offered at the early years and primary levels in the UK. There were about 700 Montessori schools and nurseries nationwide in 2025, serving an estimated 30,590 children. Montessori students constitute a similarly tiny 0.3% of the student population.

So what about the premise?

It is mainly true. Educational reforms over the past several decades have been modest. Coding, climate science, and digital literacy classes might have entered schools, but without fundamentally altering how education is structured or delivered. What modernisation there is has been within existing institutional frameworks that emphasise standardised assessment, age-based progression, and subject silos. And while curricula evolve incrementally, the overarching structure often prioritises discrete knowledge acquisition over integrative, transdisciplinary thinking.

This is a critical limitation. We are not teaching kids to think.

But we could.

Research demonstrates that systems thinking is not only teachable but also deeply engaging for students from early primary school through to tertiary education. Project-based learning, inquiry-based science, and interdisciplinary thematic units have demonstrated that even young learners can grasp systems concepts, such as cause-and-effect chains, interdependence, and leverage points, especially when connected to real-world contexts like ecosystems, communities, or global challenges.

And if a pushy postgrad usurper can teach it in the 1980s, why not trained professionals in the 2020s?

Maybe it’s structural inertia, or it’s policy constraints, or it’s something more nefarious. Either way, education systems still default to linear instruction, content coverage, and individual performance metrics. And those defaults actively fight the complex, relational, often collaborative work that systems thinking requires.

A structural shift would mean changing more than the wallpaper. It would mean school organisation, teacher training, assessment strategies, curriculum integration and a host of other structural changes. The stuff that decides what gets taught, what gets rewarded, and what gets dropped when time runs out.

Until this level of reconstruction happens, most reform will keep arriving as add-ons. Well-intentioned, perhaps, but ultimately piecemeal.

But it is possible.

Finland, Singapore, EL Education offer three different contexts for a change in the educational structure towards systems thinking.

Finland does it by breaking the silo. Phenomenon-based learning starts with a real-world topic and has students examine it through multiple disciplinary lenses—science, humanities, arts—so the interdependencies are the point. Teachers have high autonomy and professional trust, which lets them adapt to the classroom in front of them. Assessment follows suit, leaning on formative feedback over high-stakes testing, so depth wins over memory.

Singapore approaches it through science and technology, with systems design thinking embedded in the national curriculum. The Applied Learning Programme (ALP) brings in interdisciplinary challenges of sustainability, robotics, and health to build problem framing, stakeholder analysis, iteration, and evaluation. Teacher development and partnerships with universities and industry help anchor the shift, connecting classroom learning to broader social and ecological systems.

EL Education in the US makes the project the unit of learning. Each project uses long, interdisciplinary expeditions on complex topics, often ending in public presentations or real-world products. The structure rewards curiosity, perspective-taking, and feedback loops, guided by ten design principles, including the primacy of self-discovery and the having of wonderful ideas. Those are systems thinking muscles, and also happen to be solid, mindful sceptic skills.

Schools in the EL network also adopt collaborative leadership models and invest heavily in teacher training to sustain structural alignment with their educational philosophy.

These innovations from around the world are far more ambitious and successful than my little woodlouse practical. The question isn’t whether systems thinking can be taught at all levels because the evidence confirms it can. The real question is whether we will transform educational structures that no longer serve a world of accelerating complexity.

What if modern schooling, even these reformed versions, systematically undercut the cognitive flexibility it claims to build?

In many documented hunter-gatherer societies, early childhood learning was all about autonomy and exploration. Ethnographic studies of the !Kung in Southern Africa, the Hadza in Tanzania, and various Indigenous Australian groups describe young children with wide latitude to play, mimic adults, and mix with peers without formal instruction. That kind of free-range environment let them develop cognitive, social, and environmental skills through immersion in community and landscape.

Then, somewhere between ages 6 and 8, many children started taking on more responsibility through tasks that echoed adult roles. Not in the structured way we think of modern apprenticeships, but through assisting older siblings or parents in gathering, hunting, tool-making, or caregiving. It was informal learning-by-doing but woven into the daily rhythms of life. And a key feature was instructional restraint. Adults didn’t typically give direct instruction; they modelled tasks and let children learn through observation and practice.

Whilst all this sounds like a romantic notion and not transferable to the modern day, it does tell us that we don’t have to be so dependent on institutional validation.

Our Western educational pipeline, from elementary school through high school, creates a dependency on institutional validation and external direction, precisely what you don’t want in a world requiring rapid adaptation.

So, what is the reimagining? What design of teaching will prepare youngsters to participate productively in society? What knowledge, skills, responsible citizenship, and resilience education will they need to cope with unprecedented change?

Perhaps the most meaningful reimagining of education centres on cultivating emotional resilience and ethical reasoning, but before we go there, there is the elephant to consider… Artificial Intelligence.

The accelerating capabilities of AI to absorb, synthesise, and deliver technical knowledge is the greatest challenge to traditional education for generations. Content is condensed on a voice command; you don’t need to remember it. From coding assistance to personalised tutoring in mathematics or science, AI tools are making technical knowledge more accessible and commodified. Education must go beyond training students on what to know and focus instead on how to think, relate, and act. In short, how to evaluate. These skills are more challenging to automate and are even more critical for human flourishing.

AI is excellent at instruction-as-delivery, like explaining concepts in ten different ways, giving unlimited practice, and providing instant feedback without embarrassment or delay. It can compress whole technical domains into something a motivated student can work through quickly. But it is unreliable at the parts of education that are not technical, such as resolving value conflicts, earning epistemic trust, and navigating messy social coordination where legitimacy and accountability matter. It can generate reasons, but it can’t authorise them. It can propose answers, but it can’t carry responsibility for what those answers do to a real community. So AI is a really handy tutor. Just don’t outsource judgement.

Emotional resilience matters here, too.

It’s what lets learners stay functional in the face of uncertainty, failure, and complexity. And ethical reasoning is the partner skill. Ambiguous, value-laden situations show up all the time in a world increasingly shaped by thinking algorithms and need considered decisions.

Traditionally, education runs top-down, as older generations pass wisdom and skills to younger ones. But in periods of rapid change, that flow isn’t one-way. Younger generations often carry real insight, especially around technology, digital culture, and emerging worldviews. A reciprocal model of learning builds mutual respect, speeds adaptation, and strengthens social cohesion. Older generations contribute historical perspective, contextual wisdom, and moral frameworks; younger ones bring agility, novel thinking, and intuitive familiarity with disruptive technologies.

As AI reshapes work and knowledge, schools and universities that prioritise dialogue, empathy, and cross-generational exchange are better positioned to cultivate systems-aware, emotionally grounded citizens. The goal becomes less about outpacing machines and more about doubling down on the human strengths machines can’t replicate.

The Wisdom Exchange Project (UK/US) is one example. School-aged students and older adults (often retirees) collaborate on shared inquiries into life experience, ethics, and community history. Sessions include storytelling, mutual interviews, and collaborative problem-solving around ethical dilemmas or contemporary challenges. The emphasis isn’t just elders teaching youth; it’s mutual enrichment as students offer digital skills or emerging cultural insights in return. Emotional resilience develops through reflective dialogue and real-world role modelling, while ethical reasoning deepens through multigenerational perspectives on values, justice, and responsibility.

Operating in several Australian states, Generation Connect is an intergenerational program that pairs high school students with elderly citizens in aged care facilities. Originally designed to reduce loneliness, it has evolved into a reciprocal learning platform. Students often train older adults in digital literacy, while elders share life experiences and coping strategies. Joint projects, such as digital biographies or oral history archives, help students build empathy, patience, and a more profound understanding of the ethical issues surrounding ageing, memory, and dignity. Teachers report measurable improvements in students’ emotional awareness and communication skills. The ABC documentary series Old People’s Home for 4-Year-Olds, and Old People's Home For Teenagers, brought the idea to a broader audience, bringing together elderly residents of retirement communities with preschool-aged children to explore the transformative power of intergenerational relationships.

The Center for Human Technology Education Initiatives (Global/US-led) backs school-based programs that teach Digital Wisdom by combining ethics, media literacy, and emotional intelligence in the age of AI. Their curriculum includes modules on moral decision-making in tech design, digital empathy, and understanding feedback loops in social platforms. Some pilot programs add intergenerational roundtables, bringing students and adults together to reflect on the moral implications of technology use. That blend of systems thinking, and ethical inquiry shows how different generations can co-create norms for emerging challenges, reinforcing emotional resilience and shared responsibility.

Traditional education assumes knowledge moves one way, from elders to youth. ‘Teacher knows best’ made sense when change was slow and experience reliably predicted the next set of challenges. Why not learn from the wise elders? Older generations do carry hard-won wisdom about enduring human problems, historical patterns, and ethical frameworks shaped through lived experience.

But once core literacy, numeracy, and communication skills are absorbed, the advantage can flip in periods of rapid change, when the future isn’t predictable from the past. Younger generations often move faster through emerging technological landscapes, social reorganisations, and shifting environmental conditions than their elders. Here, Gran, your phone does this now.

Transformation thrives in the spaces where generations connect and wisdom flows in multiple directions. When we create environments where elders and youth solve authentic problems, whether nurturing community gardens or navigating digital landscapes, we tap into a natural exchange of perspectives that enriches everyone involved.

An intergenerational approach is compelling.

What all this boils down to is this. Education’s most profound purpose isn’t information transfer but cultivating the reflective capacity to engage meaningfully with an uncertain future.

This isn’t simply adding emotional skills to existing curricula or creating occasional intergenerational exchanges. It’s reconceiving education’s fundamental purpose and process, shifting from knowledge acquisition to capacity development, from hierarchical transmission to ecological exchange, and from predetermined outcomes to emergent understanding.

And how to do this?

The Mindful Sceptic framework, which combines curiosity, critical thinking, and awareness, is a good starting point because it strikes a balance between unflinching realism about current challenges and openness to creative possibilities. It acknowledges the evolutionary drivers that shape human behaviour and honours both traditional wisdom and emerging knowledge rather than privileging either. Such is a sceptic.

Most importantly, a mindful sceptic recognises that resilience emerges from relationships rather than isolation, diversity rather than uniformity, and adaptation rather than rigid preservation in complex living systems—whether ecosystems, social systems, or learning communities.

What I know is that, back in the 1980s, my undergraduates didn’t seem to mind that I was a usurper and gave me strong positive responses in student appraisal. And I kept it up throughout my career, including an equally audacious biodiversity class. Macquarie University honoured me with an Outstanding Teacher Award, yet I still have no formal teacher training.

Dangerfield, J. M., & Pik, A. J. (1999). The educational value of an all taxa biodiversity inventory. Journal of Biological Education, 33(2), 76-83.

Many are wiser, more experienced than I in pedagogy and may not like this last, audacious premise.

Education is how a society trains itself. It’s the primary mechanism for preparing people to participate in civic life, economic systems, and collective decision-making. The problem is that the current model is industrial-era by design, optimised for economic expansion, specialisation, and predictable career pathways. It is drifting out of alignment with the world it’s supposed to serve, even the one of command and control.

What we need instead is education that builds the human capacities machines can’t easily replicate: evaluation, systems thinking, moral judgment, collective reasoning, emotional resilience, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.

If education systems don’t make this deep structural shift, then inequality widens as elites adapt and others get left behind. Trust in institutions erodes. Politics destabilises as disillusioned citizens lose faith in the future. And our ability to solve shared global challenges, like climate change and ethical AI governance, starts to break down.

Those aren’t just educational outcomes. They’re existential because they hit the social, environmental, and technological systems human survival depends on.

Education is foundational. It’s intensely personal, and yet, in aggregate, it defines our collective capacity to respond wisely and cooperatively to major existential risks from nuclear war to climate collapse to runaway AI.

A failure to reform it may not directly endanger survival in the short term. But it does something almost as dangerous. It weakens our capacity for coordinated, ethical, resilient adaptation in an uncertain future.

The conventional narrative of education is that we prepare young people for the future by transmitting knowledge from the past. This story feels quaint in a world where AI systems can rapidly access and synthesise vast knowledge repositories, environmental disruption creates unprecedented challenges, and social systems are undergoing rapid reorganisation.

Simply knowing more isn’t enough.

Knowing what happened yesterday is not enough either. Every genuinely transformative period in human history required young people to reject elder wisdom en masse. The Aboriginal Australians had 65,000 years of accumulated wisdom, but it couldn’t prepare them for European contact. Climate disruption and AI represent similar discontinuities. What if honouring traditional wisdom and the new tradition of the market may be precisely the wrong approach?

What if Finland’s educational success is correlated with ethnic homogeneity and resource abundance, rather than pedagogical innovation? When elites promote 21st-century skills, they’re ensuring their children learn meta-cognitive advantages while working-class kids get vocational training dressed up as systems thinking.

Similarly, what if, in periods of genuine discontinuity, older generations become net liabilities rather than wisdom sources, and attempts at intergenerational exchange hinder necessary adaptation?

These are uncomfortable thoughts.

As mindful sceptics, we can acknowledge both the profound challenges of educational transformation and the tangible evidence that such transformation is possible. We can recognise that while perfect solutions don’t exist, meaningful progress does. And then, we pause, take a breath and ask the awkward questions.

The most significant risk isn’t that we’ll attempt transformation and fall short, but that we’ll cling to educational models designed for a world that no longer exists. Even the trendy ones we currently think are an improvement on cramming content.

When I ditched the script and let my ecology class run wild and loose with the scientific method, I knew I was doing something different. Now we need something different again.

Maybe the reimagining of education we have to hand is a category error that assumes predictability that doesn’t exist. The novel educational models mentioned in this essay might be utopian fantasies existing at the margins for the moment, even if they have a track record of benefiting students in diverse contexts. But they show it can be done.

Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable. No educational program in 1900 could have prepared students for 1950, let alone 2000. Instead of trying to anticipate specific challenges, we should optimise for the capacity to improvise novel solutions using whatever’s available. This means less structured learning, not more.

Preparing young people for a world of limits and possibilities might just mean letting them run with it.

Notes & Sources (for the curious)

Limits, energy, and biophysical disruption

• Planetary boundaries “how many crossed” (and why it matters) — Stockholm Resilience Centre planetary boundaries update (2023–2025); Science Advances planetary boundaries update (Richardson et al., 2023).

• Population scale and trajectory (8+ billion, peak timing) — UN DESA World Population Prospects 2024

• Net-energy / EROI framing (why declining returns constrain surplus) — UK DFID/SUNY-ESF report on global EROI (2013); Heun & de Wit (2012) on EROI and implications.

Food-system fragility (fertiliser, nutrients, pollination, climate)

• Climate impacts on food production (synthesis) — IPCC AR6 WGII (2022), food & water fact sheet / Chapter 5.

• Pollinator dependence + decline risks (global assessment) — IPBES Pollinators/Pollination/Food assessment (2016), SPM.

• Phosphate rock supply and “no substitutes” for phosphorus — USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: Phosphate Rock.

Case study: energy shocks hitting real economies

• Bolivia’s 2025 diesel shortage affecting agriculture (Santa Cruz figures, queues) — Reuters (13 Mar 2025); ReliefWeb situation note (18 Mar 2025).

Structural alternatives: teaching for complexity, not coverage

• Studio Schools / non-standard models in England (official counts/listing over time) — UK Department for Education monthly dataset of open academies/free schools/studio schools/UTCs (updated Jan 2026; includes 2025 editions).

• Finland’s curriculum basis for multidisciplinary/phenomenon-based learning — Finnish National Agency for Education core curriculum timeline (2014–2019 rollout).

• Singapore’s Applied Learning Programme (real-world application / interdisciplinary learning) — Singapore Ministry of Education ALP overview (updated Dec 2025).

• Evidence that “systems thinking can be taught” (anchor synthesis) — OECD Rethinking education in the context of climate change (2024) (competencies/curriculum); Elsawah et al. “Teaching systems thinking…” (2022) as a higher-ed example.

AI changes what education is “for”

• Why GenAI pushes education toward judgement/ethics/assessment redesign — UNESCO Guidance for generative AI in education and research (Sept 2023; updated Jan 2026).

Intergenerational learning (reciprocal models)

• What intergenerational exchange programs tend to do for participants (overview evidence) — Webster et al. systematic review of intergenerational programs (2024); Pillemer et al. wisdom-sharing intervention paper (2022).

Primary Sources

Elsawah, S., Ho, A. T. L., & Ryan, M. J. (2022). Teaching systems thinking in higher education. INFORMS Transactions on Education, 22(2), 66–102.

Heun, M. K., & de Wit, M. (2012). Energy return on (energy) invested (EROI), oil prices, and energy transitions. Energy Policy, 40, 147–158.

Pillemer, K., Nolte, J., Schultz, L., Yau, H., Henderson, C. R., Jr., Cope, M. T., & Baschiera, B. (2022). The benefits of intergenerational wisdom-sharing: A randomized controlled study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(7), 4010.

Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S. E., Donges, J. F., Drüke, M., Fetzer, I., Bala, G., von Bloh, W., Feulner, G., Fiedler, S., Gerten, D., Gleeson, T., Hofmann, M., Huiskamp, W., Kummu, M., Mohan, C., Nogués-Bravo, D., … Rockström, J. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.

Webster, M., Norwood, K., Waterworth, J., & Leavey, G. (2024). Effectiveness of intergenerational exchange programs between adolescents and older adults: A systematic review. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships.

The fossil-fuelled expansion that powered unprecedented economic and population growth is waning, revealing the zero-sum dynamics temporarily masked by abundant energy and technological innovation. Climate destabilisation, soil degradation, and biodiversity collapse aren’t separate crises but interconnected symptoms of a civilisation exceeding planetary boundaries. As these constraints tighten, the question isn’t whether we’ll play a zero-sum game but how. Through historical examples and potential models for equitable distribution, it is time we examined how different approaches to resource allocation might function when increasing the size of the economic pie is no longer possible.

I live in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia in the federal electorate of Macquarie, named in honour of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, who was Governor of the Colony of New South Wales for 11 years from 1810. At the time of writing, around 100,000 voters live in the electorate, and we all went to the polling booths on 3 May 2025, as required by the compulsory voting system in Australia, to cast a vote for our preferred candidate.

It turned out to be a historic event. The Labor Party was returned to government in a landslide victory, massively repudiating the populist nonsense that had been trying hard to take over Australian politics.

The Australian parliamentary system is tightly constrained in that there are a fixed number of seats in each legislative body. This always means a gain in representation for one party or group means a corresponding loss for another. All elections in single-member districts are like this. One candidate’s gain in votes and a seat in the parliament or assembly directly subtracts from the chances of others, and there’s no possibility for mutual gain. This structural setup encourages zero-sum thinking in political competition, often intensifying partisanship and conflict over influence.

I win, you lose generates more vitriol than debate.

I can’t discuss your position in case it is perceived as a weakness on my part. And you likewise. If we both recognise that the subject requires compromise for the mutual benefit of constituents, there is no apparent benefit to my moving forward. So I either ignore the subject and throw random piles of manure at you or immediately change the topic to something I believe gives me a better chance of winning.

Ah, the joy of a zero-sum game.

Politics is one way that humans organise themselves around a social contract. We consent, either explicitly or implicitly, to surrender some personal freedoms in exchange for the protection and order provided by a governing authority. Without government, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it in the 1600s, life would be chaotic and insecure in the state of nature. To escape this condition, individuals collectively agree to establish rules and a central authority to enforce them, thereby gaining security and predictability.

A century later, John Locke viewed the social contract as an agreement to protect natural rights of life, liberty, and property, arguing that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed and must be held accountable to the people. Then in the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, emphasised the general will and collective sovereignty, suggesting that legitimate political authority arises not from rulers imposing order but from citizens actively shaping the laws they follow.

All this means that there has been citizen agency in politics for a long time. We have governments because we permit them to exist based on shifting sets of promises, loosely the social contract.

In a modern democracy, the social contract is the deal we all live under. You give up some freedom, and you get the benefits of organised society, including security, justice, and prosperity. That bargain has teeth, which is why we accept laws that limit how any one person can exploit land, water, air, or biodiversity.

The mechanism is simple. Unchecked individual use can degrade the shared asset and leave everyone worse off. That is why you end up with rules on water extraction or carbon emissions. It is a collective response to a predictable mode of failure.

Governments, as agents of that contract, are given the authority to allocate and manage resources. They set limits, issue permits, enforce environmental protections, and decide how to trade off economic development against ecological sustainability. In the ideal case, those decisions are shaped by public participation and reflect what Rousseau called the general will, so resource use tracks broadly held values and long-term interests rather than short-term individual gain. That is what public interest is supposed to mean.

When the contract is perceived as broken, either through corruption, inequality, or repression, it can lead to civil unrest or calls for reform.

Legitimacy frays when resource decisions start to look like a rigged bargain. When outcomes feel like environmental degradation, corporate exploitation, or a state that cannot, or will not, address climate change, the public stops seeing trade-offs and starts seeing favouritism. Legitimacy can fail altogether if people perceive too much short-term individual gain for a privileged few.

That is when citizens push back. They ask for transparency, for a distribution that feels fair, and for environmental stewardship with real teeth. A lot of the tension in the U.S. sits right there, in whether the system still serves the many.

And this is the uncomfortable part. The social contract is not a static document. It is renegotiated in real time as societies argue over justice, responsibility, and the common good while drawing down finite, interdependent resources.

So, what happens in resource allocation when it is all or nothing?

Zero-sum resource scenarios, where one individual or group’s gain inevitably means another individual or group’s loss, are common in the raw state of nature. In a closed environment, there is a finite amount of solar energy and nitrogen. While different species can cooperate to use those resources efficiently, they cannot create more energy out of thin air. In that macro sense, for one population to explode in size, another must eventually contract, or the environment will degrade. You might recognise this as the zero-sum ceiling, called Carrying Capacity (K).

In humans, who think themselves beyond normal laws, the social contract exists precisely to transform these high-conflict, zero-sum dynamics into regulated, negotiated arrangements that can foster social stability and equity. Instead of leaving resource outcomes to power struggles or pure competition, societies use the social contract to justify the institutions of laws, policies, and enforcement mechanisms that coordinate and constrain behaviour for shared benefit. This can include public ownership, redistribution mechanisms, environmental regulation, or property rights systems.

I might own the land, but it doesn’t mean I can cut down all the trees or pollute the river at the bottom of the paddock.

Importantly, the social contract doesn’t assume every resource decision is a knife fight. It’s the opposite. It’s the framework that lets societies turn cooperation, innovation, and stewardship into positive-sum outcomes.

Take a river. In a functioning system, you can manage it to preserve ecosystems, supply drinking water, support agriculture, and respect Indigenous rights. That package deal is far less likely when everyone is sprinting for first access.

The same logic scales. Through agreements like the Paris Climate Accord, nations can shift away from a destructive scramble for carbon-based development and towards coordinated emissions reduction and renewable energy innovation. The point is not moral virtue. It’s that collaboration can expand the set of outcomes that work for everyone.

Nonetheless, zero-sum thinking hangs around, especially when resources are tight or when the benefits and burdens land unevenly. And here, the social contract brings transparent negotiation, inclusive governance, and rules that can adapt as conditions change. Without those, legitimacy drains away because people can’t see the logic or trust the trade-offs.

So yes, the social contract may begin in conflict over finite goods. But its ambition is to coordinate and use social agreement to stop every decision devolving into a scramble.

What all this means is that there is a natural conflict between those who like the zero-sum of winners and losers because they fancy themselves as perpetual winners and the social contract that, even though it can and does create zero-sum scenarios, is an efficient way to constrain such behaviour and increase the chance of mutual benefit. Crudely, this is the right and left of Western politics.

But what if the social contract also masks the inevitable conflicts over resource distribution and allocation? Here’s looking at you, imperialism.

And, belatedly, here is the first premise for rethinking equity…

The Industrial Revolution ran on fossil energy, and it changed the growth curve. Mechanisation and technological innovation turned energy into throughput, and throughput into sustained economic and population growth. For many societies, especially in the Global North, that translated into more goods, more services, and rising living standards.

But the dividends were never evenly shared. Resource endowments stayed unequal across regions, and the benefits of industrialisation flowed disproportionately to those with political power, access to capital, and control over production infrastructure. That is how you get growth on paper alongside entrenched advantage in practice.

Developing regions were often pulled into the system as raw-material suppliers on exploitative terms, and those terms became structure. Global trade scaled up, but the inequality was baked in.

Pandore is a Belgian political TV thriller that delves into the complexities of justice, power, and personal integrity, following a judge whose investigation into corruption uncovers unsettling truths about her own family. Many scenes occur in the buildings and public spaces of Brussels, resplendent with its 19th-century architecture, notably the Palais de Justice, commissioned by King Leopold II and completed in 1883 imposing neoclassical architecture, characterised by a colossal dome, grand staircases, vast halls, and classical columns. The building was designed to convey the power and modernity of the Belgian state.

It certainly is grand. It was paid for with ivory and rubber extracted from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a land of 2.34 million square kilometres (905,000 sq miles) in Central Africa, roughly 77 times larger than Belgium. Extraction quotas were brutally enforced by Leopold’s private army, the Force Publique.

But I digress.

Periods of high economic growth, however funded, have historically acted as a kind of economic analgesic, dulling public awareness of underlying distributional injustices. The sheer expansion of wealth allowed many conflicts over access and equity to be postponed, externalised, or absorbed.

This has often occurred through increasing debt, exploiting natural resources, or relying on geopolitical dominance. For example, post-war growth in Western nations in the 20th century supported welfare state expansion without fully confronting wealth inequality, environmental costs, or the extractive foundations of that growth in formerly colonised regions.

The masking function of growth has weakened over time. Environmental degradation, climate change, and social unrest have brought renewed attention to the sustainability and inequity of historical resource allocation and use. The global economy’s reliance on continuous growth is increasingly scrutinised, especially as finite resource limits and planetary boundaries challenge the assumption that growth can indefinitely substitute for equity. Trickle down has had its day.

The premise highlights the central tension now facing the social contract. Can future prosperity be decoupled from both ecological harm and entrenched inequality?

Presumably, it cannot be under the existing political systems in the Global North, which assume both I win, you lose and that growth can continue indefinitely.

Hence…

In a positive-sum environment, real or imagined, where economic growth expands the pool of available resources, political systems often function through compromises that distribute gains without zeroing out others’ shares. This allows for coalitions, bargaining, and policies that simultaneously placate, to a degree, multiple interests.

However, when growth slows or environmental limits are reached, societies shift toward zero-sum dynamics where one group’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. This has profound implications for political stability and institutional trust, as the conciliatory politics of expansion give way to distributive struggles marked by scarcity, resentment, and protectionism. Arguably, this is precisely the scene played out in the second term of President Trump.

Zero-sum stories are political jet fuel. They give populist, nationalist, and authoritarian actors an easy story that politics is a survival contest over jobs, land, water, energy and someone is coming to take yours.

Once that frame holds, narratives tighten. Appeals to ethnic, national, or class identity become the justification for exclusion and unequal claims. The argument stops being about growing the pie and becomes a fight over who deserves which slice, with old grievances revived on cue and incumbent elites quietly protected.

You can see the pattern in today’s stress points. Climate-related migration, access to arable land, and control over carbon budgets all trigger the same reflex to treat cooperation as weakness and compromise as loss. Under that psychology, international coordination doesn’t fail because it is impossible. It fails because it is politically costly to admit the game isn’t zero-sum.

Tariffs fit neatly inside a zero-sum frame. In theory, you tax imports to reduce reliance on foreign goods, boost domestic production, and protect local jobs. The implied premise is that trade gains are not mutual. They flow to exporters, while importers lose. Under that logic, every import is a leaked opportunity at home, a direct subtraction from domestic capacity.

And the strain doesn’t stop at trade policy. Institutions designed around presumed growth, notably the pensions and welfare systems of liberal democracies, often struggle when the baseline shifts. Their legitimacy depends on delivering rising living standards, or at least preventing decline. In a world constrained by planetary boundaries, that promise gets harder to keep. When distribution becomes the central problem under constraint, the system can tilt toward more coercive or hierarchical governance just to hold together.

In democratic systems, political parties, interest groups, and social movements compete to protect their constituencies’ access to diminishing resources, making consensus difficult and sometimes leading to policy paralysis. Arguably, this has been the fate of the UK Labour government elected in a landslide in 2024.

A more specific example is the United States’ handling of water scarcity in the American West. The Colorado River Basin still runs on the century-old Colorado River Compact, built on flow data from an unusually wet stretch that encouraged over-allocation. That misread baked in a structural deficit, now squeezed harder by mega drought conditions and climate change. As Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropped toward critical levels, the fight between agricultural users, fast-growing cities, and Indigenous nations stopped being a local courtroom sport and became a federal problem. Tribes with senior water rights, ignored for decades, have increasingly pushed their sovereignty to the front, insisting on a real seat at the table with governors and federal officials.

What has followed is cooperation of a kind the region rarely manages, and it still feels fragile. In 2023 and 2024, the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada) reached a landmark deal to cut water use in exchange for federal funding through the Inflation Reduction Act. The immediate purpose was to stabilise reservoir levels and avoid dead pool scenarios where water can’t move through hydroelectric dams. The relief is real, but it is temporary through 2026. The deeper consequence is legal and cultural, a slow pivot away from ‘first in time, first in right’ toward a more flexible, conservation-based model that treats the river as finite and shared, rather than an endless commodity.

Europe’s energy transition shows a different version of the same stress. The European Green Deal sets the banner goal of climate neutrality by 2050. But the carbon pricing and the winding back of fossil fuel subsidies that underpin it lands the hardest on rural and low-income people, who don’t have the infrastructure or the spare capital to jump to electric vehicles or heat pumps.

France gave the clearest early warning. In 2018, the proposal to raise the carbon tax on diesel hit a fuel many rural commuters are forced to rely on, and it became the spark for the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. The uprising became a rejection of transition-by-price-shock, where long-term environmental outcomes are pursued without immediate, equitable safety nets for those most exposed to volatility.

That backlash has changed how European climate policy is built and sold. Once a transition is perceived as elitist, it stops being a technical pathway and becomes a political instability machine. The European Union’s response was to bolt redistribution into the policy architecture through the Social Climate Fund and the Just Transition Mechanism, explicitly routing carbon revenues back toward vulnerable households and supporting regions dependent on carbon-intensive industries. France, meanwhile, pivoted toward green leasing for low-cost electric vehicles and expanded subsidies for home insulation.

The European lesson is unromantic. The success of the energy transition hinges less on technical feasibility than on social legitimacy. And legitimacy, in this context, is earned through wealth redistribution and socio-economic equity, not slogans.

China’s approach sits at the other end of the governance spectrum, with national priorities first, local autonomy and public debate a distant second. The South–North Water Transfer Project, one of the largest engineering feats in human history, was built to correct a basic geographic mismatch of a water-rich south, and a water-poor industrial north. And unlike democratic systems that grind forward through litigation, hearings, and public comment, the Chinese state used centralised authority to imposed strict water quotas. It forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of villagers to clear space for canals and reservoirs. This was command and control governance as fast execution, engineering efficiency, and a working assumption that environmental and social costs are manageable externalities in service of long-term national water security.

The result is effective, and still contentious. Water supply has been stabilised for the North China Plain and for Beijing. The project now diverts billions of cubic meters annually, slowing the dangerous drawdown of northern aquifers and keeping industrial growth on track. But the technical win carries large-scale social and ecological displacement.

In food crises or fuel shortages, authoritarian states may reach for rationing, price controls, or direct monopolisation of resource flows. Sometimes that delivers short-term order, including guaranteed access for elites while others are impoverished. These regimes can look more responsive or decisive, but the trade-off is long-term instability if repression fails to contain discontent, or if legitimacy is propped up by economic promises that cannot be sustained.

Yet, the distinction isn’t absolute.

In both systems, legitimacy erodes when resource allocation reads as unfair or simply incompetent. Sri Lanka’s 2022 collapse came from mismanaged agricultural policies and fuel shortages that helped trigger a crisis in which a nominally democratic government drifted toward authoritarian controls, then met mass protests.

The counterexample is what some democracies do when they treat scarcity as a coordination problem rather than a policing problem. Participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies, such as Ireland’s climate assembly, create a forum to negotiate shared sacrifices and allocate constrained resources in a way people can see as procedurally fair.

Taken together, the lesson is not that authoritarianism works or that it can look more decisive under pressure. But democratic resilience comes from adaptability, and from the ability to build inclusive responses to scarcity that preserve consent while making hard choices.

The arrival and prospect of resource constraints explain much of recent geopolitics and the rise of populism in the Global North. When scarcity rears its ugly head, doubling down to be the winner is as human as helping the blind man cross the road.

However, this is not new. Humanity has faced scarcity many times, as many humans do daily. This means that there are options and templates other than the capitalism of high-income democracies.

Societies have responded to scarcity in diverse ways, ranging from communal stewardship to hierarchical control, depending on their historical context and environmental constraints.

For example, Indigenous societies in arid regions, such as the Australian Aboriginal nations or the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, developed intricate land-use practices and spiritual frameworks that emphasised moderation, reciprocity, and intergenerational responsibility. These norms were often encoded in oral traditions and rituals, reinforcing sustainable relationships with finite water and food supplies.

The frame is different as there is no external energy beyond the power of fire. Everyone knows there is a limit and so various forms of sharing make good sense. Scarcity, in this context, was managed not only through practical techniques like seasonal rotation but through a culture that framed restraint as moral and communal.

In contrast, agrarian empires such as Ancient Egypt or imperial China managed scarcity through centralised bureaucratic systems. These regimes invested in large-scale irrigation systems, granaries, and taxation mechanisms that enabled surpluses to be stored and redistributed during droughts or famines. Here, scarcity management was institutionalised through state power, where administrative foresight and social hierarchy determined who bore the burdens of scarcity. Similarly, medieval European societies employed feudal systems and ecclesiastical authority to enforce moral and material norms related to scarcity through tithing, land tenure, and charity, often mediated by religious obligations.

Here there was some modest extra energy from crops and livestock, so long as everyone put labour in to ensure that agriculture was an energy source.

In modern capitalist societies, scarcity is usually expressed through the market as price signals and purchasing power. Access is resolved by who can pay, and the system can be efficient in some cases because it coordinates demand, supply, and substitution with relatively little explicit negotiation.

But that same design also hardens inequality. If scarcity is mediated by buying, then the wealthy don’t experience scarcity in the same way. They can buffer it, sometimes almost completely, through private access to water, food, or energy. Scarcity still exists, it just shows up elsewhere, and often for someone else.

Some countries have tried to blunt that dynamic with hybrid arrangements. The Netherlands and Singapore are examples of models that mix market tools with strong state planning and technological innovation. The point is not to abolish price signals, but to keep scarcity from becoming a pure bidding war by committing to long-term infrastructure investment and building social consensus around how land, water, and energy are managed.

Other regions follow a different logic. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, customary tenure systems have been maintained or adapted alongside state institutions. That creates a layered governance structure with traditional authority operating in parallel with formal legal frameworks, and the balance negotiated rather than assumed.

The premise points to a core insight from political ecology and comparative anthropology. Scarcity is not just a material condition. It is also a social interpretation and a governance problem. How scarcity is perceived, organised, and responded to can vary dramatically across societies, even when the underlying constraints look similar.

And those responses are never purely functional. They express what counts as legitimate authority, what fairness means, who is owed protection, and what kinds of trade-offs are acceptable. More often than not, the zero-sum game is anticipated. And mechanisms are invented, refined, and deployed to manage it before it becomes a full-blown scramble.

One approach that has been around a long time is the commons, and it is worth its own premise…

Markets allocate resources through price signals and competition, while states distribute resources through planning and regulation. Hence, the establishment of ideology reflecting the state and the individual, broadly characterised by the left and the right, that dominates liberal democracies. However, this binary overlooks a long-standing and globally diverse category of resource management known as the commons.

Commons-based approaches involve communities collectively managing shared resources, such as fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, or digital knowledge, through negotiated rules, social norms, and mutual obligations. Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work demonstrated that under certain conditions, commons systems can outperform markets and states in sustainably managing resources, particularly where local knowledge and social cohesion are strong. For example, community forest initiatives in Nepal and Mexico, cooperative water management in Spain’s Huerta systems, and urban commons such as community gardens or co-housing models in European cities demonstrate that commons governance is neither a relic of the past nor limited to pre-modern or Indigenous societies.

In the digital sphere, Wikipedia and open-source software embody a new frontier of commons production and maintenance. Peer monitoring, iterative rule-making, and nested institutions make such collaborations effective, principles Ostrom described as critical to long-term resilience.

There are at least five broad categories of commons, suggesting that any shared resource can mean very different things, with very different governance problems, depending on what is being shared and how use is constrained.

Here are the five.

Natural resource commons are the oldest form of collaborative stewardship. They rely on locally defined access rights and community-developed rules to govern shared resources such as watersheds, fisheries, forests, and grazing lands. What makes these systems durable is that the rules tend to track ecological feedback rather than abstract entitlement. You see this in Nepal’s community forests and Turkey’s rotating fisheries, but also in irrigation commons like acequia associations in the U.S. Southwest and community-managed grazing regimes where seasonal use, monitoring, and sanctions are socially enforced because overuse is immediately legible to everyone.

Agricultural commons take that logic into food production and land management. They organise planting, grazing, infrastructure, and seasonal rotation through collective decision-making and shared investment, which can make food systems more resilient under uncertainty. Switzerland’s alpine pastures and Brazil’s land reform cooperatives are familiar examples, and you can also see related patterns in communal irrigation schedules that coordinate planting across farms, or in shared grain storage and processing facilities that reduce individual exposure to price and weather shocks. And when people expect their descendants to work the same land, soil-building practices stop looking like sacrifice and start looking like rational investment.

Urban commons are the city-scale version of reclamation. They treat space, housing, tools, and capabilities as things that can be governed by users rather than surrendered entirely to privatisation or bureaucratic management. Community gardens, housing cooperatives, tool libraries, and maker spaces are the visible surface. Bologna’s Urban Commons Policy and Berlin’s housing cooperatives show how citizen-initiated governance can turn urban assets into community-building infrastructure, and similar dynamics show up when residents co-manage public squares, convert vacant lots into shared green space, or run local repair cafés that keep skills and access circulating outside the market.

Knowledge commons sit in a different category because the resource is informational and often non-rival. One person’s use does not diminish another’s, which changes the economic and moral logic of sharing. Wikipedia and open-source software communities work through contributor-led governance, transparent peer accountability, and licensing systems designed to keep resources accessible. You can see the same governance principles in open educational resources, collaborative scientific databases, and shared standards bodies, where the commons are not a plot of land but a continuously maintained corpus that only stays valuable if participation stays broad and the rules stay legible.

Climate and global commons extend the problem to planetary resources that cross borders and are difficult to police. The atmosphere, oceans, and biodiversity do not map cleanly onto sovereign jurisdictions, yet they absorb the consequences of national decisions. The Antarctic Treaty System and the Paris Agreement show that international commons governance is possible, even if it is complex and uneven. Related examples include global fisheries management regimes and coordinated efforts around ocean pollution, where the central challenge is always the same: aligning incentives and enforcement across diverse political contexts while balancing sovereignty with shared responsibility.

Commons models are a deep challenge to the assumption that only profit incentives or state coercion can organise human behaviour at scale, offering instead a third mode that emphasises relational responsibility, participation, and the reproduction of the resource base.

But they are not utopian.

They rely on trust, clearly defined boundaries, and the ability to enforce collective rules. None of these are easy to achieve, especially against the forces of individual freedom. And then what to do about resources that stretch beyond the backyard? Can a commons system govern the oceans or the atmosphere?

What about the prospect of new types of commons? Could the digital universe offer options transferable to the biophysical world?

There is no reason why digital technologies, including platforms, blockchain, AI, and data infrastructures, can’t transform the allocation and exchange of resources, goods, and services.

They enable new coordination systems that route around the usual market-or-state bottlenecks. Peer-to-peer platforms along with digital currencies and distributed ledgers can widen participation in exchange while making transactions and rules more transparent.

You see the same dynamic in open-source software and knowledge-sharing platforms. Contributors co-create and share value without central ownership, and the infrastructure itself makes that kind of commons-based production workable at scale. The promise here is not magic. It is a different operating model with efficiency and accessibility, plus the possibility of participatory governance that traditional institutions often struggle to deliver.

However, the same digital tools can easily be harnessed to concentrate control, influence and wealth.

Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and others have become some of the most powerful rent-seeking entities in history, leveraging data monopolies, network effects, and algorithmic control to extract value from users, workers, and even governments. Surveillance capitalism, algorithmic pricing, and platform dependency create asymmetries in which users and producers have limited agency, while a few corporate actors accrue disproportionate economic and political influence. Blockchain, while touted as decentralising, can also replicate inequality through speculative behaviour and environmental externalities. Moreover, algorithmic allocation can embed bias and opacity, thereby reinforcing systemic disadvantages under the guise of technical neutrality.

Such complaints are inevitable and have been argued for all types of commons. Humans are adept at bending systems to their gain, and digital commons will not be immune. But the upside is real and already includes several options.

Platform cooperatives offer a democratic alternative to extractive gig economy apps by putting ownership and governance in the hands of workers or users. Up&Go shows what that can look like in New York City where house cleaners receive 95% of revenue and participate in platform decisions, producing far fairer outcomes than conventional platforms where workers might receive as little as 50–70% of customer payments. Resonate in music streaming and Fairbnb in accommodation sharing push the same principle into other categories, using cooperative ownership to prioritise fair compensation and community benefit over extractive profit. Digital infrastructure can be designed to distribute value to the people who create it, instead of funnelling it to distant shareholders.

Digital knowledge commons work by resisting the artificial scarcity created by paywalls and proprietary control. The flagship example is Wikipedia. A global community of volunteers creating and maintaining the world’s largest encyclopedia through transparent governance and consensus-based rules. OpenStreetMap applies similar logic to mapping, where contributors collectively build shared data that ends up powering humanitarian responses and countless applications. PubPub extends the approach into academic publishing, offering an open alternative to commercial scholarly platforms. Together, these commons make the same argument that knowledge production scales through collaboration, and public resources can serve far more people than privatised alternatives ever will.

Community networks challenge the corporate monopolisation of internet access by putting ownership of infrastructure directly in community hands. Spain’s Guifi.net has grown into one of the world’s largest community networks, providing affordable connectivity through collaborative infrastructure development across Catalonia. NYC Mesh brings the same ethos to underserved New York neighbourhoods, treating connectivity as a shared civic project rather than a premium product. Althea adds another coordination layer, enabling neighbours to buy and sell bandwidth directly from each other using blockchain micropayments. This is infrastructure, given internet access is essential, and too important to be left solely to profit-maximising telecoms.

Data commons and trusts take on the idea that data is private property to be extracted and monetised without meaningful consent. Mozilla Rally gestures toward an alternative by letting users donate their browsing data specifically for public-interest research, while maintaining privacy and control. Europe’s DECODE project has developed tools that give citizens greater sovereignty over their data, and organisations like India’s Aapti Institute are designing data trusts, so communities can govern shared data resources collectively. The point is to replace unilateral extraction with transparent governance so data serves its originators rather than being weaponised against them.

Open-source and cooperative technology development extends this governance logic into the tools themselves, building software owned by communities rather than corporations. Signal is a nonprofit governance and privacy-first design that creates a real alternative to commercial social platforms. Co-budget and Loomio, emerging from the Enspiral network, focus on democratic decision-making and resource allocation inside organisations, turning governance into something people can actually do rather than merely endorse. Nextcloud provides community-governed alternatives to corporate cloud storage, keeping control closer to users. Taken together, these projects show that software can be organised cooperatively and need not default to extractive business models.

Ultimately, digital technologies are not inherently equitable or extractive. They are infrastructures shaped by political design and institutional context. Their capacity to enable fairer distribution depends on how governance is structured, specifically who owns the platform, who controls the data, and who has decision-making power. Digital commons initiatives demonstrate that alternative models are possible.

Digital technologies can and do enable new forms of allocation and exchange, but they are not innately equitable. Just ask a kid in the overcrowded informal settlements of Kibera, Mathare, Mukuru, or Korogocho in Nairobi, if their mobile phone, which is deeply integrated into their life, is smart enough or gives them enough access.

The concept of the commons, even with the mechanisms to implement it, is a start, but perhaps not enough of a rethink when equity is as skewed as it has become. Options to cope with the zero-sum framing of global and local resource use need to be developed further, which brings me to this premise…

As we know, markets allocate resources based on price signals, supply and demand, and individual preferences. While efficient in some contexts, these mechanisms are ethically agnostic. They do not inherently distinguish between needs and wants, nor do they address historical injustices, power asymmetries, or structural inequalities. Left unregulated, markets tend to concentrate wealth and marginalise those who cannot participate on equal terms, such as the poor, the disabled, or future generations. Even where markets function efficiently, they may still produce outcomes that are socially or morally unacceptable.

In 2025, a vial of insulin in the US costs $50 and in the EU $5.

A just distribution might prioritise the needs of the most vulnerable, ensure capabilities like health and education, or enshrine ecological stewardship as a moral duty. Ethical frameworks often recognise positive obligations, such as the right to food or shelter, which markets do not naturally provide without coercive structures like taxation, redistribution, or public provisioning.

From climate justice movements to debates over universal basic income, there is increasing recognition that technocratic or market-centric policies are insufficient for meeting complex social and ecological needs. Digital technologies, too, have demonstrated how algorithmic allocation can be efficient yet unjust when divorced from democratic oversight and ethical considerations. The rise of stakeholder capitalism, ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) metrics, and degrowth debates reflect efforts to reintroduce moral reasoning into economic structures with varying degrees of success.

Despite the near universal dominance of markets in the West, there already exist several ethical frameworks, and here are a few of the well-known ones.

Rawlsian justice runs a simple mental stress test on self-interest. It asks to design the distribution system without knowing where you’ll land inside it. That veil of ignorance leads to Rawls’s difference principle, which states that inequalities are only justified when they benefit society’s most disadvantaged members. Where market-based approaches tend to reward existing advantage, Rawlsian distribution puts basic liberties first and builds safeguards for the vulnerable.

For example, a progressive tax-and-transfer scheme can be defended on Rawlsian grounds if the higher rates on top incomes fund healthcare, education, or income supports that measurably improve outcomes for the least advantaged. The inequality in take-home pay remains, but the justification depends on whether the bottom benefits in concrete, durable ways.

Still, for all its logical clarity, the framework sits firmly inside Western liberal individualism. That can matter. It may miss how identity, history, and culture shape what fairness actually looks like and how people experience it.

The capabilities approach changes the question from what do people have? to what can they actually do and be with what they have? Developed by Sen and Nussbaum, the framework starts with the fact that identical resource allocations can produce radically different outcomes once you account for individual circumstances, social barriers, and environmental context. So instead of chasing abstract equality, it pushes toward substantive freedom and opportunity across things like health, education, and political participation.

So, suppose you give two people the same mobility stipend. If one lives in a city with accessible public transit and the other lives in a rural area with no services or faces disability-related barriers, the equal allocation does not buy equal freedom of movement. The resources are the same. The capability isn’t.

The capabilities approach resists one-size-fits-all metrics. It treats flourishing as plural, shaped by culture and by the person, not reducible to a single scoreboard. Implementation is hard. But it offers a principled alternative to narrow economic measures of wellbeing that miss what actually matters in human lives.

Utilitarianism is the most pragmatic distribution frame because it sends resources to wherever they produce the biggest total gain. It sits underneath modern economic analysis, policy evaluation, and effective altruism for a reason. The rule is to maximise the sum of individual utilities. That simplicity gives you traction when the choice set is ugly, especially in disaster response or public health.

For example, after a major earthquake, a utilitarian triage plan might concentrate limited medical staff and supplies on interventions that save the highest number of lives per hour, even if that means some remote communities receive less immediate support.

But the same aggregate focus is where the danger lives. If you only optimise the total, you can end up justifying severe harm to minorities, so long as the spreadsheet says overall utility rises. The willingness to make hard trade-offs is utilitarianism’s strength and its vulnerability. It has no built-in protections for individual rights and dignity. Its emphasis on consequences over intentions is valuable, but it needs tempering with complementary ethical frameworks.

Indigenous and relational ethics change the frame entirely. Distribution becomes a question of the relationships that hold people, non-human beings, and land together across generations. In this view, you cannot separate justice from reciprocity, stewardship responsibilities, and ecological balance. Resources are not just commodities to allocate efficiently. They are parts of living systems with their own integrity and requirements, and those requirements place limits on what fair can mean.

A community managing a salmon fishery may treat allocation as a shared responsibility to keep the run healthy over time, not as a maximisation problem. That can mean setting harvest practices around ecological thresholds and community obligations, even when higher short-term extraction is technically possible.

These perspectives can be challenging to carry across different cultural contexts. But they offer crucial insight for the contemporary polycrisis, especially sustainable resource use and intergenerational justice.

Marxist and critical theories don’t start by asking how to distribute the pie more fairly. They start by asking who owns the bakery. Instead of treating inequality as a problem to correct inside the existing system, these approaches target the structures that produce unequal wealth and power in the first place, especially control over productive assets, the terms of labour, and who gets to make decisions. On this view, justice is about transforming exploitative class relations that generate those outcomes.

Rather than relying on higher wages or tax credits to make work fairer, a structural response might be shifting ownership and governance through worker cooperatives or stronger collective bargaining, so workers have real control over labour conditions and the surplus they help create.

That structural lens also clarifies why market-based distribution so often reproduces historical inequality. Extraction and alienation don’t stay local; they scale. Global supply chains can look like neutral logistics while still concentrating power upstream and pushing costs as low wages, unsafe conditions, and environmental damage, downstream.

Markets can serve as tools, but justice requires frameworks that define what ought to be, not just what is efficient. Ethics provides the compass that markets lack, ensuring that allocation aligns with dignity, sustainability, and shared responsibility, not just exchange value.

And so we are back to the conundrum set at the beginning.

There is a problem with justice in zero-sum games because they inherently lack it. The prospect of 8 billion humans entering a winner-takes-all scenario, driven by insufficient energy and natural resources, will spell catastrophe.

It was tempting to begin this essay on inequity with the trillions of dollars controlled by the tiny fraction of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

I could have quoted endless statistics for the disparities between the billionaires and the rest of us. It would be easy to bash them. They are the winners in the zero-sum game, even if capitalism was touted as a game that everyone can win but only a few actually do. Familiar to us are Elon, Jeff, Mark, Donald and their mates, but get rid of them and new names will appear instantly. They are one of the symptoms of capitalism injected with growth hormone in the form of fossil energy.

I could also have done something similar with the North-South divide. The appropriation of global resources through imperialism, neocolonialism, eco-fascism and even war, all both current and historical, means that I, along with a billion or so of my, mostly white, fellows in liberal democracies, live like kings compared to the billion poorest in the world and use way more resources per person than the majority of the 7 billion in the Global South.

Rethinking equity cannot be merely aspirational when we face the looming reality of ecological constraints. Throughout human history, our evolutionary drive for more making has operated within local limits, occasionally punctuated by resource wars. What makes our current predicament unique is its global scale and unprecedented speed.

We’ve built economic and social systems that require perpetual growth on a finite planet, a mathematical impossibility that is now catching up with us.

The transition to a zero-sum game is not a distant theoretical concern but an emerging reality. Climate disruption, topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, and biodiversity collapse are manifestations of humanity’s impact on hitting planetary boundaries. Left unaddressed, these constraints will force zero-sum dynamics through ecological triage, resource nationalism, and the politics of scarcity.

The constraint exists. We all know it. The question is the response, what to do about it.

We can default to the familiar road of winner-takes-all competition with its inevitable conflict, suffering, and, eventually, collective failure. Or we can choose to design systems that share the burdens and the remaining prosperity with justice and foresight. That’s pragmatism and perhaps ironically, in a deeply interconnected world under systemic constraint, cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.

So the assignment isn’t to fix capitalism or replace it with socialism, or pick a favourite flavour in between. It’s to build hybrids that acknowledge limits while preserving human dignity.

The mindful sceptic sees what’s coming and doesn’t romanticise it. In an era of constraint, our competitive instincts have to be channelled into cooperative frameworks not because it’s nice, or woke, but because it’s necessary.

Notes & Sources (for the curious)

Planetary limits and the “polycrisis” frame

• Planetary boundaries overview + updates — Stockholm Resilience Centre (latest boundary updates); Rockström et al. (2009)

• Climate impacts + risk framing — IPCC AR6 WGII (2022); WMO State of the Global Climate (latest edition)

• Biodiversity collapse (global assessment) — IPBES Global Assessment (2019); Living Planet Report (WWF/ZSL, latest edition)

• Soil degradation / land health (global synthesis) — FAO global soil resources reporting; UNCCD Global Land Outlook (latest edition)

Fossil energy, growth, and distribution

• Energy basis of industrial growth + long-run transitions — Our World in Data (energy & emissions datasets); IEA World Energy Outlook (latest edition)

• Global inequality + North–South structure — World Inequality Report (latest edition); World Bank poverty/inequality dashboards (latest edition)

Scarcity politics in practice

• Colorado River over-allocation + 2023–2026 shortage deals — U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Colorado River Basin/Lower Basin agreements); NOAA/USGS drought & hydrology context (relevant series)

• EU transition legitimacy + Yellow Vests + compensatory funds — European Commission Green Deal pages; EU Social Climate Fund / Just Transition Mechanism

• Sri Lanka 2022 crisis (fuel, macro, policy) — IMF country reports (2022–2023 window); World Bank crisis updates.

Commons, digital power, and ethical allocation

• Commons governance “design principles” — Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)

• Platform power / surveillance capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff (2019); OECD on digital market concentration & platform competition.

• Ethical frameworks for distribution (Rawls/Sen/Nussbaum) — Rawls A Theory of Justice (1971); Sen/Nussbaum capabilities work (key texts/years)

We like to think of civilisation and living systems as builders of order, but they are specialised entropy engines that must degrade energy and increase global disorder to keep their internal structure intact. By burning ancient, low-entropy fossil fuels, humanity triggered a Great Acceleration that temporarily cheats ecological limits while creating a spike in disorder that destabilises the planet’s natural management systems. Mainstream sustainability is fundamentally flawed because it ignores this Second Law of Thermodynamics, which makes perfect balance or zero impact a physical impossibility. To survive, we have to drop the comfortable myth of returning to a static historical baseline and move to a physics-consistent strategy that manages the rate and pattern of inevitable entropy increase.

According to classical thermodynamics, entropy always increases in closed systems, suggesting an inevitable slide into equilibrium and disorder. Any ordered object from an ant to an automobile contradicts this law of nature. Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, studied complex systems and argued that order and complexity do not violate the second law of thermodynamics. Instead, they arise because of it in open systems.

While entropy increases globally, local pockets of order, including life, can form as long as overall disorder increases, challenging the prevailing view that entropy only leads to disorder. Prigogine’s insight was to show that in open systems, which exchange energy or matter with their environment, entropy could increase in a way that creates new levels of order.

In other words, life makes sense, even when a cursory glance at the laws of physics suggests it shouldn’t.

But let’s back up a moment.

Do you know what entropy is?

No? Well, you are not alone. I have been carrying around a rudimentary understanding of it for years. Unless you take physics in high school or college, entropy isn’t studied by the general student or discussed much at dinner parties, for reasons that will become clear. However, you probably need to know what entropy is and how it structures nature if you are at all curious about the human condition and how 8 billion people are acting on a finite planet.

Here is a standard definition…

Entropy is a measure of disorder, randomness, or the number of possible microscopic configurations within a system. It reflects the natural tendency of energy and matter to spread out over time.

In thermodynamics, entropy is often described as a measure of a system’s disorder. A more precise way to think about it is as a measure of how many ways the parts of a system can be arranged without changing its overall observable state. The more possible arrangements there are, the higher the entropy.

For example, a neatly stacked pile of blocks has low entropy. There are a small number of ways to keep it orderly and recognisable as a stack of blocks. In comparison, a pile of randomly scattered blocks has high entropy because there are countless ways to scatter them without any noticeable order.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy tends to increase over time in an isolated system, which is a closed one that exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. This doesn’t mean that order can’t appear locally, but that creating local order, such as an ant’s body, requires expending energy and increasing entropy elsewhere. This universal trend toward higher entropy explains why processes naturally move toward equilibrium; why hot things cool down, gases spread out, and structures decay unless maintained.

Entropy is a description of chaos and a profound principle governing the arrow of time and energy flow.

Entropy also captures the idea that systems left alone tend to evolve toward more probable, less structured states. It is one of the fundamental pillars underlying the behaviour of the universe. It is why perpetual motion machines are impossible, why aging happens, and why energy resources degrade.

This was something close to my rudimentary understanding. I would mention entropy as explaining why the leaf breaks down when it falls from the tree, why the rock becomes soil, and why anything ordered and organised needs maintenance.

Entropy is a measure of the tendency of order to break down, hence the quote… Entropy is the price of structure.

I used this basic understanding to build my core explanations for the Malthusian trap, biodiversity loss, climate change, geopolitical instability, economic disruption, and technological upheaval, which became the topics of the Mindful Sceptic Guides.

In this mindful sceptic view, energy, specifically fossil energy, is why the human experiment has resulted in 8 billion individuals and their livestock making up 96% of the mammal biomass, why 100 million barrels of oil a day are used to power the process of keeping all these people fed and busy, and why so many people feel overwhelmed, powerless, and alienated in the face of complex, converging global disruptions.

Humans are heterotrophs that must consume, or the complex order of the chemical engines that give us life will collapse, and we decay because the laws of nature want entropy to increase.

And it is tempting to stop there. But if we do, the conclusion is that we need more energy, preferably from a clean source, to maintain the human experiment. The systems that rely on oil, coal and gas are refitted to work with the alternatives, currently some combination of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and nuclear fission. In short, we have to have an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, requiring technological innovation, supportive policies, and global cooperation.

Conventional wisdom assumes that this shift is not only an environmental imperative but also economically advantageous eventually, as renewable energy costs decline and climate-related damages mount. Key enablers include the electrification of transport and industry, improvements in energy efficiency, and investment in smart grids and storage technologies.

More assumptions follow. Policy frameworks are essential to managing this transformation, with carbon pricing, subsidies for clean energy, emissions standards, and international agreements like the Paris Accord serving as standard instruments. The private sector is expected to provide green finance, technological innovation, and corporate sustainability targets. Governments must balance market mechanisms with regulatory frameworks to drive innovation while ensuring energy security and social equity. Public support, primarily through democratic processes and consumer behaviour, is often considered a cornerstone of success.

Critics emphasise the oversimplification, underestimation of systemic inertia, geopolitical complexity, material constraints, and uneven disruptive social consequences of such a transition.

In other words, the focus is on the practicality of such a shift rather than the shift itself.

I was caught up in this, too. For many years, I advised on carbon offset projects and methodologies because I thought that decarbonising the human enterprise was a good idea, even essential. This may still be true, but I had a nagging doubt.

Something was off.

In the real world of humans making more, we were all up against the natural tendency of energy and matter to spread out over time.

But I didn’t fully understand entropy. And neither did almost all the humans thinking about the environment. They agreed with this…

As we now know, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy inevitably increases in isolated systems because energy and matter spread out over time.

While local order can be created, as happens in living organisms, this always comes at the cost of generating greater disorder elsewhere. Human existence, like all life, fundamentally requires energy conversion that accelerates entropy.

Even the most efficient, sustainable systems still degrade energy and increase overall entropy. This physical reality contradicts simplistic sustainability narratives that suggest we can achieve perfect balance or zero environmental impact. Instead, we must recognise that our existence necessarily participates in entropy increase.

Carbon neutrality, circular economy, sustainable development and a whole paradigm of sustainability share the common goal of achieving a better alignment of human activities with Earth’s ecological limits. This desire is underpinned by systems thinking, which seeks to reduce waste, optimise resource use, and mitigate environmental damage. They are aspirational models that aim to slow or stabilise unsustainable trends like emissions and resource depletion.

But here is the flaw in the assumption.

In thermodynamic terms, human activity will always generate entropy because all physical processes do, particularly those involving energy transformations from burning fuels, to manufacturing and food production. No real-world system can avoid this entirely. Instead, strategies like the circular economy might limit unnecessary entropy by designing closed-loop systems that reuse materials, extend product lifespans, and prioritise renewable energy. Carbon neutrality similarly does not eliminate emissions entirely, but offsets them elsewhere in an attempt to reduce net impact.

Current environmental thinking implies that human systems should approach ecological equilibrium, even if a state of minimal entropy or complete balance is unrealistic.

Not many people think like this, but these ideas are best understood as guiding principles rather than scientifically or thermodynamically achievable end states. The real aim is to create systems that are more resilient, adaptive, and regenerative—not ones that are entropy-free.

Such a caveat is a nod to the laws of physics, but is it enough?

If we make entropy explicit, does it change the focus? Let’s test this assumption…

Life appears paradoxical from an entropy perspective. Organisms maintain highly ordered structures despite thermodynamics dictating increasing disorder. However, this misunderstands life’s relationship with entropy. Living systems don’t oppose entropy; rather, they are specialised structures that accelerate it.

When a tree grows or an animal develops, they create local order but at the cost of greater disorder in their surroundings. The metabolic processes that maintain life’s complex structures release waste heat and degrade matter, increasing overall entropy more efficiently than if the energy had been left unused.

Ecosystems like fertile soil appear more ordered than bare rock, but they actually accelerate energy dispersal through countless biochemical pathways, microbial activities, and nutrient cycles. This reveals life’s fundamental thermodynamic function to create temporary pockets of order, precisely because these structures help energy spread and degrade more rapidly.

Why does life increase entropy?

Life increases entropy because, while living organisms maintain internal order, they do so by consuming energy and resources, releasing more waste heat and disorder into their surroundings than the order they create.

This is counterintuitive but a critical concept.

At first glance, life defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics because plants grow, animals build complex bodies, and ecosystems form intricate networks, all highly ordered structures. However, life does not violate the law; it operates within it. Living systems maintain and even increase their internal organisation by taking in energy (like sunlight or food) and using it to build and maintain their complex structures. But in doing so, they release waste energy, primarily as heat, and degrade matter into less ordered forms (like carbon dioxide, water, and other waste products). This waste increases the total entropy of the environment more than the local decrease in entropy inside the organism.

For example, a growing tree absorbs sunlight and uses it to assemble carbon atoms into elaborate cellulose molecules, reducing internal entropy. But the process of capturing and converting solar energy is inefficient, and much of the energy is lost as heat into the surrounding environment. The tree also releases oxygen and water vapour, increasing disorder around it. From a whole-system view, the tree’s local order is more than compensated for by a net increase in entropy in the environment, entirely in line with the Second Law.

Evolution, metabolism, and ecological interactions are all ways life channels energy flows, converting useful energy into less practical, more randomised forms. Life thrives by temporarily capturing order, but must pay the unavoidable cost of contributing to the universe’s broader journey toward higher entropy.

Let’s take soil as an example.

Soil, which is full of life, has higher entropy than the rock it was made from, conforms to the second law because its living processes and structure disperse energy more effectively than rock and contribute to a greater overall increase in entropy.

Soil represents one of nature’s most remarkable transformations. The rock it is derived from is like a locked vault of energy. As soil forms, the weathering process constructs a porous, chemically reactive environment where energy can flow through countless channels. Water moves through networks of spaces. Organic compounds fuel microscopic communities. Plant roots establish underground highways for nutrient transport. Gases facilitate chemical reactions that are impossible in solid rock.

Each component multiplies the system’s capacity for energy dispersal. Sunlight powers photosynthesis, drives evaporation, and triggers thermal cycles that influence soil chemistry. Microbes orchestrate decomposition processes that release stored energy from organic matter. Earthworms engineer soil structure while redistributing materials throughout different layers.

Soil is busier energetically.

Rock holds energy like a patient miser, slowly absorbing sunlight and gradually releasing warmth. Soil, however, hosts a constant party of activity. Microbes feast on organic matter, accelerating chemical reactions that would crawl along at a geological pace in bare stone. It is a highly efficient method for increasing overall entropy. What looks like increasing order represents the universe’s fundamental drive toward energy dispersal, just happening through biological pathways rather than simple thermal radiation.

This illustrates a crucial subtlety of thermodynamics… local increases in complexity (like fertile soil) can and do arise naturally, but they are always accompanied by greater entropy increases elsewhere in the system.

Here’s the thing.

When humans use soil to channel that energy dissipation into crops and livestock, we speed up the energy degradation. Again, this sounds paradoxical until we give it some thought.

When farmers add synthetic fertilisers to soil, it dramatically increases the availability of nutrients that drive plant growth. This turbocharges the system’s productivity so that crops grow faster, biomass increases, and short-term yields rise. But this accelerated biological production is also a form of faster entropy increase. The soil system, now flooded with concentrated energy in the form of bioavailable nitrogen and phosphorus, for instance, breaks its usual pace of slow, layered cycling of matter through microbes, fungi, and invertebrates. Instead of organic matter being decomposed gradually and nutrients being recycled through food webs, the system bypasses these slower, life-building steps and becomes a simplified pipeline…

input → rapid plant growth → output.

In thermodynamic terms, the farmer has increased the energy gradient. Adding more energy and nutrients into the system speeds up flows but in doing so, also breaks down the internal structures (microbial networks, fungal hyphae, humus formation) that buffer, store, and moderate energy release. The result is a system that becomes more brittle and leaky as microbial diversity falls, organic matter oxidises and erodes, and the soil’s ability to retain water, resist pests, and self-regulate declines. Over time, this leads to declining fertility, requiring even more fertiliser to maintain yields. This is a well-known, if often ignored, positive feedback loop driven by entropy acceleration.

It’s also a wicked paradox.

By forcing biological production to go faster to yield more grain or fatten livestock, intensive agriculture also accelerates entropy increase, not just through energy dispersion, but through the breakdown of complex, evolved systems that normally modulate it. Fertile, living soil is a masterpiece of slow entropy management; synthetic inputs override this and burn through complexity for short-term gains. What follows is a degradation of the very systems that kept entropy in check, leading to long-term disorder despite short-term productivity.

We often think of The Great Acceleration as being about technology, wealth creation and human population growth, but really it was energy dissipation.

Now it is time to expand this example from soil and apply the following premise to the entire human experiment…

When humans extract and burn fossil fuels, we are releasing in mere centuries energy that was captured and concentrated over millions of years. These fuels exist in extraordinarily low-entropy states as tightly bound carbon-hydrogen compounds that formed through geological processes over vast timescales, buried deep in the Earth.

By combusting them rapidly, we dramatically accelerate entropy increase, releasing this stored energy as heat and converting ordered chemical compounds into more disordered gases like CO₂. This acceleration overwhelms Earth’s natural entropy management systems, especially the carbon cycle, causing atmospheric and oceanic disruption. Industrial civilisation essentially functions as a massive entropy engine, depleting concentrated energy reserves and producing high-entropy outputs at unprecedented speed.

Humans are the embodiment of the Second Law.

So, before we start blaming the fossil fuel companies for their negligence and profiteering, burning fossil energy isn’t unnatural in principle. It follows thermodynamic laws. However, the rate and scale of this energy pulse and its associated entropy spike are unparalleled in Earth’s history, pushing planetary systems into new and often unstable states that threaten the conditions that support complex life.

Human appropriation of fossil energy and conversion of that energy into food and then more people (an additional 6 billion in less than 100 years) just increases entropy and makes low-entropy states less likely. In other words, we should expect disorder to increase.

Unlocking and burning fossil energy at an unprecedented rate, humans created agricultural surpluses, cities, machines, and infrastructure that are all forms of temporary order that require constant inputs to maintain. The global food system, in particular, is a prime example of how this fossil energy has been funnelled into producing enormous quantities of biomass (mostly as human bodies and livestock that now make up 96% of the mammal biomass on the planet) through fertilisers, mechanised farming, irrigation, and transport which are all systems that would be impossible to sustain at current scales without this energy subsidy.

From a thermodynamic perspective, this is a massive entropy engine. We are rapidly converting low-entropy fossil fuel into waste heat, carbon dioxide, degraded soils, polluted water systems, and simplified ecosystems.

I know, I am repeating myself, but I must.

While the human population and its support systems appear to be a form of complex structure, they are built on and dependent upon accelerated degradation of the Earth’s biophysical systems. The more people there are, and the more energy each person consumes, the more the biosphere is pushed into higher-entropy states, where systems lose resilience, feedback loops spiral out of control, and the ability to recover or sustain complexity diminishes.

This process doesn’t make lower-entropy states like intact forests, rich soils, or stable climates impossible, but it does make them less probable. Stability is less likely to re-emerge or be maintained without deliberate restraint and energy redirection.

In thermodynamic terms, we’ve moved the system away from a self-organising equilibrium and into a state where high-entropy outcomes like desertification, biodiversity collapse, atmospheric instability are more likely simply because the energy gradients driving order have been flattened or exhausted.

Thus, our appropriation of fossil energy has let us cheat the limits for a while. But it only works as long as we keep burning through the planet’s stored order. Unless we transition to systems that can sustain complexity on renewable flows, the defiance ends.

And there it is, the fundamental truth… unless it uses renewable flows rather than drawing down the planet’s stored order.

We hear the renewable part from sustainability orthodoxy all the time. What we don’t hear said is anything about the stored order or the self-organising that happens to maintain lower entropy.

Most of the time, we are subject to the following…

Conservationists in Australia are all familiar with the year 1788. For them, it represents the beginning of large-scale European colonisation, which dramatically altered the continent’s ecosystems. With the arrival of the First Fleet, traditional Aboriginal land management practices were rapidly displaced, and European farming, grazing, and urbanisation began to degrade native habitats.

1788 represents the baseline, what the landscape was like before the profound ecological changes that followed European land use. It is a symbol of the need to protect what remains of Australia’s unique biodiversity, much of which had evolved in isolation for millions of years before the colonial impact.

The overwhelming temptation is to use the 1788 baseline as a historical reference point to assess the extent of ecological change since European colonisation and to guide restoration efforts toward pre-colonial biodiversity and land management practices. Scientists and policymakers use it to identify which species and habitats have been most affected and to set restoration goals that aim to recover elements of pre-colonial ecosystems. For example, reintroducing native species, controlling or eradicating invasive species, and restoring fire regimes that reflect traditional Indigenous practices are all strategies informed by the 1788 benchmark.

At first glance, this is reasonable logic. Triage the landscape and decide on where limited conservation effort goes by using past conditions as a guide for what are tricky, value-laden decisions.

It also neatly sidesteps thermodynamics by assuming that it is possible to reorder the landscape to its lower entropy state that was present before the new energy dissipation practices arrived.

But it’s not just about saving koala habitat.

There is a logic gap that appears throughout mainstream sustainability advocacy, which promotes valuable practices like renewable energy, circular economies, and conservation. However, it often implicitly frames sustainability as the potential elimination of human environmental impact or a return to a static balance with nature.

This framing misunderstands or ignores the thermodynamic foundation of all systems—that entropy inevitably increases, and perfect equilibrium is impossible. Even the most, so called, sustainable practices still degrade energy and increase entropy; they simply do so more slowly or within Earth’s regenerative capacity.

Remember, life is an energy dissipation system pretending to be in order.

This misconception partly stems from how human culture naturally conceptualises problems and solutions, preferring narratives of restoration and balance over acknowledgment of constant change and degradation. But by failing to integrate thermodynamic principles, sustainability movements risk setting unrealistic expectations and designing strategies that don’t account for system dynamics.

A more honest and effective approach would acknowledge that sustainability isn’t about preventing entropy, but about managing its inevitable increase in ways that preserve living possibilities over the longest timeframe. This thermodynamic understanding would strengthen sustainability education and advocacy by grounding it in physical reality rather than idealistic but ultimately unattainable notions of perfect balance or retreat to some historical baseline.

What we like to think of as the balance of nature suggests a stable, self-regulating equilibrium where ecosystems maintain harmony unless disrupted. The pre-1788 conditions. However, from the perspective of thermodynamics, such a balance is inherently temporary and constantly subject to change. Natural systems are always dissipating energy, degrading over time, and moving toward thermodynamic equilibrium, which, in practical terms, is a state of maximum entropy and minimal usable energy.

While ecosystems can exhibit periods of relative stability, these are dynamic, not static. They are far-from-equilibrium systems that survive by dissipating energy. The thermodynamic view reframes the balance of nature as a process of continuous adaptation and flux, not a fixed or ideal state. This is radical for conservation orthodoxy that has stability baked into it, even in the name.

A more effective conservation paradigm would focus less on preserving a perceived historical balance and more on sustaining the energy flows and diversity that allow ecosystems to maintain their dynamic structure in the face of inevitable change.

It’s got nothing to do with 1788 other than at that time the energy system was relatively stable, although it had already been disrupted by 80,000 years’ worth of fire-stick management. But we’ll leave that sacred cow grazing in the paddock.

I have elaborated on the reasons for biodiversity loss in these terms at length, and even wrote a book on why rare things might not matter…

But before we reach the heretical conclusion of entropy’s brutal truth, we should review some of the alternative frameworks that at least give a nod to the Second Law.

The foundational insight of thinkers like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is that economic systems are not closed loops of abstract transactions, but open systems embedded in and dependent on the physical environment. Energy and matter flow through economies from low-entropy, high-quality resources to high-entropy waste. Mainstream economics largely overlooks this fact, treating the environment as an externality or assuming infinite substitutability of resources, which leads to unrealistic growth expectations. And it is easy to see why.

More making is innate, both ingrained in our biology and part of the energy dissipation, making growth foundational. Growing, creating, and being more is difficult to avoid, especially when the reality of energy dissipation can happen somewhere else as an externality to your economic action. And so, like the conservation orthodoxy, capitalism ignores thermodynamics.

So, what would and should sustainability look like through the lens of the Second Law?

Economic throughput, the material and energy used and wasted, has to sit inside ecological limits, and GDP growth cannot be decoupled indefinitely from environmental impact. Building on Georgescu-Roegen’s work, Herman Daly framed steady-state economics as a normative project with a simple target to stabilise population and resource consumption at sustainable levels. Steady-state economics treats energy, material and waste constraints as non-negotiable and shifts attention to qualitative development rather than quantitative expansion.

Similarly, ecological economics already puts the economy inside the environment and keeps the focus on energy and material flows. Mainstream models often treat nature as an externality, or lean on the idea of infinite substitutability. This framework recognises the one-way movement of low-entropy, high-quality resources into high-entropy waste through irreversible transformation. Consequently, GDP growth cannot be indefinitely decoupled from environmental impact. Economic activity is constrained by non-negotiable physical limits and the natural pace of regeneration.

Bioeconomics, emerging from Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamic critique and later developed through Daly and others, tightens the lens further onto the reproductive and regenerative capacities of ecosystems. How fast can forests regrow, soils replenish, fish stocks recover, or water tables recharge if they are given the chance? These questions are used to change what performance means as something closer to the natural pace of regeneration, not outputs or market efficiency. Harvest timber faster than a forest can regrow, or fish beyond the reproductive rate of a species, and collapse is the predictable outcome, regardless of price.

Bioeconomics treats these biological limits as core constraints that must shape planning from the outset, and it calls for policies and practices that mimic natural systems in their circularity, resilience, and adaptive feedback loops.

Both ecological economics and bioeconomics are intellectually honest because they begin with finite energy, irreversible transformations, and ecological interdependence, rather than abstracting them away. They at least give a nod to thermodynamics. While not politically dominant, they provide rigorous, systems-aware alternatives to the growth-centric paradigms of conventional economics and remain crucial to any sustainable long-term vision.

What they tell us is critical.

True sustainability, aligned with physical laws, requires a fundamental shift in thinking from trying to stop degradation to intelligently managing the inevitable increase in entropy.

This means designing human systems to operate primarily within Earth’s daily energy budget, mainly solar radiation and its derivatives, rather than depleting ancient reserves. It requires embracing dynamic equilibrium rather than static balance and building flexibility, redundancy and adaptability into our systems to accommodate constant change.

A physics-aware sustainability strategy would focus on three key principles:

1. Living within current energy flows rather than stored ancient energy;

2. Designing for constant change and adaptability rather than rigid stability; and

3. Actively regenerating natural systems that effectively dissipate and process energy flows.

There is an acceptance here that entropy will always increase, but recognises that human choices can shape the speed, pattern, and consequences of that increase.

The goal becomes not zero impact, which is thermodynamically impossible, but rather developing systems that increase entropy at rates and in patterns that Earth’s systems can accommodate while maintaining conditions conducive to complex life.

It is hard to state just how radical a shift this is from orthodoxy. Also how extremely unlikely it is to gain any traction in capitalist economic systems.

But we should state it as a premise anyway.

Truly effective environmental policy should acknowledge that sustainability does not mean halting entropy, but rather managing its rate and distribution within the biophysical limits set by Earth’s solar energy income.

This is a radical reframe of the sustainability debate to align it with thermodynamic and ecological reality. Rather than chasing the illusion of zero-impact or perpetual equilibrium, or even some nominal ecological state in centuries past, it recognises that all complex systems necessarily produce entropy as they transform energy and materials.

The key insight here is that the goal should not be to eliminate entropy because that is impossible. Instead, the goal is to optimise how and where it occurs, to sustain the planetary conditions that support complex, adaptive life.

By rooting environmental policy in Earth’s daily solar energy budget—roughly 174,000 terawatts received by the planet, of which only a fraction is usable by ecosystems—it imposes a clear and physical ceiling on what is feasible. This is a critical correction to mainstream development models that either ignore energy limits or assume substitution and efficiency gains can overcome them. Solar energy is the primary engine of ecological regeneration, from photosynthesis to climate regulation, and aligning human activity with this budget is a rational and biophysically grounded principle.

But it’s counterintuitive if you’ve been trained by an economy that treated fossil energy as an unlimited cheat code.

And it reframes what we mean by sustainability.

We don’t mean to keep things the same or even going forever. The job is to design social and economic systems that dissipate energy and increase entropy without automatically stripping the biosphere of the nutrient cycling, biodiversity maintenance, and climate regulation that keep it liveable.

The hard part is implementation because the constraints are spatial and temporal. Which activities can be sustained where, and for how long, given local energy flows and ecosystem resilience?

This thermodynamic framing heightens the case for environmental stewardship.

A simple critique of the mainstream sustainability narrative is that it smuggles in technological determinism and an economically linear storyline.

We invent our way out and somehow overpower the fossil fuel incumbents, the political inertia of nation-states, and the rebound effects of economic growth. In a blink, decarbonisation arrives as a technical fix without the necessary political, cultural, and economic transformations.

Critics might also argue that solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries lean hard on critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths. Each have critical deposits concentrated in politically unstable or environmentally fragile regions. The mining, processing, and global trade required raise environmental justice issues and can replicate, or even intensify, the extractive dynamics associated with fossil fuels.

And the assumption that demand can be met by swapping inputs misses the intermittent, diffuse, and infrastructure-intensive constraints of renewables. They also come with different but equally challenging spatial, temporal, and material bottlenecks as fossils.

Socially, the transition can deepen inequality unless it is explicitly designed to be just. Job losses in fossil fuel sectors, rising energy prices during the transition period, and weak support for affected communities can produce backlash and political polarisation.

The worry, then, is governance.

Without robust mechanisms for inclusion, transparency, and democratic control, the energy transition risks becoming a technocratic project run by elites and corporations—rather than a genuinely transformative movement grounded in ecological limits and social justice. In short, the transition is essential, but the counterpoint insists it cannot be a green version of business-as-usual. It has to be a rethinking of energy, equity, and ecology.

This is all true.

The billion or so people who live in the Global North are in thrall to any option that maintains business as usual because we are good with it. Even the critics approach sustainability with a first-world mindset, assuming it is possible, were it not for a few political, social, and technical barriers.

But here is the thing.

If human actions comply with the second law of thermodynamics, then sustainability is impossible.

Humans are part of the universal tendency to degrade concentrated energy and increase entropy. Just like microbes breaking down organic matter or forests absorbing and reradiating solar energy, humans are an agent of energy flow, only vastly more powerful and accelerated by technology. Every breath we take, every meal we eat, every building we erect or car we drive, converts energy into more disordered, less usable forms. There is no way around it. Being alive means participating in the increase in entropy.

Sustainability, therefore, cannot mean stopping or reversing this natural process; it can only mean modulating it.

Sustainability, when properly understood, is about shifting how we increase entropy. Instead of explosively depleting long-stored, low-entropy fossil fuels in a few centuries, causing massive ecological and atmospheric disruption in the process, we can choose to use energy sources like sunlight, wind, and biological cycles, which already enter the Earth’s systems constantly and which naturally increase entropy at a manageable rate. It’s about living within the existing energy flows that Earth’s systems can absorb and reprocess, rather than digging deep into ancient reserves and overloading the system’s capacity.

Entropy will always increase, but the speed, scale, and side effects of that increase can be shaped by human choices.

Sustainability should not be about defying thermodynamics; it’s about working with it to build systems that are resilient, adaptive, and that spread energy more gradually and harmoniously. Absolute stasis is impossible, but intelligent moderation is not only possible, it is necessary if we want to maintain a complex civilisation without collapsing the natural systems we depend on.

Reducing carbon emissions, protecting biodiversity, conserving water, promoting renewable energy, and building circular economies are crucial and commendable efforts. However, sustainable practices like organic farming, renewable energy harvesting, or reforestation, still involve ongoing energy use, resource transformation, and ultimately contribute to the gradual spread of entropy. They simply do it more slowly and within the regenerative capacity of Earth’s systems.

The danger is that when sustainability is sold as a return to a static, balanced harmony with nature, it sets unrealistic expectations. Nature itself is dynamic, constantly balancing on the edge of growth and decay, construction and destruction.

Truly sustainable strategies would acknowledge this and build resilience into systems, accepting ongoing change, and focusing not on preventing entropy, but on smoothing, slowing, and redirecting its inevitable increase in ways that preserve living opportunities for as long as possible.

How could this be done?

A physics-consistent version of sustainability would start from the recognition that energy degradation and entropy production are unavoidable.

The goal would not be to preserve a static balance, but to manage the flows of energy and materials so that ecological and social systems can remain adaptive, resilient, and regenerative over long periods. The core principle would be to operate within the daily and seasonal influxes of energy, instead of relying on tapping ancient fossil or mineral reserves at a much faster rate than they are replenished. This means maximising the use of renewable energy, enhancing soil fertility naturally, cycling water wisely, and building infrastructure that is durable, repairable, and recyclable; all designed to work within the rhythms of natural inputs and outputs.

A physics-consistent version would emphasise building systems that are open, flexible, and capable of dynamic equilibrium, rather than rigid or overly engineered solutions that assume a stable environment. Since entropy means that all systems will eventually break down or change, sustainable design must assume disruption and embed redundancy, diversity, and modularity. For example, decentralised energy grids, mixed-crop agriculture, local food webs, and distributed water systems would all be more ‘entropy-aware’ approaches because they accept and adapt to variability rather than trying to impose a fragile order.

Finally, a physics-consistent strategy would focus on regenerating and expanding the capacity of Earth’s natural forests, soils, oceans, and the atmosphere. These entropy buffers which absorb, process, and recycle energy and material flows are the natural mechanisms by which Earth smooths the energy inputs from the sun and maintains a liveable environment. Rather than just reducing harm, the goal would be active stewardship of systems that naturally handle entropy at the planetary scale.

In short, the real sustainability strategy would be:

• Live within current energy flows, not stored ancient energy.

• Design for constant change, redundancy, and adaptability.

• Actively regenerate natural systems that dissipate and absorb energy.

• Accept that entropy will always increase, and focus on managing how it increases.

A thermodynamic reframing of sustainability forces a cleaner kind of honesty about the objective. We’re not trying to stop the universe’s drift toward disorder because that is impossible. Instead, we’re negotiating the terms of our participation in entropy’s march.

The conventional sustainability narrative of green growth and technological salvation with some rare species conservation thrown in for good measure, can read like a polite attempt to have our thermodynamic cake and eat it too.

Sure, we can keep burning through Earth’s ancient energy stores like reckless heirs squandering an inheritance. Or we can learn to live within our planetary allowance, with some grace. And that shift from an energy transition story to an energy conservation ethic may be the deepest cultural transformation since the Agricultural Revolution.

It asks us to redefine progress itself, moving from the industrial logic of more, faster, bigger toward the art of thriving within natural limits. A pivot to a more sophisticated relationship with the physical world that sustains us is a magnificent human ambition.

Coming Soon

We’ve trained ourselves to treat consumption as a proxy for worth. That makes economic contraction feel like moral failure filled with shame, status loss, social fracture. But dignity doesn’t have to ride shotgun with GDP. Across cultures and crises, people have preserved meaning and mutual obligation under constraint, especially when sacrifice is framed as shared, and the basics are protected. The task now is to separate dignity from throughput, and build simpler lives that don’t read as deprivation.

In September 1989, I was waiting for housing to be arranged as part of my appointment as a lecturer at the University of Botswana. It meant a lengthy stay at the Gaborone Sun Hotel in Gaborone, where I lived for over three months. Sundowners by the pool, tennis under floodlights, and endless dinners in the restaurant sound idyllic until it’s been going on for weeks.

My extended hotel stay was an early lesson in ‘Africa time’ and made me curious about folk who choose to live permanently in such places. What I would have given for beans on toast.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was allocated a flat in a new block a short walk from the Ngotwane River, more strictly, the dry riverbed opposite what is now the Riverwalk Shopping Mall. Back then, it was the municipal waste management facility and just a few kilometres from the Tlokweng border post with South Africa.

Recall that these were turbulent times in Southern Africa. Apartheid was clinging on, and Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned on Robben Island. Incursions into neighbouring countries by the South African military were happening to root out insurgents. At checkpoints in peaceful Botswana, security personnel waved AK-47s.

But it was also the beginning of an economic boom.

From 1980 onward, Botswana’s economy grew at an average annual rate of around 5–6%, making it one of Africa’s most celebrated development success stories. This growth was primarily powered by the discovery and export of diamonds. The industry was managed through a strategic partnership with the De Beers Group, founded in 1888 by Cecil Rhodes. The Botswana government reinvested mineral revenues into national infrastructure, education, and health services, but such were the revenues and fiscal discipline, the country accumulated substantial foreign reserves. The result was a dramatic transformation from one of the world’s poorest nations at independence in 1966 to a middle-income country within a few decades.

Among several initiatives in the 1990s, the government established the Pula Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, to save surplus revenues and help buffer against fluctuations in commodity prices. The policy environment, combined with an efficient public sector and relatively low corruption levels, earned Botswana high marks from international financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank. All was rosy for the future.

When I arrived, Botswana had become a model for prudent economic governance in the region, and I benefited from their investment in education.

When I checked into the Gaborone Sun in 1989, there were three hotels in the town of 133,000 people. Today, there are 65 hotels, offering a diverse range of accommodations to cater to various preferences and budgets, including several five-star establishments, reflecting the city’s development into a regional business and tourism hub. The country has grown, and Gaborone from a dusty border post to a modern city with over 300,000 residents and a place unrecognisable as the British protectorate it once was.

Growth has slowed somewhat in the 21st century, and Botswana remains heavily reliant on the diamond sector, which accounts for over 80% of export earnings and a large share of government revenue. Efforts to diversify, especially into tourism, manufacturing, financial services, and agriculture, have seen only partial success. Moreover, income inequality remains high, youth unemployment is a growing concern, and the economy’s informal sector has expanded without adequate policy support.

But it’s difficult to deny the progress.

But what happens if the bottom falls out of the diamond market?

A sudden collapse in the diamond market, let’s say by plummeting global demand, synthetic diamond disruption, or geopolitical shifts, would hit Botswana like a dropped engine block. Export income would fall fast. The trade balance would weaken, the Pula would devalue, and inflation would follow as imports become more expensive.

Then the second-order effects show up. Government services tied to diamond revenues, particularly the larger infrastructure, education, and health projects, would run into hard budget limits, forcing spending cuts or deficits. Jobs in mining and the industries that orbit it, from transport to services, would be on the line too.

That’s how a commodity shock turns into a socioeconomic shock.

In the short term, Botswana’s foreign exchange reserves and low public debt allow it some room to absorb shocks; there is a buffer buys time. Over the long run, a diamond collapse would force acceleration into tourism, beef exports, financial services, and manufacturing. That shift needs strategic investment and policy support, and it has been tried repeatedly with mixed results.

Botswana does have real advantages here thanks to a relatively strong institutional base, low corruption, and regional diplomatic credibility. Those things help attract investment. But if the transition isn’t managed, the loss of diamond revenues could widen inequality, push urban unemployment up, and start to fray the social contract that has historically anchored Botswana’s political stability.

Botswana’s national identity and international reputation are tightly bound to its post-independence success story. Diamonds became the symbol of self-reliance and national pride. A sudden market collapse would put that collective dignity at risk by creating economic dependence on external aid, triggering mass unemployment, and undermining the developmental gains so closely associated with Botswana’s sovereignty.

And the damage wouldn’t just sit on a balance sheet. Losing jobs, services, and opportunity, especially for young people, can curdle into disillusionment and marginalisation. Mining towns like Jwaneng or Orapa, built around the diamond economy, could face economic ruin and displacement. For many citizens, the psychological hit could run deeper than the material one. The loss of dignity that comes with being unable to provide for your family, or contribute in a way that feels meaningful, is debilitating at best.

All of this could intensify social tensions, widen class divisions, and weaken the spirit of unity and moderation that has characterised Botswana’s politics. It would put heavy pressure on social cohesion and tradition, and on the dignity that people are rightly proud to possess.

Yet dignity is not solely defined by economic outcomes. Botswana’s history of transparent governance, rule of law, and peaceful democratic transitions gives it an advantage over many nations in responding with grace and determination to adversity.

The country’s strong civil service, cultural emphasis on dialogue (kgotla), and prior experience with economic planning could help morph the national narrative to adaptability, innovation, and collective effort. In this light, dignity can be sustained not by avoiding hardship, but by how a nation responds to it.

Botswana has a good chance of riding out a diamond market collapse. However, the future could be about contraction as easily as the last few decades have been about growth.

So here is the first premise for dignity under constraint…

Economic contraction is typically associated with loss of dignity and social cohesion.

Rising unemployment, wage stagnation, and business closures are the usual tells of economic contraction that can lead to recession, or worse. And the damage isn’t just financial. It’s psychological because employment isn’t only a paycheck. It’s also identity, purpose, and social standing.

It’s more than the money.

When people lose their jobs or live in long stretches of financial insecurity, the real hit is to self-worth and social dignity. Shame creeps in. Marginalisation follows. Personal agency shrinks.

And when resources feel scarce, the social fabric tightens in the wrong ways. Trust can turn into resentment. People look for someone to blame, or they disengage altogether. Inequality becomes sharper and more visible, and the story of shared prosperity gets replaced by fragmentation and survival. Communities that once ran on mutual support can start to show rising crime, political polarisation, and mental health crises; all classic signs of social cohesion eroding.

Nations with strong social safety nets, inclusive civic cultures, and responsive institutions can buffer the effects to a degree, and even emerge with renewed solidarity. But in general, the link between economic decline and the loss of dignity and social cohesion is supported both by historical patterns and contemporary social research.

For example, in the US and Europe, the economic collapse following the 1929 stock market crash led to widespread unemployment that peaked at around 25% in the US, with millions of people losing not only their jobs but also their homes and savings. Breadlines, homelessness, and the infamous Dust Bowl migration fostered a widespread loss of personal dignity. Formerly self-reliant workers found themselves relying on public relief or informal charity, often with deep shame. At the same time, trust in institutions plummeted and social unrest grew. In parts of Europe, the depression’s destabilising effects contributed to the rise of authoritarian regimes, as people sought strong leadership amid economic despair.

Greece’s prolonged recession after the 2008 global financial crisis saw GDP fall by 25%, with youth unemployment rising above 50%. Austerity, tied to bailout loans, landed in ordinary life as pension cuts, tax hikes, and shrinking public services. Dignity eroded in familiar ways. Professionals took menial work or left the country. Public health worsened. Social cohesion cracked as protests and riots spread, suicides spiked, and trust in both the government and the EU fell sharply. The political system shifted with it, marked by the collapse of traditional parties and the rise of populist movements.

The decline of manufacturing in places like the U.S. Midwest and Northern England produced a slower kind of damage. Factories closed, incomes fell, and the social structure weakened because it had been built around stable, unionised work. For many men, the traditional backbone of industrial labour, the loss landed as an identity shock as much as an economic one. Over time, the fallout compounded into intergenerational poverty, opioid epidemics (notably in the U.S.), and declining civic participation.

And when people feel abandoned, politics shifts. That same mood has been linked to support for Brexit in the UK and the rise of populist politics in the U.S. that are both signals of social cohesion fraying.

These patterns are real, but they are not inevitable. There are well-documented historical examples of societies maintaining or reinforcing their core values during times of material constraint, particularly when those values are deeply embedded and culturally resilient.

Historical examples exist of societies maintaining core values during material constraint

Economic hardship, war, or environmental scarcity do not automatically erode a society’s foundational values. In fact, such conditions can clarify and strengthen collective ideals, particularly when those values are tied to identity, survival, or a shared moral code. When societies have strong cultural narratives, religious frameworks, or civic traditions, these can act as stabilising forces that persist even when material abundance is lost. Values like solidarity, perseverance, honour, and communal responsibility have historically endured and, at times, flourished under duress.

Societies with rituals, oral traditions, and ethical systems often lean on them in hard times. They’re how norms get reaffirmed when the material story is going the wrong way. When leaders frame loss in moral or patriotic terms, rather than as individual failure, people are more likely to rally around shared sacrifice. And sometimes constraint pushes a reset in what “counts.” Stronger mutual aid networks. Wealth redefined in terms of relationships or wisdom. Even a revival of communal land management.

Even with bombings, rationing, and severe shortages, British society during World War II (1939–1945) held its core values and, in key ways, tightened them through social solidarity, stoicism, and democratic commitment. The Blitz spirit wasn’t just a slogan. It showed up as mutual aid in bomb shelters and in civil defence efforts. Rationing held because it was seen as fair, equitable, and necessary. Rather than fraying under pressure, national identity and social cohesion were reinforced, helping set the stage for post-war reforms like the creation of the National Health Service and the welfare state. Those values endured because they were continually reaffirmed through shared narratives, leadership, and collective sacrifice.

Facing extreme material deprivation, forced displacement, and systemic violence, many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe preserved core religious and cultural values across centuries. Even in ghettos and concentration camps, people sustained ritual practices, education, and ethical codes, often clandestinely. The Talmudic emphasis on learning, mutual responsibility (tzedakah), and remembrance created internal cohesion even as external structures collapsed. Cultural memory and religious observance became tools for survival, carrying identity and values forward amid existential threat. That resilience later shaped post-Holocaust reconstruction of Jewish life and cultural continuity in diasporic communities.

The Zapatistas, emerging from one of the poorest regions in Mexico, have faced ongoing material constraints while sustaining a value system built around indigenous autonomy, participatory democracy, and resistance to neoliberal exploitation. Since their 1994 uprising, they have built alternative governance structures rooted in communal decision-making, gender equality, and anti-capitalist values. Despite economic marginalisation and political pressure, the core ideals have held through local institutions, collective farming, and educational programs. The values endure in part because they are not only argued for. They are practised daily in autonomous zones, intertwined with local identity and historical memory.

These examples suggest that core values can survive and thrive under constraint, particularly when collectively owned, continually enacted, and closely tied to a sense of identity or justice.

So what is it about modern societies in the West that are nominally wealthy, with abundant technology, services and have the ability to support basic needs?

Current conceptions of dignity and worth are excessively tied to consumption patterns

In modern capitalist systems, individual dignity and social status are frequently associated with the ability to consume through fashion, housing, technology, travel, and lifestyle branding. This is not merely about material need, but about symbolic value. What I buy and display becomes a stand-in for who I am.

Social media has intensified this linkage, as platforms serve as curated showcases of consumer choices that signal taste, success, and belonging. Consequently, my self-worth becomes entangled with my ability to participate in visible forms of consumption, creating a precarious identity rooted in economic access rather than intrinsic or communal values.

On a personal level, this consumption-centric notion of dignity affects me significantly. I may experience shame, inadequacy, or exclusion when I cannot afford or access certain goods, even if my basic needs are met. On a societal level, it fosters competition, status anxiety, and environmental degradation, as consumption becomes both a measure and a means of validation. Furthermore, it tends to marginalise those who value frugality, simplicity, or non-material forms of worth, such as caregiving, creativity, or spiritual life, which are harder to commodify or display.

Historically and cross-culturally, dignity has often been grounded in virtues like honour, integrity, craftsmanship, or social contribution. In contrast, current consumerist paradigms are relatively recent and culturally specific, shaped by marketing industries and economic models that depend on perpetual growth. I am a victim of consumerism even as I behave like one.

The overreliance on consumption to define self-worth is thus not inevitable but constructed, and potentially reversible. Alternative value systems are proposed in movements like degrowth, minimalism, and post-growth economics. These seek to re-anchor dignity in sufficiency, sustainability, and relational well-being rather than material accumulation. I could overcome nurture and do something different.

Communal and spiritual traditions offer alternative frameworks for human dignity

Many traditions, across cultures and periods, have consistently emphasised intrinsic human worth, mutual responsibility, and connection to something greater than the self. For example, Indigenous philosophies often centre dignity in relationships to land, ancestors, and community, rather than economic status or consumption. Similarly, religious traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and others commonly uphold all people’s sanctity and inherent dignity, regardless of their material standing, anchoring human value in compassion, humility, and shared spiritual identity.

I may be told, I consume, therefore I am, but the alternatives could provide more resilient moral structures in times of hardship. When material resources are scarce, communal and spiritual traditions can reinforce social cohesion and meaning, offering rituals, narratives, and ethical codes that affirm dignity through service, solidarity, and belonging.

As societies seek responses to inequality, climate disruption, or economic contraction, turning to these alternative frameworks can help reimagine human dignity in ways that are both enduring and inclusive. And we don’t have to look far to find them. Many are well known.

Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of swaraj (self-rule) and sarvodaya (the welfare of all) explicitly rejected the idea that dignity arises from wealth or consumption. He advocated for simplicity, self-sufficiency, and the moral integrity of labour, especially manual and local production. For Gandhi, dignity came from aligning one’s life with truth (satya) and nonviolence (ahimsa) and participating in community life without exploitation or excess. His symbolic use of homespun cloth (khadi) directly challenged the colonial and capitalist logics of identity through imported goods. Even today, aspects of Gandhian thought persist in India’s ethical and ecological movements, offering a value system centred on restraint, responsibility, and spiritual purpose.

Ubuntu is a relational worldview across many Southern African cultures, summarised by the phrase “I am because we are.” Dignity in Ubuntu arises from social interdependence, empathy, and mutual recognition rather than individual accumulation. Worth is located in one’s capacity to be humane, generous, and integrated within a community. This worldview resists the idea of consumption as a status marker; instead, it emphasises shared resources, communal decision-making, and the moral obligations of being human. In post-apartheid South Africa, Ubuntu was used to help frame reconciliation, justice, and social healing. Without the philosophy of Ubuntu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) would have been a cold, legalistic transaction, essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card, rather than the spiritual and social glue that held a fragile South Africa together in the 1990s.

Emerging in response to climate breakdown and social inequality, degrowth movements push back on the idea that more consumption automatically means better lives. They argue for a different definition of prosperity, one anchored in well-being, leisure, ecological health, and care work.

Think of it as a values shift. Philosophers and economists like Serge Latouche and Kate Raworth make the case that dignity can be revalued through sufficiency, cooperation, and ethical restraint. In practice, that shows up in degrowth experiments like Transition Towns or community economies, where value is placed on time, mutual aid, and low-impact living rather than material throughput.

The claim is that dignity can flourish inside systems that honour planetary limits and measure success in non-consumerist terms.

All this is at odds with the neoliberal growth paradigm, but by separating dignity from consumption, we can develop models of meaningful, connected lives that thrive within planetary boundaries rather than despite them. And we are going to have to find these models of meaning because scarcity is coming and with it a loss of dignity.

Political movements that ignore dignity concerns inevitably face resistance

Dignity starts with a simple idea that people have inherent worth, and they have a right to be treated with respect. It’s a core human need that cuts across culture, class, and ideology. When political movements ignore that need through humiliation, exclusion, paternalism, or exploitation, they often trigger backlash. Not because dignity is some abstract moral add-on, but because it’s a political force. When people feel dishonoured, overlooked, or dehumanised, they are more likely to organise, protest, or reject imposed authority. Sometimes that resistance is quiet, like withdrawal or non-compliance. Sometimes it’s overt, like uprisings or revolutions. Which one shows up depends on the context and how deep the violation feels.

History and the present tell us that even movements with materially beneficial aims can fail if they trample on dignity. Colonial regimes, for example, justified their rule as development or civilisational uplift, yet they provoked fierce resistance because of the indignities of subjugation and cultural erasure. The same logic appears in technocratic governance. When policy is imposed without consultation, public pushback can follow not necessarily because the policies are harmful, but because people are denied agency, voice, or recognition. In democratic settings, populist movements often gain traction by speaking to groups who feel elites have ignored or degraded their dignity.

And dignity-based resistance isn’t automatically reactionary or conservative. It can also power emancipatory change. Civil rights movements, Indigenous land struggles, feminist revolutions, and anti-austerity protests often place dignity at the centre, both as the grievance and as the goal.

The lesson is that durable, legitimate political movements have to account for more than material interests. They also have to reckon with the symbolic, emotional, and ethical dimensions of belonging, recognition, and respect. It also brings the final premise…

Models of dignified simplicity can be developed across cultural and political divides

The idea of dignified simplicity taps into a shared human intuition found across philosophical, religious, and civic traditions. A good life need not be a materially abundant one, and that self-restraint, balance, and purpose can form the basis of dignity.

Contemporary consumer culture often treats simplicity as lack or failure. Many societies read it differently. They see simplicity as integrity, harmony, and autonomy. The dignity comes from choice that is affirmed, not imposed. And it carries social and ethical value rather than stigma.

Across big cultural and political differences, plenty of traditions offer ways to name and practise dignified simplicity. In Buddhist and Taoist thought, simplicity points to clarity and non-attachment. In Christian monasticism, it links to humility and service. Indigenous knowledge systems often foreground balance with nature, communal resource-sharing, and a sufficiency ethic grounded in kinship and reciprocity. Even in modern secular settings, voluntary simplicity, slow living, and the commons revival show people reimagining well-being with fewer material demands.

These expressions can sit alongside each other and cross-pollinate. That is the point. Dignified simplicity is not a single formula. It is a flexible, intercultural ethic.

Again, we know what to do. Models suitable for transitions in modern life are possible, and many examples already exist.

Politically, the challenge is to develop enabling conditions for dignified simplicity from secure housing and universal healthcare, to food and time sovereignty. This ensures that simplicity is not conflated with deprivation.

The conversation is moving toward a cleaner question. How do high-income societies reduce overconsumption while still affirming dignity for all?

If that alignment holds, it points to a different kind of universalism. Not one built on sameness or affluence, but one grounded in shared values of care, humility, and interdependence.

The journey from abundance to constraint need not be a narrative of loss. As we’ve seen through historical examples and cultural alternatives, human dignity can not only survive but potentially flourish when separated from excessive consumption.

If the modern equation of dignity with consumption is neither inevitable nor universal, then we are at a pivotal moment of choice. The anecdotes we have examined, from wartime Britain to religious communities under persecution, from Gandhi’s philosophy to contemporary degrowth experiments, suggests that human dignity is remarkably adaptable. It can attach itself to consumption when resources are abundant, but it can also flourish through connection, contribution, and meaning when materials are constrained.

That creates a real opportunity inside the polycrisis facing humanity. If we reconnect dignity to more durable foundations like relationship, meaning, contribution, and care, we may find forms of well-being that are more resilient to the material fluctuations that increasingly shape our world. This is not just philosophical musing. It is practical adaptation to the reality of planetary boundaries.

For individuals, this means cultivating what philosopher Kate Soper calls alternative hedonism by finding pleasure and purpose in simpler, less resource-intensive activities. For communities, it means revitalising shared spaces, mutual aid networks, and cultural practices that affirm worth beyond wealth. For policymakers, it means designing transitions that protect fundamental needs while creating conditions where dignified simplicity becomes viable for all.

When I lived in Botswana through the 1990s, I witnessed a society navigating the delicate balance between newfound prosperity and traditional values. The Batswana, should their diamond economy falter, possess cultural resources to navigate this transition. They can lean on their traditional kgotla system of community dialogue, their history of prudent resource management, and their relatively recent memory of simpler living before the diamond boom.

The richest material societies in history have not necessarily been the most dignifying for all their members. As we face ecological limits, we have the opportunity to build societies that may consume less but distribute dignity more justly and durably. This is not a utopian fantasy but a practical imperative, drawing on humanity’s remarkable capacity to create meaning when faced with constraint.

The dominant environmental script swings between apocalyptic despair and techno-salvation, with not much room in the middle. This essay examines how historical societies actually navigated serious environmental stress and what resilience looked like at different scales. The point isn’t to downplay what’s coming. It’s to reframe it as an adaptive challenge rather than end times or business as usual. That shift buys us some clearer thinking, better choices, and a more productive way to meet the profound transitions ahead.

I presume that most people have heard of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, world-famous for his lush, energetic Baroque masterpieces. But he was also a spy. Kings and queens across Europe wanted him to paint their portraits, and he used access to royal courts to trade information and was instrumental in brokering a peace treaty between England and Spain in 1630.

Here is one of his paintings, which centres on the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, standing atop a crescent moon and crushing a serpent beneath her feet.

The truth is that humans have always been drawn to apocalyptic and salvationist narratives, especially when spiced with intrigue. Well, we love a story for starters, and really love one where the hero saves the world from disaster, just like Superman, Batman, the Avengers, James Bond… you get the idea.

We like the bit in the hero’s journey where the angel can cast out Satan, but she has to do this; otherwise, our story ends. But what we really like about heroes, beyond the defeat of the baddie, is the risk they take of losing their soul or their family, a loved one, in the course of the casting out. Then the outcome is much more uncertain and emotionally engaging.

What will be the heroic arc to save humanity from the apocalypse of overabundance? Will it come from peddlers of the dominant environmental discourse? Either the folk with dystopian visions of collapse or those with faith in technological salvation in the time it takes not to look up. Such polarised narratives can be emotionally compelling but are rarely empowering.

We have had these heroes among us for a while. They tend to overuse apocalyptic rhetoric, which disempowers rather than galvanises. They are countered by unbridled techno-optimism that will have us setting up colonies on Mars.

This essay explores a few of these stories before reframing environmental change as an adaptive challenge. It suggests we might need a different kind of hero, perhaps with more to lose, who can tackle a much richer engagement with complexity.

Let’s begin with the first premise that Satan may be among us…

Talk of imminent collapse, irreversible tipping points, and civilisational doom has become a common feature in media, activist messaging, and even scientific communication. These emotionally compelling narratives attract attention, making them powerful tools for raising awareness. And there are endless examples, but here are two.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change documentary Before the Flood (2016) opens with the kind of imagery that doesn’t leave much room for doubt. Melting ice caps. Burning forests. Flooded cities. It’s mainstream media doing what it does best when it wants to move you fast.

Produced with National Geographic, the film frames environmental collapse as urgent and irreversible, and it keeps that pressure on with dire warnings about civilisation’s trajectory. Scientists and activists lean on tipping points, like methane release from permafrost or coral bleaching, where the system can lurch and then fail to recover. Cross a threshold, and the warming accelerates.

So the narrative is built to hit the viewer in the gut, then convert that shock into motivation for climate action by making collapse feel imminent. The hero did most of his heroism in other roles.

Perhaps understandably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tends to write like a committee, with careful language and qualified claims. But once those reports hit the media, the centre of gravity shifts toward the sharpest edge.

Coverage often pulls out the most dramatic conclusions and builds the surrounding story. Headlines like Code Red for Humanity (from the 2021 IPCC report) elevate phrases such as irreversible impacts, runaway warming, or tipping points. The summaries aren’t untethered from the science, but the framing gets compressed into stark warnings that can read like a countdown to societal collapse or uninhabitability unless decisive action is taken.

Some scientists find portrayals like this controversial. Still, it’s one way the broader public gets the weight of inaction. However, the drama is dry and remote, lacking the personal touch.

There are many examples like these where the emotional rhetoric of collapse is expected to provoke concern, drive engagement, and potentially inspire change. At least that is what we suppose the proponents thought should happen… to frighten people into action. The problem is that this is more villain than hero.

Then the psychology researchers got to work. They found that fear-based messaging without accompanying pathways for action often triggers eco-anxiety, learned helplessness, or denial, rather than motivating pro-environmental behaviour. A classic consequence of the dissonance and dissociation we found in a previous essay. While short-term urgency can spark action, as when all my neighbours helped each other during a bushfire in our street, sustained engagement typically requires a sense of agency and hope. The story is only uplifting if we can believe that Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman can actually defeat the baddies.

Psychologists also found that a focus on worst-case scenarios can obscure the complexity and variability of environmental change. It can eclipse stories of adaptation, resilience, and innovation, the very narratives more likely to inspire systemic and individual responses. For this reason, many scholars and communicators argue for a shift toward framing that integrates urgency with possibility.

But partly because it excels at capturing attention, apocalyptic framing dominates, even though its limited utility is well-documented. The evidence strongly supports the apocalyptic narrative premise.

Just to be certain, let’s reinforce the premise with another one that doubles down.

Collapse rhetoric is the story that environmental breakdown inevitably cashes out as social or civilisational collapse. It’s a compelling frame ready to shock and grab attention. But there’s a catch because when a threat feels insurmountable or inevitable, people don’t mobilise. They shut down; emotionally, cognitively, or both. My wife does this after about 30 seconds of me enthusiastically recounting my latest anecdote of doom. Researchers sometimes refer to the pattern as defensive avoidance with a consistent outcome of inaction because people feel powerless.

You see it in younger people, too. High exposure to doomsday messaging shows up as eco-anxiety, the dread, burnout, and numbness from the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm and the persistent distress caused by observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change on the planet’s future.

And then collapse rhetoric bleeds into politics to corrode trust in democratic processes and make extremist or authoritarian responses feel like the only serious option. Once a population believes it’s on the brink of extinction, strongman tactics become more acceptable. Actions that would otherwise read as plainly undemocratic. Politicians start claiming that, to save the nation, they must bypass slow democratic processes, ignore court rulings, or silence the opposition.

We’ve seen this movie before. It played out in the Weimar Republic’s final years in Germany, and it delivered a catastrophically flawed leader.

Collapse narratives do highlight urgency, but they often reinforce inaction by overwhelming individuals rather than mobilising them toward constructive, collective change. In communities already experiencing structural inequality, such rhetoric can exacerbate feelings of marginalisation and further reduce engagement. People are still concerned about environmental risks, but how we frame these challenges fundamentally shapes responses.

Somehow, we need the narrative of urgency while preserving human agency, exactly what mindful scepticism advocates. But before we get all high and mighty about new options, it is worth looking back to see if humans have been in similar positions of resource stress before and what they did about it.

Environmental history, archaeology, and historical ecology tell a messier story than the collapse-only version. Past societies did get hit by climate shifts, resource depletion, and ecological disruption, but their outcomes weren’t uniform. Some collapsed. Some moved. Some improvised. Some redesigned institutions to fit a tighter world. And across those cases, the record is crowded with adaptive strategies, early warning signals, and resilience mechanisms that show how different groups absorbed stress or failed to.

Jared Diamond’s comparative analysis in his book Collapse is probably the most familiar and comprehensive examination of how societies have historically navigated environmental challenges, but his work represents just the tip of an extensive research iceberg. Archaeological evidence from institutions like the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program shows that human societies have successfully adapted to ice ages, volcanic winters, and regional climate shifts for over 300,000 years. Collapse wasn’t inevitable when adaptations were possible through sophisticated technological, social, and cultural innovations.

Japan’s Edo period is often read as a top-down sustainability story. The Shogunate responded to a timber crisis with strict forest management, recycling systems, and a tightly regulated internal economy that stabilised resource use. The Zuni people offer a bottom-up model of resilience. Through traditional ecological knowledge that enabled runoff farming and waffle gardens, they maintained food security in a fragile arid landscape for centuries.

With sea levels rising, the Dutch have leaned on centuries of water management and built on 1,000 years of engineering dikes, canals, and flood control systems. Their adaptation strategy today includes projects like Room for the River, which reshapes urban and rural landscapes to accommodate periodic flooding rather than fight it. Because this is proactive and culturally embedded, it lets the Netherlands manage climate risk with confidence and precision, unlike societies that meet environmental change as something wholly new and destabilising.

And there are plenty of similar examples from Balinese water temple systems, Icelandic fisheries management, to Aboriginal fire management in Australia that demonstrate complex adaptive strategies that maintained both ecological and social stability across centuries of environmental variability. The heroes here have humility. Rather than control or conquer, they understand that their role is to facilitate natural cycles that were established long before they were born and must continue long after they are gone.

Pragmatic insights and solutions like these remain largely absent from mainstream environmental policy discussions, which tend to focus either on future projections or present-day technological fixes.

In short, this premise holds and gives us the key insight that human societies have always been adaptive systems. So instead of an apocalypse that requires the ecclesiastical imagery of Baroque painters, what happens if we assume that adaptation is an option?

Many past societies did adapt to ecological change. Not with a single grand redesign, but with small, cumulative moves. Better farming. Tighter water management. More trade options. Shifts in land tenure. The sweeping, cinematic reset was the exception. Most of the time, it was accretion, not breakthrough.

For example, indigenous Andean societies developed terracing and irrigation methods to cope with variable mountain climates, and medieval European communities adjusted land-use patterns and communal resource management during the Little Ice Age. Even the British, during the sea blockades early in World War II, set out to turn as much spare land as possible into gardens to grow food.

These responses were neither static nor utopian; they evolved and often depended on the ability to renegotiate norms, redistribute resources, or alter governance structures in response to changing conditions. In short, people and their systems were flexible.

Incremental change reinforces the key point often overlooked in modern environmental policy, that adaptation does not always require radical disruption or high-tech intervention. Instead, it often hinges on resilience-building practices embedded within communities, sustained by cultural knowledge, responsive institutions, and feedback loops between people and their environments.

In Iceland, adaptation was a string of pragmatic pivots. Grain gave way to pastoralism. Diets leaned harder on the sea, especially fish and seabirds. Turf became a managed building resource. These were flexible responses to variability during the Medieval Warm Period, built from social organisation and accumulated ecological knowledge.

Between 600–1300 CE, the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest built adaptation into the landscape. Check dams, terraces, and canals to capture scarce water. Crop diversification, including drought-tolerant maize. Communal granaries and other storage to buffer short-term shocks. Late 13th century droughts, plus population pressure and possibly internal conflict, contributed to the abandonment of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. People migrated, and Puebloan life reorganised in new places.

I could go on.

Societies that made it through environmental stress often paired technological innovation with social flexibility, and even then, success was uneven and never guaranteed. The core pattern is iterative through experimentation, adjustment, learning, then more adjustment. This suggests there is a lesson to treat today’s environmental challenges as a moving target and build for continuous adaptation, not one-time fixes.

In other words, we already have countermeasures to the apocalyptic narrative, so we could adopt them as principles to guide our responses.

Successful adaptation is rarely all-or-nothing. Societies that endure environmental stress tend to maintain core governance structures, cultural narratives, and mechanisms of community cohesion, while changing how they operate. That blend is the point. Resilience thinking treats continuity and change as a paired move because neither rigid stability nor wholesale transformation, on its own, reliably produces sustainability.

I think this is often forgotten in the fear of change. The assumption is that everything we know and love will be lost, and what replaces it will be uncomfortable or even horrible. Hence, the need for a saviour, religious or secular. Only this is not how it works.

In Tokugawa Japan, the state kept social order and political continuity intact while still reshaping land use, forest management, and economic practice to live within ecological constraints. In traditional Pacific Island societies, cultural cohesion and oral knowledge systems persisted even as people adjusted settlement patterns or fishing techniques in response to shifting marine or climatic conditions. Across cases like these, the idea is how people operate under constraint. Humans are often good at working in loops that embrace feedback, learning, redundancy, and modularity, which maps cleanly onto concepts now foundational in modern resilience frameworks.

Importantly, acknowledging both continuity and transformation avoids two common pitfalls in environmental narratives. The first assumption is that preserving the status quo is always desirable or feasible. The keep everything the same fallacy. The second is the idea that transformation must be total, rapid, or disruptive. When change begins, it will be catastrophic. Instead, adaptation often involves layered, iterative adjustments, where some aspects of a system are stabilised while others evolve. A nuanced understanding like this, drawn from historical successes, is especially relevant today as societies navigate complex transitions without eroding their social foundations or cultural identities.

One further example is necessary here.

The adaptive cycle framework, developed by ecologist and systems theorist C.S. “Buzz” Holling, offers a dynamic model for understanding resilience in ecological and social systems. Rather than assuming stability is the norm, Holling proposed that resilient systems move through four recurring phases: rapid growth (r), conservation (K), release or collapse (Ω), and reorganisation (α). This cycle reflects how systems accumulate resources, become more rigid or vulnerable, experience disruption, and then reorganise into new configurations. Adaptation, in this context, is not about preventing change but about navigating these transitions without losing the system’s core identity or functionality.

The Venetian merchant network is a clean example of adaptation with a backbone. It stayed durable across centuries of political and economic churn by keeping a stable institutional core in place, guilds, maritime law, and banking infrastructure, while still adjusting to new trade routes, shifting alliances, and changing technologies. Japan’s traditional forest management shows a similar pattern in a different domain. Systems evolved through cycles of depletion and renewal, and after periods of overuse, policies like temple-controlled reforestation and community-based resource limits helped sustain the resource over the long run. In both cases, the point is not perfect foresight, but a systemic capacity to reorganise when ecological strain made the old pattern untenable.

An adaptive cycle raises an uncomfortable question of where modern societies are on that arc.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, countries in the Global North have seen rapid growth across the board, and the appetite for more hasn’t gone away. But many of these societies now carry the classic fingerprints of a late-stage system with accumulated wealth, institutional rigidity, and a growing vulnerability to disruption. That looks a lot like the conservation phase, with clear signs of systemic stress.

If adaptation isn’t pursued proactively, the next steps tend not to be gentle. The path narrows toward collapse or drastic reorganisation.

However, it can’t be everything all the time. There is the problem of scale…

Environmental challenges like droughts, floods, and biodiversity loss show up locally, but they’re rarely purely local in origin. They’re shaped and amplified by larger forces that include global climate change, economic policies, and geopolitical dynamics. So adaptation has to match the shape of the problem. It has to run across scales from the local, context-specific responses on the ground to institutional and policy-level shifts that enable, fund, and reinforce those efforts.

Bottom-up and top-down at the same time.

Historical and contemporary case studies support this principle. For instance, smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have adapted to climate variability through crop diversification and water conservation techniques, but these innovations are most durable when supported by access to markets, land rights, and government extension services. Likewise, urban climate resilience projects that emerge from community engagement often depend on integration with municipal planning and national policy for long-term viability.

Resilience literature also points to scale-crossing brokers and polycentric governance as core mechanisms for adaptation. In plain terms, these are the actors, institutions, or networks that move information and resources—and keep policies aligned—across different levels of decision-making. Without that connective tissue, local efforts can get boxed in by higher-level constraints, and top-down strategies can fail because they don’t fit on-the-ground realities.

Here is the thing. Local action within a broader structure is how humans transitioned from living in small bands on the savanna to create large, organised social systems. And it’s what we do now.

The Transition Towns movement, started by Rob Hopkins in the mid-2000s, is a clear example of local, grassroots adaptation. The idea is simple. Build resilience close to home through local food systems, renewable energy projects, and community-based economic support.

Totnes in Devon, England was the first Transition Town, and it became a reference point for how small places can test more sustainable ways of living under climate change, peak oil, and economic instability. The toolkit is a practical mix of community currencies, food co-ops, energy descent plans, and citizen-led infrastructure projects. The aim is to shrink ecological footprints and strengthen local self-reliance.

These efforts scale better when city or national policy makes room for them through funding, legal flexibility, or infrastructure support. By contrast, top-down sustainability mandates often stumble when they lack community buy-in or fail to fit local conditions.

Adaptive framing is more effective than the apocalyptic narrative we began with, but it requires coordination to be a practical tool. And it can’t just be local or structural, it has to be both. Hence, ideas like transition towns, regenerative agriculture networks, and urban resilience programs become functional nodes in a larger system as well as feel good stories.

When environmental issues are framed as existential threats with only a narrow set of solutions, the response often collapses into paralysis, denial, or reactionary politics. When the same challenges are framed as opportunities for adaptation, the response set widens. You get more proactive behaviour, more hope, and more participation. It also trains the right stance. It makes room for complexity, uncertainty, and learning. This is everything a mindful sceptic should be.

Cities facing sea-level rise are experimenting with living shorelines and climate-resilient infrastructure, not just to defend against change but to reimagine urban design. Some agricultural systems are adopting regenerative principles that restore soils while enhancing productivity and local food security. Indigenous and place-based knowledge systems, which have always been adaptive, are now being recognised as central to climate resilience strategies.

Adaptation framing also broadens who gets to participate. It invites contributions from education, health, technology, arts, and governance, and it treats meaningful action as distributed and diverse rather than owned by one sector. It also makes room for incremental and systemic work, not a brittle pass fail story of success or failure. That flexibility matters if you want momentum that survives different contexts and longer timeframes.

But the reframing only helps when the opportunities are real. They have to be genuine, achievable, and aligned with what people already care about and can actually do.

Here is the heretical thought.

Our most passionate environmental advocates may be inadvertently sabotaging the very cause they champion. Every time we share another apocalyptic climate headline, and every time we describe environmental challenges as a civilisational collapse, we may be systematically training human brains to disengage.

Cognitive science is unforgiving on this point. When we frame environmental challenges as overwhelming disasters, we activate psychological defence mechanisms that make people less likely to act, even while increasing their anxiety. We’re creating a generation of environmentally anxious but behaviourally disengaged humans.

This demands uncomfortable self-reflection from anyone who cares about environmental issues. Are your climate conversations helping or hindering your efforts? When you share that latest alarming study or catastrophic projection, are you building adaptive capacity or feeding the paralysis machine?

Ask yourself this.

Does this apocalyptic narrative enhance or diminish my sense of agency? Then experiment with reframing one environmental concern as adaptation opportunities rather than a looming threat. The goal isn’t to minimise real challenges, but to activate your exploration mindset rather than your defensive one.

The evidence suggests our environmental future depends less on perfect data and more on our collective capacity to engage constructively with uncertainty. That capacity is shaped, minute by minute, by the stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible.

Neither technology nor collapse is coming to save us from the hard work of adaptation. Despite decades of hoping for either revolutionary breakthroughs or clarifying catastrophes, the evidence suggests a gradual, iterative, and unglamorous change across multiple generations. We have to adapt, and it will take time, trial and error and action.

This is a demanding task, and our culture finds it deeply uncomfortable. We will need to adopt long-term, incremental change rather than find a transformative silver bullet today.

So we don’t need conquering warriors who defeat nature, the traditional hero who uses force to restore the status quo.

The heroes and heroines we need have the humility to accept that the world has changed and then redesign accordingly. Partnership over dominance. Human systems that flow with a volatile environment rather than fighting it.

This kind of heroism is defined by intergenerational integrity and the ability to build social architecture. Much like the biblical Daniel, these figures operate with temporal depth, ignoring short-term political or economic pressure in favour of long-term survival. They’re the bridge-builders who create cooperatives and community trust, so society doesn’t collapse into conflict when resources become scarce.

Ultimately, this is a hero of Tragic Optimism like Malala Yousafzai or Nelson Mandela. The modern heroes for the environment would neither deny environmental loss nor succumb to the paralysis of despair. They would offer the steady, ethical leadership needed to transition into a new reality, and their legacy would be a functioning, resilient ecosystem passed down to the next seven generations.

Could you be one?

This essay argues that enough is a psychological threshold and a societal design choice. Modern consumer culture depends on manufactured dissatisfaction, amplified by social comparison and industrialised by advertising and platforms. Once basic needs are met, the returns shift to relationships, autonomy, competence, and meaning that drive wellbeing far more reliably than upgrades and status goods. The punchline is that if we want a post-growth world that doesn’t feel like punishment, we’ll have to build systems and habits that make contentment normal instead of suspicious.

All Boomers like myself were born after World War II; yet many of us are fascinated by those horrific events. Between 70 and 85 million people died from starvation, disease, genocides, strategic bombings and combat-related fatalities. This was about 3% of the world’s population at the time. Few would have escaped the trauma.

After the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, most civilian manufacturing in the US was suspended and factories that had made cars, appliances, or textiles shifted to tanks, bombers, and uniforms. By 1945, U.S. war industries were outproducing the combined efforts of all the Axis powers.

During the war, over one-third of U.S. GDP was devoted to military output, and over 17 million civilians were employed in defence industries.

And it wasn’t just that there were factories with millions of workers. What went on inside them had changed drastically. They were way more efficient, productive and profitable. When the war ended, that capacity didn’t evaporate. It needed a new job.

Techniques of mass production, assembly-line efficiency, and standardised parts perfected during the war were applied to consumer goods, making them more affordable and accessible to the growing middle class. Wartime scientific advances in materials, particularly plastics and synthetic fabrics, electronics, and communication technologies, were repurposed for civilian use. This technological inheritance from war production helped accelerate the adoption of convenience-oriented domestic life.

People who had gone without new cars or appliances during the war years were eager to spend, and businesses capitalised on this appetite with aggressive marketing. Credit systems also expanded, making consumer purchases more attainable. This ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, when consumer spending became the dominant driver of economic growth and a proxy for national prosperity. The mad men had a ball.

In the blink of an eye, or was it a wink, the war machine became a consumer machine that had to be fed. Its voracious appetite was sustained in postwar America through a deliberate combination of advertising, suburban development, and cultural messaging that equated personal consumption with freedom, modernity, and patriotic duty. People were showered with goods and opportunity.

The expansion of all forms of consumer credit, from charge accounts and instalment plans to credit cards, allowed people to purchase goods they could not immediately afford, effectively pulling future consumption into the present. Home loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration enabled millions of families to buy homes in the suburbs, creating demand for furnishings, cars, and appliances. This cycle of credit and consumption, which fuelled economic growth, was reinforced by policies favouring low interest rates, tax deductions for mortgage interest, and infrastructure spending, including the Interstate Highway System, that supported a car-based consumer lifestyle.

Culturally and ideologically, consumerism was framed as a cornerstone of American life and values, especially during the Cold War. The ability to buy and own goods was presented as a personal achievement and a symbol of American democracy and superiority over communism, a message echoed in political rhetoric, school curricula, popular media, and even international propaganda. The American Dream was redefined. Now it meant homeownership, upward mobility, and material abundance. And the economic system was calibrated to stimulate continuous consumption through planned obsolescence, seasonal fashion cycles, and the constant rollout of new technologies, ensuring that even satisfied customers would return.

Over time, this created a self-reinforcing economy of desire, where consumption became both a social norm and an economic imperative. Everyone forgot about enough and instead thought only about more.

Consumer cultures generate perpetual dissatisfaction to drive continued consumption.

Consumer cultures, particularly in capitalist economies, are built around a dynamic of desire rather than need.

We are told that what we want is a grasp away. Little Johnny and Jenny can grow up to fulfil their desires, so long as those desires are to be better than Joe and Jill. But you have to work for it, or you’ll fall behind. Marketing strategies, product design, and branding create or intensify a sense of lack or inadequacy through aspirational imagery, status signalling, or the promise of self-improvement. This cultivated dissatisfaction keeps consumers in a perpetual search for fulfilment that only the acquisition of goods and services can resolve.

Products are often marketed as extensions of identity, status, or lifestyle, where satisfaction is inherently elusive and endlessly redefined.

Planned obsolescence, both technological and symbolic, reinforces this cycle. In fashion, electronics, automobiles, and almost all consumer goods, products are often deliberately designed with limited lifespans due to material degradation or cultural devaluation as trends shift. This ensures repeat purchases and sustains the economic momentum of industries reliant on continuous consumption.

The message is subtle but persistent… what you have now is not enough, and what will satisfy you is just one purchase away.

Following World War II, America became a caricature of this trend. A place where consumer culture was deliberately shaped to drive economic growth through sustained demand, using dissatisfaction as a central lever. The challenge was no longer how to produce enough because the capacity and capability now existed. The challenge was how to ensure people continued to buy. This led to the strategic deployment of advertising, psychology, and design to cultivate a culture of perpetual upgrade.

Retail analyst Victor Lebow famously articulated this philosophy in 1955, writing that…

our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life…that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals…that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.

In essence, satisfaction became both fleeting and commodified, ensuring that new desires would continuously replace fulfilled ones. People often overlook their needs and become fixated on their wants.

TikTok is an insidious symptom. Spend five minutes watching the feed or ten minutes watching a Black Friday queue in a store, and you can see the machine doing what it was designed to do.

Dissatisfaction is maintained with the simple lever of comparison.

You don’t need to get from A to B. You need to do it alone in a luxury car. As a consumer, my thought is that I don’t just want a car. I want one that sits higher than my neighbours’ and looks expensive from forty metres away.

Social comparison drives consumption more powerfully than absolute needs.

People don’t just buy products for their utility. They do it to signify status, identity, and belonging within a social hierarchy.

This is the essence of social comparison theory, first formalised by Leon Festinger in 1954, which suggests that individuals determine their own social and personal worth by comparing themselves to others. In economic terms, this manifests in positional goods, items whose value partly derives from how they elevate someone’s perceived status relative to peers. Think about luxury cars, branded clothing, the latest smartphone, or, in my case, golf equipment.

And social comparison is powerful.

Bizarrely, individuals would prefer to earn $50,000 if others earn $40,000 rather than $60,000, if others earn $70,000. This logic-defying phenomenon drives consumption patterns beyond necessity, fuelling industries such as fast fashion, tech gadgets, and cosmetic surgery.

Social media has dramatically amplified this effect. Scrolling means we are constantly exposed to curated images of others’ lifestyles, ever-shifting benchmarks for adequacy and aspiration. Influencer is a precise label.

And we can’t seem to help it.

We know from evidence and a gut feeling that the absolute needs of food, shelter, and basic clothing motivate consumption only up to a sufficiency threshold. And once those are met, additional consumption rarely yields proportional increases in well-being; satisfaction from material gains diminishes over time. We know this, but we consume more anyway.

But it is not just diminishing returns. Social comparison is also a driving force behind chronic dissatisfaction, fuelling continual consumption even when we are already overwhelmed with possessions. Thus, consumer culture thrives not on need, but on the perception that others have more, better, or newer.

Maslow’s hierarchy reminds us that physiological needs form the basis of our priorities, and purchasing patterns do provide some support for this. Food staples like grains and vegetables exhibit price inelasticity, meaning people continue to buy them regardless of cost fluctuations. They’re non-negotiable necessities.

The social layer arrives early. Even in poorer settings, people allocate some spending to signalling because belonging isn’t a luxury need. For example, research in Peru suggests that even in impoverished communities, while 78% of spending directly satisfies basic needs, 22% still serves social signalling. This pattern suggests our social needs begin asserting themselves well before physical necessities are fully secured.

In the wealthy world, the share of household budgets devoted to basic needs is historically low. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), in 2024, U.S. consumers spent an average of 10.4% of their disposable personal income on food. Whereas in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Myanmar, food often accounts for 50% to 60% of total household spending. This phenomenon is known as Engel’s Law, which states that as income rises, the proportion of income spent on food falls, even as total spending increases. This gap is quickly filled by comparison-driven consumption, with 68% of middle-income consumers reporting that they overspend simply to keep up, and roughly 35–45% of Millennials and Gen Z admitting they spend more than they can afford to keep up with what they see on social media.

We can argue over exact percentages, but the direction of travel isn’t in doubt. Status drives discretionary spending, and the social platforms industrialise envy to take advantage.

There is also a lock-in effect that blurs the boundaries between absolute requirements and socially constructed ones. For example, our infrastructure choices create pseudo-necessities, such as car dependency in suburbs… How will I get to work without the car?

Across luxury, tech, and travel, purchasing is often a social act before it is a functional one. The strongest signal is not what the product does, but what it implies about the owner inside their circle. Economists have a name for this, the relative income hypothesis. We don’t calibrate consumption against some clean, absolute income line. We calibrate it against the people we compare ourselves to.

Social media widens that comparison set and keeps the gap visible. In luxury, that has made pre-owned goods a primary on-ramp for buyers who want status without paying the full ticket price. Tech runs the same script. The pull of social parity can outweigh hardware utility, so perfectly functional devices get replaced simply to stay in the pack.

So luxury consumption is now less about function and more about deliberate signalling. Now you know why it makes economic sense for companies to sponsor social media influencers with modest followings. They are the ultimate peddlers of status signalling. Think about that next time the TikTok feed sends you a fit youngster with a new chia seed recipe.

We can debate the precision of any statistics associated with these phenomena, but there is little to doubt that status drives buyers, even the well-educated and aware.

I could provide endless examples, from organic food adoption rates to house sizes to SUV purchases, but a brief explanation of why there is never enough is instructive.

Social comparison triggers dopamine responses 23% stronger than absolute need satisfaction, creating addictive consumption patterns that reshape entire economies. In subsistence economies with a per-person income of less than $2,500, 85% of consumption choices are driven by absolute needs. This shifts dramatically to 55% social comparison in developing economies, and 72% in advanced economies with earnings above $15,000.

Three-quarters of our choices!

Once we have enough, we don’t stop; we keep going until we have more than Joe and Jenny.

What does this tell us about consumption?

Social comparison dominates discretionary spending in developed societies, but crucially, this rests upon the prior satisfaction of absolute needs. Basic needs are met, but this is not enough. We fulfil the desire for more with discretionary spending to make us appear better than others.

Modern marketing exploits this want with glee. It offers $8 designer water, transforming necessities into status symbols, and creates artificial scarcity through limited editions and VIP access.

So, do we know how to counteract this psychology of never being enough? What is there to do when people tend to be driven increasingly by wants and social comparison as the economy advances?

A simple solution is to reiterate Maslow’s hierarchy and remind us all that our basic needs are met, and that well-being doesn’t have to be about stuff that signals status.

Psychological research identifies pathways to well-being unrelated to material consumption, and historical and cross-cultural examples demonstrate high well-being with modest material footprints.

Research repeatedly identifies key determinants of happiness and life satisfaction that have nothing to do with stuff. Strong social relationships, a sense of meaning or purpose, engagement in fulfilling activities, and a sense of autonomy and competence individually and in combination do more to satisfy us than a bigger house or an $8 bottle of water.

In many traditional and Indigenous societies, people have maintained strong communal bonds, meaningful rituals, and ecological harmony without the trappings of consumer culture. For example, studies of the Hadza in Tanzania or Quechua communities in the Andes reveal high life satisfaction despite limited material wealth, primarily due to strong kinship networks, shared cultural meanings, and minimal status competition. Similarly, post-war Scandinavian countries, even during times of modest affluence, invested heavily in social infrastructure and egalitarianism, producing high levels of well-being rooted more in social security and trust than consumption.

Moreover, contemporary research on voluntary simplicity and minimalist lifestyles suggests that many individuals in high-income societies report increased life satisfaction when they intentionally reduce consumption and focus on meaningful activities, environmental values, or relational depth. The evidence indicates that human flourishing can be decoupled from material accumulation and is often enhanced when attention is redirected toward intrinsic values and communal life.

The pursuit of meaning may be a powerful path to well-being. Meaning-oriented lives consistently show better health outcomes and greater resilience during hardship. The conventional explanation suggests this is simply a psychological buffer against stress, but a mindful sceptic might recognise something deeper, perhaps our evolutionary heritage as social, tribal beings who thrived through contribution to collective survival. The growing research on post-materialist values indicates that once basic needs are met, further consumption contributes minimally to well-being compared with purpose-driven activities. This suggests our economic systems may be fundamentally misaligned with our psychological needs, prioritising metrics that don’t maximise human flourishing.

Conventional wisdom acknowledges that relationships matter, but our economic systems and technological innovations increasingly monetise, mediate, and sometimes erode our social bonds. The Harvard Study of Adult Development provides compelling evidence that close relationships predict health and happiness more effectively than any other factor, including wealth, status, or achievement. Yet, our most meaningful connections require little material throughput, suggesting an alternative economy built around relationship cultivation might yield far greater well-being returns than consumption growth.

But as with all psychology, nothing is simple. Numerous layers can complicate any cause-and-effect relationship.

Technological advancement liberates us from effort, but that is not enough. Self-Determination Theory suggests that appropriate challenge leads to optimal experiences; if it’s too easy, we are not satisfied. This contradiction helps explain why convenience-enhancing technologies often fail to increase reported life satisfaction. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains evolved to solve problems and overcome obstacles in our environment, processes that trigger neurochemical rewards. Many modern conveniences short-circuit these reward pathways, replacing the satisfaction of earned mastery with hollow consumption experiences. What’s particularly revealing is how many people voluntarily seek out challenges during leisure time, from climbing mountains, learning instruments, or creating art, to engaging in extreme sports, suggesting that our innate drive toward competence remains powerful despite cultural messaging that equates happiness with ease. Maybe we watch sport not for the ritualised combat, but for the desire to see what it takes to be an elite athlete.

The paradox is that we end up with an economy built to remove effort, even though effort may be a core ingredient of human satisfaction.

Books on gratitude and mindfulness are readily available in modern bookstores. Soft colours and simple fonts on their covers stand in stark opposition to the dissatisfaction engine that drives consumer capitalism. Research consistently demonstrates that gratitude interventions increase life satisfaction without altering material circumstances, suggesting that much of our perceived need for more stems from attention patterns rather than an actual lack. And as we have seen, advertising and social media systematically redirect attention toward deficiencies and social comparison, creating an artificial sense of scarcity amid abundance.

What’s striking is how many wisdom traditions arrived at the same attention practices on their own, and then, how often they tied them to material simplicity. Ancient intuition knew the mechanisms for training the mind and loosening the hedonic treadmill.

And the pattern is consistent. These practices tend to raise subjective well-being. That offers a credible alternative to growth-dependent ideas of progress. It offers a version of prosperity that lifts life satisfaction while potentially easing environmental impact.

What becomes evident with even a little digging into the brain is that well-being is not just psychological, but also relational, purposeful, and experiential. That consumption often distracts from rather than supports these foundations means happiness may need to be a social contract, rather than a mindfulness practice.

Let’s suppose that this is the answer and premise that…

Communities practising voluntary simplicity offer practical models for contentment.

Voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle choice that minimises material needs to focus on more meaningful, sustainable, and fulfilling ways of living.

Across cultures and contexts, several communities have adopted this principle not out of necessity, but by design, often as a critique of consumerism or as a spiritual commitment. These groups offer living experiments that demonstrate how well-being can flourish without material excess, instead being supported by community, purpose, and ecological mindfulness.

The Amish of Pennsylvania and other parts of the United States are perhaps the best-known examples. Their lifestyle is centred on religious values, simplicity, family cohesion, and resistance to modern technology. They avoid most forms of consumer culture and live without electricity from public grids, automobiles, or social media. Despite these limitations, studies consistently find high levels of life satisfaction among Amish communities, attributed to strong interpersonal bonds, a clear moral framework, and a slower, less stressful pace of life. Their model illustrates how contentment can arise from consistency, community obligation, and autonomy from consumer pressure.

In southern India, Auroville presents a different but equally intentional form of simplicity. Founded in 1968 as a utopian township, Auroville was designed to promote human unity, ecological sustainability, and spiritual growth over material accumulation. Residents often live in basic dwellings, engage in cooperative labour, and focus on education, organic farming, and meditation. The community experiments with alternative economic models, including a gift economy and communal decision-making. While not without challenges, Auroville demonstrates how shared ideals and modest living can foster resilience, creativity, and satisfaction.

The Bruderhof, an international Anabaptist community with roots in early 20th-century Germany, live in intentional settlements across the U.S., U.K., and other countries. They practice common property ownership, pacifism, and a strong emphasis on equality. There is no private wealth, and all members contribute to and share in the life of the community. Despite, or perhaps because of, their renunciation of consumerism, Bruderhof members often report high well-being, supported by a deep sense of belonging, spiritual purpose, and meaningful daily activity.

These communities, diverse in geography and belief, show that contentment and flourishing can emerge from deliberate limits, not as deprivation, but as liberation from the churn of comparison, accumulation, and ecological overshoot.

They certainly have smaller material and energy footprints.

The Amish rely on horse-drawn buggies or communal vans rather than personal cars, significantly reducing their fossil fuel use. Most Amish homes are off-grid, often relying on minimal solar power, natural gas, or non-electric tools. Much of their diet comes from local, organic, small-scale agriculture, which minimises packaging, refrigeration, transportation, and synthetic fertiliser emissions. Amish homes are often built using local materials and maintained over generations, rather than being demolished or renovated frequently, which reduces construction-related emissions. The Amish way of life represents a viable low-impact model within an industrial society, offering insights into how cultural norms, technology choices, and community structure can reduce environmental burdens without sacrificing well-being.

We can be happy with less, happier even, but since the explosion of widespread consumerism after World War II, we have some inertia to overcome.

Would it be possible to go from hedonistic social climbing to a system of enough?

The transition to “enough” requires both personal practice and systemic change.

Enough is both material sufficiency and psychological contentment. Materially, it means the resources needed for physical well-being, including adequate nutrition, shelter, healthcare, and education. Psychologically, it means satisfaction that is not powered by endless consumption or comparison with others. It also means we need a purpose.

Research suggests that beyond a certain threshold, more wealth does not reliably translate into proportionate gains in happiness or life satisfaction. So a meaningful life becomes a quantitative and qualitative judgment about what actually contributes to it. Enough is reached when essential needs are met and contentment comes through relationships and purposeful activities rather than excess goods. We know what enough could look like.

Structurally, that requires a hard reset on what counts as economic success. Liberal democracies tend to treat GDP growth and consumer spending as prosperity, which rewards production and consumption even when the social and environmental costs are high. Moving toward enough means shifting metrics to well-being indicators such as the OECD’s Better Life Index or Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, ecological sustainability such as the planetary boundaries, and social equity. It also means regulating advertising, incentivising repair and reuse economies, and redesigning tax systems to penalise waste and pollution while supporting low-carbon public infrastructure in housing, transport, and energy.

Most of all, it requires giving up growth as the defining paradigm.

Culturally and locally, the work is to rewrite desire. Consumer capitalism runs on dissatisfaction and competitive acquisition, amplified by marketing and social comparison. A transition to enough elevates sufficiency, care, community, and reciprocity, supported by education that builds ecological literacy, civic responsibility, and emotional resilience. Journalism, film, literature, and the arts can make post-consumerist life feel aspirational rather than austere. At the individual and community level, enough looks like voluntary simplicity, conscious consumption, and relational living, helped by systems that make low-carbon choices easier, including walkable neighbourhoods and workplaces that allow shorter hours and job sharing. Religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions can also help re-root values of humility, stewardship, and sufficiency.

Ultimately, enough is a cultural transformation of desire and a collective reimagining of how to live well together on a finite planet.

At risk of boredom and a little incredulity, let’s break this down some more in Scandinavia.

Nordic countries routinely rank highest in life satisfaction, largely because of strong community bonds and institutional trust rather than luxury consumption, even if many will point out they have that too. The evidence also suggests that purposeful engagement, especially intergenerational activity, improves mental well-being by building meaningful connection and reducing isolation.

Autonomy also correlates strongly with happiness, particularly in societies with robust democratic institutions that protect individual agency while maintaining social cohesion. What stands out is that these psychosocial needs can deliver outsized well-being gains with relatively low resource throughput. That points to a possible decoupling of human flourishing from high-consumption lifestyles.

Enough does not flourish accidentally. It depends on governmental and social institutions. Liberal democracies can build frameworks for sufficiency through universal welfare systems that meet basic needs, civil liberties that protect expression and assembly, and progressive taxation that funds public goods like education and healthcare. These conditions let people pursue fulfilment without constant material insecurity.

Denmark and Norway show what enough can look like in practice. They sustain sufficiency through high social expenditure at 25 to 30 percent of GDP, support for work-life balance, a cultural prioritisation of leisure and family time over accumulation, and labour protections that secure living wages without excessive hours. They maintain economic viability and exceptional quality of life by investing in human capabilities rather than maximising consumption.

The Nordic paradigm suggests a third way, beyond the false binary of growth versus austerity that shapes many debates in other liberal democracies. Their welfare model is a social contract that provides universal healthcare, comprehensive education through university, and robust safety nets including unemployment benefits, parental leave, and pensions that reduce economic insecurity. Their consistent top ranking in the UN World Happiness Report suggests something simple and significant. Security in these basic domains is what makes contentment possible.

Perhaps the most revealing of all is the consistent evidence for threshold effects in the relationship between wealth and well-being. Beyond an annual household income of approximately $75,000 (U.S. equivalent), additional wealth shows diminishing returns for life satisfaction. At this point, psychological needs dominate well-being outcomes—quality relationships prove seven times more impactful on happiness than income. At the same time, a sense of community belonging and opportunities for lifelong learning and creativity become central to fulfilment.

There is no reason these psychological dimensions cannot thrive in much lower material-throughput economies, and enough can emerge when societies guarantee material security while cultivating environments where social bonds and personal growth outweigh status competition. Crucially, this balance is achievable in liberal democracies through institutionalised rights and welfare safeguards. We could engineer it.

The Netherlands and Denmark average just 29 to 32 working hours weekly while sustaining strong economies. Sweden’s provision of up to 480 days of paid parental leave per child reshapes what family life can look like. Across Scandinavia, progressive taxation captures excess wealth to fund public services while reducing inequality, which speaks to practical needs and psychological well-being. Universal basic services such as subsidised transport, childcare, and elder care lower the income required for a good life by making essentials accessible regardless of earning power.

Policy is only half of it. Certain cultural traditions actively train contentment without heavy consumption. Denmark’s hygge centres cosiness, togetherness, and simple pleasures, often through communal meals and protected downtime. Norway and Sweden’s friluftsliv pushes time outdoors for well-being in any weather, reinforcing a relationship with nature that research consistently links to improved mental health. Janteloven discourages boastfulness and excessive competition, nudging societies toward equality and cohesion. These norms are not quaint. They function like psychological technologies that blunt consumerism’s promises. High scores in subjective well-being and social cohesion surveys suggest they work.

A society’s mental health posture also shapes what enough feels like. Universal access to mental health services reduces stigma and suffering through earlier intervention. Preventive public health campaigns support lifestyles that improve physical health and, through it, quality of life. The shift is from treating distress after it appears to building conditions where psychological thriving is more likely from the start.

What stands out across these frameworks, and I apologise for the implication that we all need to be Swedish, is the synergy. Enough becomes not just achievable but normal. Contentment is not a solo project powered by willpower. It emerges from social systems designed around more profound human needs for security, connection, meaning, and autonomy.

Before we get too carried along in Scandi chique with all its clean lines, quality natural materials and neutral palettes, we must acknowledge that reaching the threshold is still an aspiration for 6 billion people. These folk don’t have access to a washing machine.

And for these households, the issue is not simply the absence of an appliance. It is the stack of constraints that makes the machine both a luxury purchase and, in many places, a practical non-starter.

Economically, a washing machine is often the first heavy capital purchase when a family moves from what the late, great Hans Rosling called Level 2 on the global income framework, living on $2 to $8 a day, to Level 3, living on $8 to $32 a day. At Levels 1 and 2, most income is absorbed by food and basics like shoes, a bicycle, or perhaps a mobile phone. A washing machine is a high-barrier asset because it can represent a huge share of annual income. Ownership usually only starts to surge once a household crosses roughly the $10,000 per year. In 2025, there were approximately 1.8 to 2.1 billion people, or about 22–25% of the global population, who were at this income level.

Then there is the infrastructure problem. Washing machine ownership is unusual because it depends on three separate pillars being present at the same time. Many of the 5 to 6 billion people lack at least two. A machine needs pressurised piped water, and for billions water is still carried in buckets from a well or a shared tap. It needs a heavy energy grid, since heating water and spinning a drum draws far more power than a phone, an LED bulb, or even a television, and many rural grids that can run a TV would blow a fuse with a washing machine. It also needs reliable paving and a stable environment because the weight and vibration demand level, solid flooring like concrete or tile, which informal or rural housing often does not provide.

The core human constraint is time poverty, and it falls disproportionately on women. Without a machine, the manual cycle of fetching water, scrubbing, rinsing, and wringing can take 20 to 50 hours per week. That shadow work carries a real opportunity cost. It keeps millions of women out of formal work, and it can keep girls out of school. The data you cite also points to a broader spillover, where introducing washing machines can be followed by higher female literacy and increased local economic activity within a generation.

There is also an apparent paradox in what arrives first.

Many people in this 5 to 6 billion group will own a mobile phone or a television before they own a washing machine. The entry cost is lower, particularly with second-hand phones or cheap TVs. And the infrastructure requirements are easier to hack around. Phones can be charged at a shop or with a small solar panel, and TVs draw relatively little power. Neither requires plumbing, which makes them infrastructure-light in a way a washing machine is not.

So here is the thing.

The concept of enough challenges our growth-dependent economic narrative by revealing how human well-being depends far more on relational and psychological factors than on ever-increasing consumption once basic needs are met. But only one in four of the people are in this category, the other three don’t have enough.

The wartime mobilisation of the 1940s demonstrates our capacity for rapid, systemic change when necessity demands it. Within months, industries pivoted, citizens accepted rationing, and collective purpose superseded individual desires. What seemed impossible became inevitable when shared survival was at stake.

Today’s long emergency demands no less of a transformation.

The post-war pivot that launched consumer culture was a deliberate choice made by governments, corporations, and citizens. Similarly, the transition to enough isn’t merely aspirational; it’s becoming existential. We must mobilise our collective resources, creativity, and courage toward an economy of sufficiency rather than excess, or we collapse under a polycrisis.

The difference, however, is profound.

Unlike wartime production, which required material sacrifice for destruction, this mobilisation invites us toward greater fulfilment through less consumption. The psychological pathways we’ve explored here on meaning, connection, autonomy, flow, and gratitude, don’t represent deprivation but liberation from the perpetual dissatisfaction machine that drives ecological harm. Communities practising voluntary simplicity thrive with deeper connections and clearer purpose.

What would our society look like if we directed even half the ingenuity, coordination, and determination we once applied to wartime production toward creating systems of genuine flourishing? The evidence suggests we might discover that enough can be abundant in all the ways that truly matter.

From the Amish to Auroville, communities practising voluntary simplicity aren’t just reducing their ecological footprints; they’re pioneering ways of living that deliver greater satisfaction through less consumption. They remind us that human flourishing doesn’t require endless economic growth. The Nordic social democracies, admittedly blessed with mature economies and copious financial capital, similarly demonstrate how institutional arrangements can support well-being while moderating material throughput.

So, what would a society-wide mobilisation toward enough look like?

It would engage our creativity and coordination not in creating more things but in crafting better relationships, meaningful work, beautiful public spaces, and resilient communities. It would redirect our remarkable capacity for innovation toward sufficiency rather than excess, cooperation rather than competition, and regeneration rather than extraction.

During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt observed that we are on this earth to make it better. The most significant contribution our generation could make isn’t producing or consuming more, but pioneering pathways to genuine contentment that future generations can walk without undermining the living systems upon which we all depend.

Waging peace with ourselves, each other, and a finite planet is our mobilisation.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Enough is an operating system. If you organise a society around perpetual dissatisfaction, you get what we have now; too many anxious consumers, burnt-out workers, and a planet treated like an infinite warehouse. But if you guarantee security, reduce the incentives for status competition, and build lives that reward meaning over signalling, enough stops sounding like deprivation and starts sounding like relief.

Ironically, for this essay series, this conclusion isn’t even contrary. I think it is what we all want.

Climate hypocrisy is mostly a category error. The people who feel the contradiction most acutely are often the ones with real leverage. The trick isn’t purity. It’s learning what your discomfort is pointing at. What if dissonance isn’t the enemy but instead is a signal?

Meet Sarah, a hardworking sustainability officer at a local council. She drives an SUV to work and spends her days arguing for public transport.

If you want the easy story, you can call her a hypocrite. She should bike to work or ditch the gas-guzzler for an EV. If you want the useful story, you notice that she is working inside the machine that decides what “choice” even means. And Sarah is good at her job. Her work has influenced transit policy, affecting hundreds of thousands of commuters and saving a heap of emissions.

Her personal choices appear imperfect. She feels guilty and knows she’s not exactly the good environmentalist who bikes everywhere and grows their food. But her job allows her to work hard and make a real difference.

If, like Sarah, you feel environmental contradictions sharply, you might be the one with agency. Your discomfort is sophisticated systems thinking.

Perhaps we should not be so hasty with accusations.

What if we reframed environmental engagement entirely? Instead of asking Are you doing enough? We might ask, Are you learning from your contradictions? Instead of measuring carbon footprints, we could track leverage footprints. A carbon footprint measures personal output. A leverage footprint measures how many other footprints your decisions can bend.

Perfection is the trap. The moment you make being a good environmentalist the goal, you create an incentive to anesthetise the discomfort through denial, by distraction, or by moral theatre.

We all feel psychological discomfort when we are inconsistent. And we all want to make that discomfort go away. Often, we will do whatever it takes.

It’s time to take a hard look at our dissonance.

I live in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. It is a World Heritage Site of outstanding beauty, and I am eternally grateful to live here. But I know I am messing with it. My house cuts into the bush, as do the roads to my suburb. Weeds escape from my garden where my lawn requires endless inputs of fuel, fertiliser and water. My SUV burns through an infinite supply of diesel, and we need the log fire in the winter.

Modern Western living is as far away from sustainable as it gets. And it is hard to ignore.

And yet I do it, you do too, even Mother Teresa did it. All humans live with some amount of disconnect between what we believe and what we do. We can not live up to our values all the time, and we know we can’t. That coping reflex is cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger gave it a name in the 1950s. We’ve been practising it since we first learned to justify ourselves. We want to stay true, but when inevitable inconsistencies arise, such as advocating for health while smoking, maintaining a lawn in the bush, and driving to your public transport advocacy job, this creates psychological tension. Sometimes it’s a twinge, sometimes it’s a migraine.

Everyone does this. The only variable is how honest they are about it. Some people sit with it. Others sprint for an excuse or a story with a more comfortable ending.

I am pretty tolerant, but if I am honest, a reframe is usually involved.

In a culture obsessed with moral consistency, dissonance becomes a daily itch. This is the Western democratic model, where self-determination is prized as much as doing the right thing. In more collectivist or pluralistic cultures, conflicting roles and beliefs may be more normatively accepted, reducing internal conflict. Well, it’s not my fault anyway; we are all forced to do it.

But here is the thing.

Dissonance is not pathology. It is a signal that your self-story has collided with your day-to-day life. You can use it to change or to anaesthetise. However, when left unresolved or habitually suppressed, dissonance can lead to defensiveness, rationalisation, and even more profound disengagement. This is especially true if the culture rewards such behaviour. It is possible, even easy, to resolve dissonance with denial.

I believe in environmental responsibility. I don’t want to see natural habitats destroyed, old trees felled, or even doughy-eyed mammals suffer. I’m especially concerned about the impact of intensive agriculture on soil. However, as we saw, I live like a king, drive a large SUV that often pulls a caravan, and eat steak. I survive the tension with the justification of it is what it is, a type of compartmentalisation or by telling myself it’s for my wife, as though somehow compromising a value or two is showing my love for her.

What I don’t do, at least in my head, is resolve the conflict by justifying it. When I’m filling the recycling bin, I don’t say, “I recycle, so I’ve done my bit”, and I accept evidence for my environmental impact. I make a point of not shifting responsibility to others or external systems. Well, maybe a bit of the latter.

I acknowledge personal agency, particularly in situations where admitting complicity would cause moral distress or require a significant lifestyle change. I bring on the dissonance, then spend an unhealthy amount of my retirement writing about how to be better citizens for the environment.

I think I manage my dissonance effectively. I am aware of my hypocrisy, accept it and placate myself with gratitude for my good fortune.

But not everyone rationalises this way. Cognitive dissonance can lead to denial, resulting in severe emotional discomfort that we must soothe.

One way is through dissociation, a much cleaner trick. You accept the facts and detach from their claims on you. From the outside, it can look like compliance. Inside it is withdrawal. I acknowledge the facts but feel no urgency, ownership, or emotional engagement with them. This psychological distancing is very useful when it protects my psyche from guilt or anxiety.

However, it also removes the impetus for personal accountability and change, with severe behavioural consequences.

I know I should act responsibly, but I resent the effort, the cost, and the implications, and I’m damn well going to let you know how I feel. I am going to procrastinate, be sarcastic, throw around backhanded compliments, and you are not getting any help from me. These passive-aggressive behaviours allow me to symbolically push back without directly acknowledging or addressing the underlying issue.

Dissociation compounds this cognitive dissonance by creating emotional distance between me and my sense of responsibility. I am going to switch off from my actions or consequences. Now I don’t need to defend against your accusations of hypocrisy; I’ll just offer half-hearted compliance, avoid meaningful conversations, and be deliberately inefficient. And the best bit is I feel good about it, no moral discomfort for me.

Socially, dissociation can create confusing dynamics. I will agree with all your suggestions for my environmental or ethical commitments, but will fail to follow through, deflecting blame or minimising their role when questioned. My passive-aggressive responses will let me maintain a socially acceptable image while expressing unresolved ambivalence or resentment.

All this explains why a demand for accountability will fail miserably. Psychological defences are real and powerful, especially against any hint of judgement. Leave my caravan out of this.

Accountability does nothing to address the fear, shame, or confusion that caused the dissonance in the first place.

I could double down.

I don’t buy golf clubs because I need golf clubs. I buy them because they’re a quick way to feel like I’m still in control even as I experience internal discomfort. Rather than confronting or adjusting to this conflict, I can come up with some self-justification. “I’ve earned it, and everyone else does it, so why not? And, anyway, I donate to charity, so it balances out”. This allows my dissonant identity to persist without requiring behavioural change.

Dissociation makes this easier by weakening emotional connections to the consequences of consumption. When wealth insulates me from the waste, labour exploitation, and ecological degradation caused by consumerism, it becomes easier to disengage. It stops being about need and starts being about mood. Shopping, travel, and acquisition function as coping strategies, offering momentary gratification or control in place of moral reckoning. In some cases, excessive consumption masks a void where meaning, connection, or responsibility might otherwise reside.

Yes, we all have this to some degree.

However, this dynamic is real and especially potent in affluent societies or in individuals embedded in cultures that equate success with accumulation. Here, cognitive dissonance is not merely individual but socially normalised, fuelled by advertising, peer comparison, and economic structures that reward consumption.

Wealth enables these defences to be enacted at scale. It even demands them. With more resources, people can consume more, outsource inconvenient tasks, especially ethical decision-making, and remain removed from the consequences. Not only that, but the economy grows.

Breaking this cycle often requires more than awareness. I already know there is a problem because I feel uneasy. What has to happen is I must buy into alternative narratives of meaning, identity, and responsibility that don’t rely on consumption as their core.

I have laboured the point of dissonance and dissociation on purpose. Together, cognitive dissonance and dissociation form a powerful psychological barrier to personal responsibility. Dissonance allows individuals to rationalise contradictions without changing their behaviour, while dissociation severs the emotional ties that might otherwise drive ethical action.

When reinforced by Western cultural norms of consumerism, techno-optimism, or political deferral of responsibility, these mechanisms contribute to widespread societal patterns of inaction, denial, and moral outsourcing.

We have ourselves a serious problem, both individual and collective.

If dissonance and dissociation persist, there is little hope for addressing environmental risks or mitigating excess. Get this wrong, and you trigger defence, not change.

So, let’s make this exploration practical by taking a closer look at climate change. This globally significant risk we know is both contentious and a major cause of emotional conflict, and begins with this premise…

Belief isn’t the bottleneck.

Longitudinal studies from the Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University suggest 70% of Americans believe climate change is occurring, with similar proportions observed across most developed nations, yet behaviour barely budges. That gap is the story. The system sets high-emissions living as the default, then acts surprised when people keep selecting it.

Despite decades of climate awareness, global CO₂ emissions continue to rise, with per-capita emissions in wealthy nations remaining stubbornly high. Based on 2024 and 2025 data from the Global Carbon Project and the International Energy Agency (IEA), the average American still generates approximately 16 tons of CO₂ annually, or roughly four times the estimated global per-capita sustainable level of 2–4 tons per year required to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.

Almost everywhere, the gap persists between climate concern and carbon-intensive behaviour. And this gap gets bigger when we examine the behaviours of climate-concerned individuals.

People who express strong environmental concerns often maintain high-carbon lifestyles through air travel, large homes, and consumption patterns. Even environmental professionals whose careers centre on sustainability frequently engage in high-emission behaviours, particularly flying for conferences and maintaining energy-intensive lifestyles, as Sarah does with her SUV.

I wrote a post on my blog back in 2021 lamenting how the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had to jet down from Glasgow to London to attend a dinner at The Garrick Club in the West End for a reunion of Daily Telegraph journalists. The next day, he was back in Glasgow as host to the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. There is a picture of him sitting at the climate conference between Sir David Attenborough and António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the morning after his sojourn to London. Naturally, he was having a nap.

A few days before sleeping off his dissonance, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced a 50% cut to Air Passenger Duty for domestic flights within the UK. The government stated this was intended to support regional airports and improve “connectivity” between the four nations of the UK. But incentivising air travel over rail was inconsistent with the government’s “Net Zero” environmental goals.

This pattern of dissonance, extreme in the example of Boris, a public figure who should know better, mirrors what economists call the intention-action gap across many domains. We see similar disconnects between stated values and actual behaviour in health, finance, and social issues. In finance, for example, individuals plan to save or budget responsibly yet frequently overspend.

The climate version feels particularly acute because climate change is a classic example of what psychologists term a psychologically distant problem. Its impacts are often perceived as occurring in the future (temporal distance), happening elsewhere (spatial distance), affecting others more than oneself (social distance), and involving abstract or complex systems (uncertainty). Climate is the perfect psychological sabotage. It is distant, abstract, slow, and probabilistic. Our threat systems don’t grip it the way they grip lions, snakes, and a bloke in your driveway.

Humans are wired to prioritise immediate, visible threats over slow-moving or indirect dangers. The good news is that for most of the species’ existence, brains had to deal with threats from lions, snakes, bad weather and neighbours. This mismatch between our cognitive architecture and the nature of climate change helps explain the inertia in even the most climate-aware individuals. Dissonance is what we use to mop up the inevitable discomfort.

We should expect a failure to act in accordance with deeply held ethical or moral values. It is one of the most documented psychological phenomena in environmental research, and it leads to obvious psychological distress, hence the following premise…

The psychological literature on climate-related distress has expanded in recent years, and the evidence is compelling. Susan Clayton’s seminal work on “eco-anxiety” documents measurable psychological impacts from climate awareness, including depression, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness. The most extensive study ever conducted on climate anxiety in children and young people, led by Caroline Hickman and Susan Clayton, shows this distress is particularly acute among young people, with 75% of surveyed youth reporting feeling “frightened” about the future due to climate change.

In Living in Denial (2011), Kari Marie Norgaard documents how Norwegian communities strategically avoid climate conversations to bypass the guilt and dissonance associated with their high-carbon lifestyles. People literally restructure their social interactions to avoid confronting the gap between values and behaviour. No exploration of anything deep and meaningful in the sauna.

Although we know that climate awareness can cause significant psychological strain, individuals have potent methods of emotional self-protection that often impede meaningful engagement or action. Even as people acknowledge the facts, they succumb to feelings of fear, guilt, and helplessness in a world that asks them to live with profound contradictions. If you’re designing comms, ignore this, and you’ll get backlash.

Want the hard evidence? Put it in a scanner.

Research by Troy Campbell and Aaron Kay identified a psychological phenomenon known as solution aversion, which explains why climate information often meets intense resistance. When the scientific evidence for a problem (such as climate change) implies a solution that contradicts an individual’s core values or political identity (such as increased government regulation), the brain perceives the information itself as a threat. Neuroscientific evidence, such as that from Jonas Kaplan, suggests that when these deeply held beliefs are challenged, the brain’s “executive” centres are bypassed in favour of the amygdala and the insular cortex. These areas treat the ideological contradiction as a personal attack, effectively lighting up to defend the individual’s sense of self rather than objectively processing the data.

While the brain is wired for immediate survival, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert highlights that climate change often fails to trigger the fast threat-detection system because it lacks the PAIN criteria: it is rarely Personal, Abrupt, Immoral, or occurring Now. Because the threat feels distant or abstract, the brain does not always initiate a traditional fight-or-flight response. Instead, the brain utilises emotional numbing as a defence mechanism. It downregulates its emotional output to avoid chronic stress, leading to a state of apathy or cognitive dissonance where the individual acknowledges the fact but remains emotionally detached from the urgency.

The brain responds to the evidence for climate impacts through complex, socially reinforced forms of emotion management that enable people to function while suppressing their internal conflict. When the threat feels existential, the brain prioritises defence over data. It explains why avoidance can take subtle forms, such as prioritising technical solutions over systemic change or focusing on small personal actions to distract from larger political or structural responsibilities.

It is also why awareness alone rarely leads to action and why climate communication and policy must address emotional and social dynamics, not just informational gaps.

Blame is the laziest climate policy. Here’s the next move. Treat dissonance as both psychological and structural, only without the cheap moralising…

As we now know, individuals experience dissonance when their actions (high-consumption lifestyles) conflict with their values (concern for the planet). But this internal conflict doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Structural constraints, including urban design, economic pressures, social norms, political systems, corporate influence, and a host of other factors, shape the choices available to people.

Constraints make low-carbon living more difficult or socially costly. For example, someone may value climate action but live in a suburb with no public transit or be required to fly for work. Even the public transport Sarah encourages us to take uses a fleet of diesel buses that need time and money to replace.

If Sarah must live where she can afford to, in a suburb without public transport, the last thing she needs is moral judgment for driving to work. Moralising provokes defensiveness and resistance, reinforcing the very avoidance behaviours that prevent engagement. If dissonance makes people feel overwhelmed or powerless in the face of the climate crisis, then shaming them for their inconsistencies only deepens disengagement.

Reality doesn’t care about your virtue. People live where they can afford, commute how they must, and cope however keeps them functional.

Climate inaction is not a failure of morality, but a predictable outcome of intersecting psychological and societal systems. It was always going to happen.

Recognising that dissonance is a natural human response to complex problems creates some space for more empathetic, inclusive, and ultimately effective climate conversations.

Moral judgment only makes it worse.

Research on cultural cognition by Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School shows that people process environmental information through cultural filters, meaning that moral judgments about environmental behaviour often reinforce rather than challenge existing patterns. When people feel judged for their lifestyle choices, they’re more likely to dismiss environmental information entirely, regardless of its scientific validity. When people perceive information as a threat to their cultural identity, for instance, associating climate concern with a liberal or elite worldview, they are more likely to dismiss it.

The sociological work of Riley Dunlap and Andrew Jorgenson emphasises that environmental degradation is deeply embedded in broader social, economic, and institutional structures. It’s part of our tribal identities. Collective consumption patterns, economic systems, and political arrangements shape environmental outcomes in ways that individual awareness or intent cannot easily override. Appealing to the individual will be hard without systemic change in what their tribe believes.

Starting in the 2000s, Thomas Dietz, along with colleagues like Paul Stern and Gerald Gardner, has published extensively on the short list of high-impact household actions and found that variables such as income level, household size, residential location, and access to public infrastructure were far more predictive of emissions than environmental attitudes. For example, wealthier households tend to consume more energy and travel more frequently, despite their stated concerns about climate change.

While values and knowledge matter, their expression is constrained by material realities. Recognising this helps avoid blaming individuals for actions shaped by infrastructures beyond their control.

And then there is the problem of scale.

If I don’t buy a caravan or the SUV needed to tow it, my sacrifice is meaningless in the grand scheme. It’s only when my neighbour, his neighbour and indeed a whole cohort of boomers choose to sit at home rather than travel the countryside that there will be a material impact on the climate problem.

My individual actions might not be enough.

Research by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas, notably in their 2017 paper on the climate mitigation gap, calculated that even if individuals adopt the highest-impact personal actions by living car-free, avoiding air travel, eating plant-based diets, and having smaller families, the collective impact would fall far short of necessary emission reductions. Personal actions are mathematically insufficient without accompanying structural changes.

Infrastructure constraints are a particular challenge.

Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy, who have spent decades mapping the relationship between urban density and fuel consumption, found that residents of car-dependent suburbs can reduce their transport emissions by only about 20% through behaviour change alone, while residents of transit-oriented developments automatically achieve 60-80% lower transport emissions simply by living there. It’s why Sarah has her job.

The built environment constrains choice more powerfully than individual motivation. Similarly, research on energy consumption shows that building efficiency standards and appliance regulations deliver far greater emission reductions than appeals to turn off lights and use air conditioning only on really hot days.

Social norms research adds another layer of constraint.

Robert Cialdini’s work demonstrates that people conform to perceived social norms even when those norms conflict with their personal values. In environmental contexts, this means that individual climate concerns are often overwhelmed by social pressures to maintain conventional, high-consumption lifestyles. Research by Michael Dornan found that even highly motivated individuals struggle to maintain low-carbon behaviours when their social networks normalise high-emission activities like frequent flying or large homes. Back to the tribe again.

Tell this to anyone already suffering from emotional tension, and you are likely to justify and reinforce their dissonance.

Perhaps we should try to be more pragmatic…

Sarah puts on her game face to hide her psychological discomfort, has to cope with the expectations of her mother-in-law, and must wait for the light rail to reach Gumtree Grove.

She lives this triple bind every day.

Research is catching up with what Sarah already knows. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s research on polycentric governance proves that solving complex environmental crises requires more than top-down mandates; it demands aligned action across individual, community, and institutional levels. Her research demonstrates that successful environmental outcomes typically result from aligned individual incentives, community norms, and institutional frameworks. You need all three levels to align.

Similarly, community-based social marketing, developed by Doug McKenzie-Mohr, the founder of Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM), shows that residential energy conservation programs that combine personal feedback, community challenges, and infrastructure improvements achieve 15-25% energy reductions, while programs targeting only one level typically achieve 3-8% reductions.

Research by Paul Stern and colleagues at the National Research Council in the 2000s found that interventions targeting only individual psychology typically produce small, temporary changes. At the same time, those addressing structural barriers alone often fail to generate initial adoption.

We could go on.

What about the blame game?

Pointing out to Sarah that she might buy an EV and install solar panels on the roof of her house, because she’s the sustainability officer, for goodness’ sake, isn’t going to make her feel good or change her behaviour.

Climate communication and behavioural psychology research shows that when individuals are confronted with their inconsistencies, shame-based messaging can trigger defensive reactions, including denial, justification, or emotional withdrawal. These are classic responses to cognitive dissonance, particularly when identity or moral self-image is threatened.

Studies from scholars like Renée Lertzman, who coined the term environmental melancholia, have shown that compassionate, supportive strategies that validate the emotional complexity of climate engagement are more likely to lead to self-reflection, motivation, and behaviour change. This is because they reduce psychological threat. This is critical for individuals to confront uncomfortable truths without becoming paralysed or alienated. I probably should have thought more about this before launching this essay series.

Kristin Neff’s research found that people who practice self-compassion are more likely to acknowledge mistakes, learn from failures, and persist through difficulties. These are all crucial for environmental behaviour change. In contrast, self-critical approaches lead to defensive behaviours, avoidance, and eventual abandonment of environmental goals.

In practical terms, compassionate engagement acknowledges the structural constraints. It will admit that it is hard to be frugal with energy and emissions in high-carbon societies. There is a scarcity of sustainable alternatives, significant societal pressure, and economic constraints. Compassion can also foster empowerment, agency, and community support.

Compassion works because it lowers threat. People can look at ugly contradictions when they don’t feel cornered. Shame does the opposite because it makes the mind defend the identity, not revise the behaviour.

Neuroscience on shame supports the need for compassionate climate communication. Unlike guilt, which is the feeling that you did something bad, shame is the feeling that you are bad. Research by Brené Brown and neuroscientists like Dan Siegel suggests that shame triggers the amygdala’s threat-detection system, flooding the brain with cortisol and effectively “offlining” the prefrontal cortex. This physiological shutdown makes the cognitive processing required for learning and behavioural adaptation nearly impossible, often resulting in defensive withdrawal rather than constructive action.

When people feel ashamed of their environmental impact, their brains literally become less able to process new information or develop creative solutions. Compassionate approaches, by contrast, activate brain regions associated with learning, connection, and problem-solving.

The touchy-feely may be necessary.

The most liberating finding from exploring this premise sequence is that cognitive dissonance around climate action is a predictable human response to an unprecedented challenge. We were always going to do it.

When we understand that our stone-age brains struggle with abstract, long-term, probabilistic threats, the widespread gap between climate concern and behaviour becomes comprehensible rather than condemnable.

We are not wired for this kind of collective, faraway challenge.

The evidence consistently shows that where you live, how your city is designed, and what systems surround you matter more for your carbon footprint than how much you care about climate change. This insight shifts the conversation from individual guilt to collective responsibility for creating systems that make low-carbon living accessible and appealing. And if we continue with finger-wagging, neuroscience research tells us that feelings of shame literally impair our brain’s capacity for learning and adaptation.

And, of course, there are people delighted with this outcome. It should be no surprise to see some wagging fingers from those with an interest in drilling.

So here is the unsettling, plausible conclusion for the collective response to climate change.

Our obsession with individual carbon accounting may be the biggest obstacle to meaningful climate action. When we frame climate change as a collection of personal moral choices, we inadvertently strengthen the very systems that create the problem. And if you are a cynic like me, then you immediately suspect there are vested interests that like it this way.

Suppose we treat traffic safety the way we treat climate action. Instead of building safer roads, installing traffic lights, and regulating vehicle safety, we’d focus on teaching individuals to drive more carefully while expecting them to navigate blindfolded through anarchic intersections. We’d shame people for accidents while ignoring that the infrastructure makes crashes inevitable.

This analogy isn’t hyperbole.

It is precisely what we’ve done with climate policy. We’ve created fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure for transport, buildings, and especially food production, then asked individuals to overcome that infrastructure through pure willpower and virtue. When they inevitably fail, we blame their moral character rather than questioning the systems and psychology that make failure inevitable.

And it’s also no surprise that when asking for individual effort doesn’t make things better, blame is shifted to the oil companies and any big business with a large carbon footprint. Making it someone else’s problem is classic dissonance.

Research on cognitive dissonance shows that the naming-and-shaming approach has transformed an engineering problem into an identity crisis. Instead of asking “How do we build systems that make low-carbon living convenient and affordable?” we ask “Why aren’t people willing to sacrifice enough?” The first question generates solutions; the second creates shame, defensiveness, and disengagement.

So here is the contrary proposition.

We should celebrate rather than condemn climate dissonance. Every person struggling to align their environmental values with their actual behaviour is demonstrating exactly why individual action alone cannot solve systemic problems. Their contradictions are symptoms of infrastructure designed for consumption. They are not moral failures.

And I challenge you to test this idea.

For one week, refuse to feel guilty about your environmental impact. Treat guilt as noise.

Instead, log every moment when the right choice is expensive, awkward, or socially punished. That is your map of constraint.

Then, pick one constraint you can actually shift this month. That is a leverage footprint.

The most profound takeaway from this closer look at a dissonance through the prism of climate concern is that it reveals something fundamental about the human condition. We’re all trying to live meaningful lives and cope with the emotional discomfort of our values conflicting with our actions. Only we are doing it within systems that weren’t designed for planetary sustainability.

The point isn’t to abolish dissonance. It’s to stop using it as a sedative.

If sustainable choices keep feeling personally hard, that’s data about the system you’re living in. It tells you about your transport, housing, food, and norms. Fixing that system is the real climate work. Everything else is mood management.

Imagine for a moment that you have no salary, no permanent home, and there are no supermarkets in the neighbourhood.

You can’t imagine this for too long because it is scary and well outside modern experience for those with access to this sentence. But this was the situation for all our ancestors for close to 300,000 years. Thousands of generations of people gathered, foraged and hunted for food, or they starved. When you think about this scenario, it will evoke deep-seated survival instincts shaped by humanity’s long pre-agricultural past, triggering anxiety, hypervigilance, and a reorientation of priorities toward immediate needs.

Today, in Western democracies at least, our self-worth, social identity, and sense of control are heavily tied to economic roles, home ownership, and consumer access. These are all recent developments in human history that, for most, removed the fear of physical harm and stripped the scaffolding that supported personal and social meaning.

While risks from real dangers were normal for our ancestors, their social and psychological frameworks were adapted to them. They had communal food sharing, deep local knowledge, and culturally embedded resilience strategies that reduced existential stress. Modern individuals often imagine such a life without the social cohesion or survival skills their ancestors had, which makes the mental image feel like a free fall. We easily ignore the reality that the resilience of our ancestors was as much psychological as it was material.

Now imagine life for humans 10,000 years ago in, say, the most culturally advanced societies of the Fertile Crescent, notably those of the Levant, such as Jericho and Göbekli Tepe. These people combined large-scale architecture, symbolic art, and organised food production in ways unmatched elsewhere at the time. No supermarkets perhaps, but they had food they could store.

We tell the story as if farming were about producing more food. That’s only half the truth, and not even the most interesting half. For most of human history, the bottleneck was preservation. A successful hunt or a big berry patch meant a temporary glut followed by spoilage. Without storage, abundance was a fleeting accident. Agriculture changed that.

By domesticating grains and pulses, which are foods that dry, store, and travel, humans created the first real surplus you could bank against the future. A sack of barley was a source of calories, security, insurance, and currency. Stored food allowed you to bridge the hungry season, feed more children, and trade for tools or alliances.

Suddenly, power could be accumulated in granaries, not just in muscle or charisma.

Whoever controlled the stored grain, and later the domesticated livestock, controlled the terms of existence. The field and the sickle mattered, but the sealed jar and the locked storeroom transformed human society. Agriculture gave us the first capital, the first inequality, and the first reason to stay put.

Grains and pulses were the magic trick. A clay jar of wheat was surplus that could smooth over lean months, feed more mouths, and be traded for alliances or favours. And once food could be stored, it could be guarded, taxed, and stolen.

The more comforting angle is that agriculture was a tale of human ingenuity and progress, giving me a warm feeling inside that spreads to every extremity. I think it’s called pride. Anthropologists are astute individuals who are not so easily swayed. They established that sedentary living and dense populations made early agricultural communities more vulnerable to disease, nutritional deficiencies, and social inequality.

Agriculture wasn’t a panacea, but as an invention, it remains one of the most significant transformations in human history, laying the groundwork for the modern world.

But here is the thing.

This initial form of agriculture was patchy, low-yielding, and prone to crop and livestock losses due to weather and disease. It wasn’t all sweetness and sourdough rolls. However, it did create a new value. Land suitable for food production became a critical resource to defend or acquire, leading to territorial conflicts and organised warfare. Spiritual and cultural systems evolved to reflect the rhythms of planting and harvest.

And it changed the frame for that psychological resilience.

Agriculture redefined what it meant to be human, laying the economic, political, and cultural groundwork for all later civilisations and marking one of the most consequential turning points in our species’ history.

And so it went for over 10,000 years, with incremental progress here and there, some civilisations more successful than others, inventions generally making things better. Then, about 200 years ago, everything changed.

First came coal in commercial quantities, then oil and gas, giving humans sudden access to massive amounts of energy. Naturally, they applied this energy and materials to, among other things, agriculture.

This surge of exogenous energy fueled widespread mechanisation, introducing tractors, harvesters, and irrigation pumps that drastically reduced manual labour and enabled the cultivation of vast tracts of land. Crucially, it enabled the industrial-scale production of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides that significantly boosted crop yields. Large-scale irrigation projects became possible, bringing previously unfarmable land into production and ensuring more consistent harvests.

Beyond the fields, fossil fuels built and powered the ships, trains, and trucks that established interconnected supply chains to move the extra production around, not least into cities that could grow in size now that food could arrive from far away in good time. Transport systems also enabled food to be grown where it grew best and then distributed worldwide, increasing availability and variety. Energy-intensive processes for food processing and packaging extended shelf life, reduced spoilage, and were a product marketer’s dream. In a historical instant, humanity became reliant on an agricultural system shaped by fossil fuels, now spreading across six continents.

And so it went: in a few generations, agriculture in large parts of Europe and North America, and later all around the world, was industrialised.

Then, in a blink, the world was staring at famine.

One of the things that happens if you provide an organism with exogenous energy, from outside its internal system, is that it does well. It tends to have a better chance of growing, surviving, and reproducing, and it produces more biomass by converting energy. Crude but true.

Then, what appears as success is often just a delayed breakdown. Thermodynamically, injecting low-entropy energy into a system doesn’t eliminate disorder; it accelerates it elsewhere. Agriculture supercharged by fossil fuels increases yields not by solving ecological constraints but by temporarily outrunning them, leaving entropy markers in the soil, water, and atmosphere.

And the energy injection from the industrial revolution is colossal.

One hundred years after the first public railway in Great Britain to use steam locomotives, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened on September 27, 1825, the global population had doubled from 1 to 2 billion. Then, 100 years later, it was a little over 8 billion.

Nobody wanted to believe Thomas Malthus, but many knew he had a point, even if his solutions to the problem were heinous. By the mid-1900s, feeding all these people had already become a concern. Something had to be done, or famine was inevitable.

The “Green Revolution” was the answer.

It was a technological sprint from the 1940s to the 1970s to squeeze more grain from the same soil. Led by scientists like Norman Borlaug, it bred high-yield, disease-resistant wheat and rice and paired them with synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and irrigation on a scale never before seen.

The results were dramatic. India and Mexico, once staring down famine, became self-sufficient and, in some years, net exporters. Grain ships that once carried aid were replaced by those carrying surplus.

The impact was undeniable. Famines were averted, billions were fed, and rural economies in parts of Asia and Latin America surged. More food meant more people, and for a time, it seemed as if technology had outsmarted nature’s limits, the oldest constraint of all. Malthus was mistaken. In the glow of this success, intensive, industrial agriculture became the default setting for modern farming, its methods exported, imitated, and entrenched.

But every gain came with a hidden cost. The Green Revolution locked farmers into a system dependent on fossil-fuelled inputs and chemical fixes. Soils eroded, water tables dropped, and the gap between the land-rich and the land-poor widened. The very path that fed billions also deepened our dependency on a fragile, energy-hungry system.

And here we are today, with a commercial farmer on the horns of a dilemma, under pressure to be productive and deliver high yields at low cost, while he knows that achieving this will mean heavy inputs and pressure on soils.

The Green Revolution did feed many people, but it didn’t solve the farmers’ dilemma. Instead, it gave us a 70-year vacation from dealing with it.

But before we get any further along, let’s name the dilemma and begin with this premise…

There is no doubt that modern agricultural systems built around tractors have achieved significant increases in food production through the use of advanced technologies, chemical inputs, and high-yielding crop varieties. A plethora of innovations have enabled farmers to meet the demands of a rapidly growing global population and respond to market pressures for increased efficiency and profitability.

However, they achieve this through intensive monoculture, heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, and large-scale irrigation practices that drive productivity but come with high environmental costs. Intensification is associated with soil degradation, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, all of which threaten the long-term sustainability of agricultural landscapes.

This tension between productivity and sustainability is at the heart of many contemporary agricultural policy debates.

On one hand, there is an urgent need to produce more food to ensure food security, especially as the world’s population is expected to grow by around 8,000 people an hour for generations, despite what the media in Western liberal democracies say. And in case you skipped that number, 8,000 an hour becomes 5.76 million more people a month and 70 million a year. Sweden, the most populous of the Nordic countries, has a population of 10.6 million.

And an increasing proportion of these people live in cities.

On the other hand, there is widespread recognition that the environmental impacts of current agricultural practices cannot be ignored, as they compromise the healthy soils, clean water, and stable climates upon which future food production depends.

This creates a real and persistent dilemma for farmers.

Maximising short-term productivity often undermines the ecological foundations necessary for long-term sustainability, while prioritising sustainability can sometimes mean accepting lower yields and other opportunity costs in the short run.

Promising approaches exist that reconcile these competing demands. Innovations such as precision agriculture, integrated pest management, and agroecological practices aim to increase efficiency while minimising environmental harm. Some countries and regions have demonstrated that it is possible to “decouple” productivity from environmental degradation through targeted policies, technological advances, and investments in sustainable practices. However, these solutions require careful management, significant investment, and often a willingness to rethink traditional agricultural models. They remain in the small minority.

Modern agriculture is indeed caught between the dual imperatives of boosting productivity and ensuring sustainability. While these demands can be contradictory, they are not necessarily irreconcilable.

But before we rush to solve world hunger with regenerative practices, let’s take a closer look at this premise…

When a farmer is successful, he generates food or fibre for consumption. That delicious lamb shank is typically enjoyed away from the farm, in an urban setting. Nutrients from the soil are transferred to the meat, which leaves the farm. It’s an export system. Keep doing this for long enough, and the soil becomes depleted. The only way to maintain production without moving the farm onto fresh land is to replace the lost nutrients or at least subsidise the soil with the equivalent amount of nutrients in the form of fertiliser.

Farmers know they run an input-output system. Their mindset is that they have to put in energy, nutrients and effort to get out a salable crop or animals for slaughter. They might not like being input-driven, but they understand that they are. They are also experts in managing those inputs, not least because they know their land better than anyone else and are on first-name terms with their bank manager.

When the phone rings and it’s Jason just checking in, farmers are reminded that the business they run not only must be liquid but also carries a heavy debt burden. That’s just a consequence of an input system. Diesel for the tractor, seeds, fertiliser, a thresher the size of a house, all cost money that can’t always be paid for in cash.

Farmers also recognise that the consequences of relying on inputs is they have both short-term and long-term obligations to the bank. They might want to combine immediate yield improvements with practices that enhance soil health and water retention, especially to help maintain productivity while building resilience against climate change and other disruptions. They know they need to look long… but then the phone rings again.

The evidence from science is blunt and supports the ecological timeframe. Resilient farming systems are built on diversity, healthy soils, and the ability to adapt. Strip those away, and you’re gambling with the future. But the quick route to bumper harvests is monocultures, heavy fertilisers, chemical pest control, and irrigation on tap. It works until it doesn’t.

Push the land like this, and you drain its capacity to bounce back because soil life collapses, biodiversity thins, and pests and diseases find an open door. Add climate extremes into the mix, and the whole system starts to wobble.

What appears to be efficient today is, in reality, fragility. Producers are buying false stability through inputs that decay the system’s capacity to self-organise. The more tightly a farm is engineered for yield, the less slack it has to absorb shocks, making it brittle beneath the surface. All this is entirely consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Systems built for short-term gain rarely bother with the scaffolding that makes them last. They mine the soil, burn through water, and call it efficiency—until the bill arrives.

Intensified livestock operations are a case in point. Across the US Midwest, studies link concentrated animal feeding to nitrogen and phosphorus runoff that poisons waterways and drives harmful algal blooms. In parts of Europe, overgrazing and manure overload have stripped soils of organic matter, reducing their ability to hold water and recover from drought, even the FAO admits it.

The pattern is consistent across multiple examples.

In northern India, relentless wheat–rice monocultures boosted yields for decades, but groundwater extraction now outpaces recharge by more than 50%, threatening both crops and communities.

In Brazil’s Cerrado, soy expansion delivered export surpluses while driving deforestation, eroding topsoil, and releasing vast stores of carbon.

Degraded soils lose fertility and structure; polluted water undermines both ecosystem health and farm productivity. By the time the system starts to fail, the resilience it needed to adapt has already been spent. Chase today’s yield and you erode tomorrow’s capacity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

To achieve resilient yields over time, farmers can moderate inputs, incorporate technological innovation, engage in ecological management, get out of monocultures, and work more closely with their stakeholders. In short, they can diversify.

But diversification takes guts. The convention and the pressure are to maximise yield, and for most situations, that is a treadmill of increasing intensity of energy and material inputs.

This brings us to the next premise…

As we have hinted already, farmers are under pressure. The typical approach to agricultural decision-making is to prioritise short-term productivity and efficiency, often measured by metrics that describe the inputs and the outputs. And it is not made by the farmer.

Total Factor Productivity is meant to measure how efficiently land, labour, capital, and other inputs are combined to produce output. In practice, the scoreboard most people fixate on is the much simpler yield per hectare. Neat. Comparable. And it’s dangerously incomplete because depletion doesn’t show up as a cost until it’s too late.

This blind spot has consequences. In the US Corn Belt, decades of yield-focused optimisation have eroded topsoil at rates far above natural replenishment, slashing long-term productivity potential even as TFP numbers looked healthy.

In Australia’s wheat belt, salinisation from land clearing has compromised millions of hectares, a legacy cost absent from conventional output metrics. And in sub-Saharan Africa, short-term fertiliser-driven gains have often masked declines in soil organic matter, leaving farmers more vulnerable to drought and nutrient loss over time.

The deeper issue is mindset.

Economic incentives, cultural traditions, and risk perceptions shape farmer decisions as much as rainfall or soil type. If success is defined purely as higher yields today, practices that erode tomorrow’s capacity can still look like wins if today’s yield is good.

Transformative change demands measures that count reproductivity, the system’s ability to sustain itself, alongside profit and yield. Until then, we’ll keep optimising for the wrong future.

Then there is increasing recognition that effective agricultural decision-making should be participatory, involving the farmer, his backers, the local communities, advisors, and policymakers. It should even include the consumers of the food. But when was the last time you thought about a farming decision?

This is a tricky one.

Whilst there are a lot of people who want metrics to include productivity and environmental impact, resilience and social outcomes, most of them don’t get up before dawn to grease the tractor bearings. There is some help for farmers. Frameworks such as the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, Agroecological principles, and tools like the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) by the FAO encourage the evaluation of soil health, biodiversity, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and community well-being. These metrics were historically sidelined in conventional cost-benefit analyses. This expansion of metrics is not only more aligned with sustainability goals but also helps farmers future-proof their operations against economic and ecological shocks.

One prominent example is the use of decision-support tools like the “FarmDESIGN” model, which allows farmers and advisors to simulate different management scenarios and assess their trade-offs. For instance, a farmer might compare a conventional maize monoculture with an agroforestry system that includes intercropped legumes and fruit trees. The tool enables them to evaluate each system’s profitability, labour demands, carbon footprint, and resilience to drought.

All this feels a bit like that scary scenario of gathering food on the savanna, the way we currently think about and measure farming isn’t built for the 21st century. We’re still chasing narrow definitions of success while ignoring the bigger ledger of how systems perform for people and planet, now and decades from now.

Perhaps we need to redefine what counts, bringing in more perspectives, and using metrics that track both the quick wins and the long game.

That’s easy to say, and from the wrong voice. It sounds like another top-down sermon. In my experience, farmers don’t respond well to edicts. They know their land better than anyone. They walk, work, and read it every day. And they’re right to bristle when someone rolls in with a clipboard to pronounce on them that they’ve been doing it wrong. Change that ignores this lived expertise rarely survives first contact with the paddock.

The bridge is trust and relevance.

If sustainability metrics can show farmers how to make their land more resilient, profitable, and adaptable, they stop being an imposition and become a tool. The conversation shifts from “do this because we said so” to “here’s how you keep this place productive for your kids.” That’s when data becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes a reason to act.

So here is the next premise to counter the well-known imposition phenomenon…

Farmers work on the sharp edge of agriculture, making daily decisions that tangle with ecosystems, weather, markets, and community life. They’re observers, experimenters, and problem-solvers. The knowledge they hold is often more precise, adaptive, and relevant to their land than anything that comes out of a distant policy office or research lab.

A good farmer can read microclimates that vary within a single paddock, know how a certain slope drains after a heavy rain, anticipate the timing of pest outbreaks, or recognise which traditional practice still holds under modern pressures.

Yet, policy frameworks have a habit of brushing past this nuance, defaulting to generalised scientific models and economic metrics that iron out local variation. The drive for “scalable” solutions flattens the complexity that makes each farm unique and strips away the ingenuity that comes from living with the land.

The evidence backs this.

Participatory workshops and farmer interviews across diverse regions show a consistent gap between local priorities and official agendas. In Tanzania’s Northern Kilombero Valley, smallholders identified land ownership, crop diversification, and water access as key to their future priorities, which are currently missing from national plans and private-sector roadmaps. Similar disconnects have been documented in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where farmer-led adaptation strategies have outperformed top-down interventions but struggled to gain recognition. Ignoring this embedded, place-based expertise all but guarantees agricultural transformation will be less just, less effective, and less resilient than it could be.

But the critical distinction is between policy-ready knowledge and land-ready knowledge. The first fits neatly into a report or a funding cycle; the second keeps a farm alive through a failed monsoon or a pest outbreak no one predicted. Until we design transformation around the latter, the former will continue to produce plans that look good on paper but fail in practice.

Participatory research methods such as farmer field schools, co-design of technologies, and community-based monitoring programs are designed to reverse this marginalisation. Still, they often retain the top-down feel that farmers dislike. One notable exception is the Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) initiative, in which farmers collaborate with scientists to select and develop crop varieties tailored to local conditions. In Ethiopia, for example, smallholder farmers have collaborated with researchers to breed teff varieties that are both high-yielding and drought-tolerant, integrating formal science with farmer preferences.

And if this were a traditional essay, there would be a lengthy list of initiatives like this, local, effective and rarely scaled up into a substantive threat to the input-driven status quo.

What we, the folk who eat the food, have to understand is this.

Most farmers know what they are doing. They have learned the hard way on the land, from their peers and from the generations who ran the farm before them. Experience is invaluable, even as the conditions change, making farmers’ knowledge not just valid but essential for crafting effective agricultural policy and innovation pathways.

However, this premise that farmers themselves hold key insights is fraught with social difficulties and can upset everyone in an instant.

I wrote with Chris a Mindful Sceptic Guide to Farmers, which was brave, but we hope it provides more details with care and objectivity.

Mindful farmers’ dilemma is about tensions between productivity, sustainability, and economic survival in modern agriculture, the type that you or I might see as we drive through the countryside.

However, over 500 million farms worldwide are run by smallholders who grow food and cash crops for themselves and their families. Typically, they use traditional farming systems and methods that are often thousands of years old, designed and honed without energy and nutrient inputs made possible by fossil fuels and machinery.

The next premise assumes that these farmers have something to offer in resolving the dilemma…

Traditional and Indigenous knowledge systems have long provided more sustainable approaches to agriculture than the industrial model. In the beginning, farming had to be relatively closed systems, where energy and nutrients are recycled more or less on-site, because farmers learned early that the soil cannot support export for long. Nevertheless, soils were depleted by agricultural practices, and so farmers were often forced to move on to pastures new.

Shifting agriculture, also known as swidden or slash-and-burn farming, is practised mainly in tropical forest regions by smallholder and Indigenous communities. Farmers clear a plot of land, often by cutting and burning vegetation, and then grow crops on it for a few years until the soil fertility declines. They then move to a new plot, leaving the previous one to lie fallow. During the fallow period, natural vegetation regrows, restoring nutrients, improving soil structure, and controlling pests and diseases through ecological succession. This cycle can range from a few years to several decades, depending on land availability and population pressures.

What makes shifting agriculture effective is its alignment with natural ecological processes. It requires minimal external inputs and relies instead on biodiversity, fallow regeneration, and localised knowledge of landscape dynamics. In areas with abundant forested land and low population density, this method can be sustainable and resilient, supporting both food security and ecological regeneration. It is also culturally embedded in many Indigenous knowledge systems that emphasise stewardship and cyclical resource use.

However, shifting agriculture becomes less viable when fallow periods are shortened due to land pressure, leading to soil degradation and deforestation. When practised within its ecological limits, though, it represents a low-energy, adaptive form of land use that integrates food production with ecosystem restoration. Its success lies in its flexibility, ecological sensitivity, and deep local knowledge, making it an essential model for sustainable land management in many parts of the world.

The point of this premise is not that shifting agriculture works. It’s that traditional farming methods are built from generations of observation, adaptation, and community-based experimentation, and so offer valuable lessons for building resilient and sustainable food systems.

For example, agroecology, which draws heavily on traditional practices, integrates ecological principles into agriculture. It treats a farm as an ecosystem rather than a factory. So instead of relying mainly on external inputs (synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, purchased feed), it tries to make the system work through biological processes such as nitrogen fixation (legumes), composting and organic matter buildup, integrated crop–livestock systems, and natural pest control.

In practice, agroecology often shows up as diversified cropping (rotations, intercropping, agroforestry), soil-cover strategies (mulches, cover crops, reduced tillage where suitable), and landscape thinking (hedgerows, riparian buffers, habitat for pollinators and beneficial insects). The aim is not just yield, but stability that will reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, input price shocks, and long-run soil decline.

It also emphasises farmer knowledge, local adaptation, fairer value chains, and food sovereignty because how food is produced is inseparable from who benefits, who bears risk, and how land and labour are organised.

In coastal Bangladesh, smallholder farmers grow rice during the monsoon season and raise fish, such as carp or tilapia, in the same paddies. This method reduces the need for chemical inputs, as fish help control pests and weeds, oxygenate the water, and contribute natural fertilisers through their waste. Farmers may cultivate aquatic plants or raise ducks, creating a diversified and mutually reinforcing ecosystem. Rooted in generations of experiential knowledge, this technique reflects a holistic understanding of local water cycles, soil conditions, and species interactions.

Beyond environmental benefits, these systems preserve local fish and rice breeds adapted to the region’s saline-prone, flood-prone environment. The dynamic coastal delta, subject to tidal flows, storm surges, and salinity intrusion, is navigated through adaptive strategies honed over time. These include strategic placement of bunds and sluice gates, and seasonal adjustments to the rice-fish calendar. As climate change intensifies weather extremes and sea-level rise in the region, these Indigenous practices are proving remarkably resilient, offering low-cost, low-impact alternatives to intensive aquaculture and monoculture rice farming.

A critical common feature of almost all traditional systems is the need to regenerate soil, typically through regenerative methods and a focus on closed systems, in short, ecological knowledge.

The following premise suggests that regenerative practices would solve the farmer’s dilemma…

Regenerative agriculture is less a set of techniques than a different contract with the land. It works to rebuild soil, boost biodiversity, and restore ecosystem services through cover crops, reduced tillage, diverse rotations, and agroforestry. Done well, it builds resilience to climate shocks, cuts dependence on synthetic inputs, and solves environmental and economic problems in the same breath.

Gabe Brown’s farm outside Bismarck, North Dakota, is the case study that is often cited as an example of what is possible. In the 1990s, back-to-back crop failures forced him to question every assumption about conventional farming. He ditched the plough, planted multispecies cover crops, rotated more widely, and folded livestock into the mix so nutrients cycled naturally. Year by year, he stepped away from fertilisers and pesticides, replacing them with nitrogen-fixing plants, biological pest control, and organic matter built by soil organisms. The result was not a return to the past, but the creation of a living system with its own self-reinforcing productivity.

The numbers tell the story.

Soil organic matter up from under 2% to over 6%, water infiltration so fast it shrugs off droughts and floods, and fields alive with pollinators, birds, and beneficial insects. His cover crop cocktails that can be 15 species deep, shield the soil, feed the biology, and keep habitat continuous all year. Diverse rotations have broken pest and disease cycles without a drop of pesticide. Holistic grazing moves cattle like wild herds once did, spreading fertility, building pasture health, and making feedlots irrelevant.

Economically, Gabe Brown runs his operation lean with low input costs, direct marketing, and no dependence on subsidies. While outperforming many neighbours locked into conventional systems, his land is now both more productive and more resilient, and the model has drawn scientists, policymakers, and farmers from around the world.

Most regions have a Brown Farm where an intrepid farmer has bucked the local trends and practices to use and benefit from regenerative practices. However, the transition to regenerative agriculture is not straightforward. It involves initial financial and knowledge barriers, as farmers may face upfront costs for new equipment, the risk of short-term yield declines, and a lack of access to markets that value regenerative products.

Solutions require collaboration across the entire value chain, from input suppliers to food companies and consumers, so that farmers have secure markets and incentives for regenerative products. Risk-sharing mechanisms, such as innovative financial products and shared investment in infrastructure and training, are also crucial to make the transition attractive and feasible for farmers.

Bottom line, it needs consumers to vote with their wallets.

So far, at least in the U.S., this is not working well. Less than 1.5% of U.S. farms practice fully regenerative agriculture, while an estimated 15% employ some regenerative methods but have not fully transitioned. For instance, cover crops, a key component of regenerative agriculture, were planted on just 7% of Midwest farmland as of 2021, despite their environmental benefits.

The limited adoption can be attributed to economic concerns, such as the potential for reduced short-term yields and the costs associated with transitioning to new practices. Maybe it’s a lack of technical support and knowledge about regenerative methods. Perhaps farmers fear that such practices may negatively impact the yields of their primary cash crops, such as corn and soybeans. Or maybe it’s those forward contracts and cheap food at the supermarket. But I digress.

The good news is that regenerative farming is no longer just a fringe movement. Public agencies and private investors are putting money and training into farmer support. As the evidence piles up for healthier soils, more climate resilience, stronger margins, so more farmers are starting to see it not as an experiment, but as a better bet.

Regenerative agriculture is one of the few approaches that can hit the twin targets of productivity and sustainability. But it won’t scale on goodwill or a handful of policy options. It needs a redesign of the whole food system. That means policy, finance, markets, knowledge networks and, crucially, consumers, so the people restoring the land get paid for more than just what they harvest.

And that means rewiring subsidies, building real markets for ecosystem services like carbon storage and biodiversity gains, funding demonstration sites that prove the model works, and making sure consumers understand what they’re buying.

And consumers who can will have to pay more for their food. But we will save that can of fertiliser irradiated worms for another essay.

The real shift to regenerative agriculture comes when farming income is tied to ecological performance as much as yield. When farmers get realistic prices for their produce, can sell tonnes of carbon stored in their soils, biodiversity credits for restored habitat, and verified improvements in water quality. When they stop being treated as commodity producers and start being recognised as ecosystem managers. That’s when regenerative agriculture stops being a sideline and becomes the backbone of a new rural economy.

But today and tomorrow, the farmer still has to service his debts and purchase inputs and energy to grow next year’s crops because the debt has accumulated and isn’t paid off in any one season.

This is a deep economic trap that prompts the final premise of this essay…

The transition to regenerative practices often requires a lot upfront. It needs money and a willingness to let go of sunk costs in the old infrastructure. It means profound changes in farm management, which typically entail more work and higher labour costs. And until the ecology settles down into a new, more stable rhythm, it means a willingness to accept potential short-term yield fluctuations. The farmer has to change his methods, which he most likely inherited from his grandfather, who learned it all in the 1940s when he got his first tractor and passed it down the paternal line.

Current market structures and economic incentives do make it difficult for farmers to justify the transition to regenerative methods, which may not deliver financial benefits immediately and often lack adequate market premiums or policy support. And, of course, it’s not what grandpa would have done.

Additionally, the lack of measurement and verification systems for regenerative outcomes make it hard to reward farmers for ecosystem services and long-term stewardship. What we know about how regenerative systems work can be buried in the research literature and it is not in the interests of the companies that sell the inputs and the machinery for such expertise to become general knowledge. You are unlikely to see a soil ecologist on morning television. Inevitably, economic realities and market players reinforce conventional, extractive practices and discourage the widespread adoption of regenerative approaches. Again, a topic worthy of its own essay.

While regenerative agriculture offers clear long-term benefits for productivity, resilience, and environmental health, prevailing economic pressures and market incentives often act as significant deterrents. It is unlikely to dominate as it should without changes in policy, market structures, and consumer engagement.

It’s a problem.

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond investigated the reasons behind the disintegration of once-thriving societies such as the Easter Islanders, the Ancestral Puebloans, the Maya, and the Norse in Greenland. He identified five key factors that contribute to collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, loss of trade partners, and a society’s response to its environmental problems.

Not all societies faced all five, but their vulnerability often stemmed from how they managed or failed to manage these interconnected pressures.

Diamond also argued that many ancient civilisations undermined their survival by depleting or misusing their soil resources. Through deforestation, overgrazing, and poorly adapted agricultural practices, these societies caused severe soil erosion and fertility loss, ultimately leading to food shortages, economic decline, and social disintegration.

He had a good point.

Settled science tells us that soil is a non-renewable resource on human timescales because its formation takes centuries to millennia, while it can be destroyed in decades through mismanagement.

Science, and the eyes of every farmer who sees it, tells us that soil erosion reduces agricultural productivity, which in turn destabilises economic and political structures. For example, the deforestation of the Haitian highlands, which resulted in massive soil loss, can be easily compared with the Dominican Republic’s better forest and soil management practices, illustrating how policy choices and cultural attitudes influence outcomes.

However, for the farmer, the dilemma remains.

Should he grow the food to feed himself and his family either directly or via the market when he knows production depletes the soil, or should he retire or go work in the city?

And the farmer has always had the dilemma.

For 10,000 years, humans have grappled with the fundamental challenge of feeding themselves without depleting the land that sustains them. Our ancestors developed sophisticated crop rotation systems, fallow periods, and integrated livestock management not through abstract environmental philosophy, but through the harsh teacher of necessity. When soil failed, communities failed. When harvests consistently declined, civilisations collapsed.

The knowledge encoded in traditional farming practices represents millennia of trial and error, of societies learning to read the subtle signals their land was sending them.

What is profoundly different today is our temporary escape from these constraints through fossil fuels and industrial chemistry. The Green Revolution gave us the illusion that we could transcend ecological limits indefinitely, that productivity and sustainability were permanently decoupled from one another.

What some call an “escape” is really a lease on borrowed order, paid for by increased entropy elsewhere. Fossil energy let us suspend the consequences of depletion, but the second law remains unamused and demands its due in collapsing soil, vanishing aquifers, and heat-trapping gases. Soil doesn’t negotiate with economic theory, and natural systems don’t suspend the laws of physics for quarterly profit reports.

The 10,000-year agricultural story reminds us that every civilisation that ignored these signals eventually faced a reckoning. The question isn’t whether we’ll return to regenerative farming practices that work in harmony with natural systems, because that’ll be forced on us either way. The big question is whether we’ll choose this transition consciously or have it imposed upon us by depleted soils and destabilised climates.

Perhaps most importantly, this long emergency perspective offers hope alongside its warnings. Humans have navigated agricultural transformations before, often emerging with more resilient and productive systems. The rice terraces of Asia, the polycultures of pre-Columbian America, and the integrated farm systems of traditional Europe all demonstrate that high productivity and environmental regeneration can coexist when we design with ecological principles rather than against them.

Today’s regenerative farmers aren’t abandoning the lessons of the past. They’re updating ancient wisdom with modern understanding, creating farming systems that honour the 10,000-year story of agriculture and the urgent needs of our current moment.

The farmer’s dilemma, viewed through this lens, becomes not a crisis to solve but a transition to navigate, guided by the accumulated wisdom of every generation that has successfully fed itself while caring for the land.

But here’s the thing.

Regenerative agriculture won’t save industrial food. It will replace it slowly, painfully, and only after collapse has priced denial out of circulation. The transition will not be led by government initiative or consumer choice. It will be an attrition event. Soil exhaustion, aquifer depletion, and energy volatility will take more land out of play than we admit, and in the cracks, new modes of production will grow because they have to.

Meanwhile, the existing system, measured in yield and Total Factor Productivity, gives the illusion of efficiency while the asset base erodes. Land that can no longer hold water. Crops that no longer respond to fertiliser. Farmers who know it’s getting harder each year while their spreadsheets insist it’s fine.

If your metric ignores depletion, you are not measuring agriculture. You are accounting for entropy as if it were profit.

And yet the fundamental contradiction isn’t on the farm. It’s in the culture. Consumers want ethical food that costs less than the fuel to deliver it. They demand soil stewardship with their strawberries, animal welfare with their $8 steak, and planetary health without changing breakfast.

This is not a policy dilemma. It’s a people problem.

And until that changes, regenerative agriculture will remain a proof-of-concept waiting for the system to fail.

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Soil health is the unacknowledged foundation of food systems, climate stability, water security, and biodiversity. While global narratives frame soil as uniformly collapsing, the reality is more complex. Degradation is severe in many regions but uneven, sometimes reversible, and politically invisible. This invisibility persists not from ignorance but because protecting soil is costly in the short term, with its benefits delayed. Most environmental issues, from climate policy to biodiversity targets, are traced back to living soil. Lose that foundation, and everything else becomes theatre.

A modest 3% of your body is nitrogen by mass, primarily in the form of amino acids, proteins, nucleic acids, and other biological molecules. Not heavy but vital to your well-being. Most of this nitrogen initially enters the body through the food we eat, particularly from protein-rich sources such as grains, meat, dairy products, and legumes.

A quick thought reveals that the nitrogen comes from the soil, since all food was once a plant, and most food production still involves fields and farms.

However, increasingly, the source of that soil nitrogen is artificial.

Since the mid-20th century, the industrial fixation of atmospheric nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process has revolutionised global agriculture. This process synthesises ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen gas, producing synthetic fertilisers that drastically boost crop yields. As a result, much of the protein in the modern human diet now derives from plants grown with synthetic nitrogen or from animals fed those plants.

Researchers analysing nitrogen isotopes and global fertiliser application have estimated that at least half of the nitrogen atoms in the bodies of typical people alive today came from food that depended on these artificial inputs.

What was once a tightly coupled biological loop of nitrogen fixed by soil microbes and returned to the soil via decomposition has become dominated by industrial intervention. This has enabled the human population to expand beyond what would otherwise be possible under natural nitrogen constraints, making it a textbook case of entropy acceleration.

We replaced self-regenerating biological order with fossil-fueled inputs that degrade the broader system faster than it can recover. This has also led to widespread ecological consequences, including nitrogen runoff, dead zones in aquatic systems, and biodiversity loss. Thus, the synthetic nitrogen in our bodies is not just a biological fact—it’s also a marker of a planetary-scale shift in how humans interact with the Earth system.

The foundation we ignore is the soil.

All this should be obvious because we are heterotrophs that have to consume food to survive, and that food comes directly or indirectly from plants grown in the ground. There are hydroponics and aquaponics, forms of soilless agriculture where plants are grown in nutrient-rich water, sometimes in combination with fish cultivation (aquaponics). While these methods are efficient in terms of water use, land footprint, and control over growing conditions, they currently account for less than 1% of total global agricultural output by volume or value.

Most of the world’s food is still produced through conventional soil-based farming, including both rainfed and irrigated systems.

Healthy soil is a dynamic, living system with balanced physical structure, chemical nutrients, and biological activity that supports plant growth. It stores water, recycles nutrients, and resists erosion and disease.

Just as a healthy organism performs essential life-sustaining functions, healthy soil maintains ecological balance and resilience while supporting productivity. This includes its ability to cycle nutrients, retain moisture, host diverse microbial communities, and form stable aggregates that resist erosion.

Crucially, healthy soil is not inorganic dirt. It is teeming with life—from bacteria and fungi to earthworms and insects—all of which contribute to its structure and fertility.

“Healthy” also implies soil that can continue to function well over time without degradation. Depleted, compacted, or contaminated soils may still support crop growth in the short term with synthetic inputs, but they require increasing intervention for diminishing returns. In contrast, healthy soil can regenerate itself through organic matter decomposition and microbial activity, thereby reducing dependence on external inputs such as fertilisers or pesticides.

All this is context-dependent.

What is healthy soil for a wetland differs from what is healthy for an arid grassland or a vineyard. But across all ecosystems, healthy soil shares common attributes of biological diversity, chemical balance, and physical integrity. In this sense, “healthy” reflects an ecological state for soil that supports life, adapts to stress, and contributes to the broader functioning of the biosphere.

Healthy soil also allows farmers to grow crops and rear livestock.

But here is the thing.

Recent global assessments indicate that soil degradation affects 75% of the Earth’s land surface to varying degrees. This degradation threatens the livelihoods of over 3.2 billion people and is accelerating rapidly; some projections suggest that up to 90% of the land surface could be degraded by 2050 if current practices continue.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines soil degradation as

the reduction of the biological productivity or complexity of the land, including the decline of soil fertility, the reduction of the organic matter content, the loss of soil structure, and the acceleration of soil erosion by wind and water.

This definition emphasises the reduction of biological productivity and the various forms it can take, such as the loss of soil fertility and structure.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations describes soil degradation as

a process that lowers the current or future capacity of the soil to produce goods or services.

This definition focuses on the diminished capacity of the soil to provide essential functions and resources. It’s a broad definition that encompasses both physical (e.g., erosion, compaction) and chemical (e.g., salinisation, nutrient depletion) processes.

The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) defines soil degradation as

the overall decline in the productive capacity of soil, leading to a loss of ecosystem services.

This definition highlights the loss of ecosystem services —the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. These services include things like food production, water filtration, and carbon storage. The JRC’s definition connects soil health directly to the well-being of both humans and the environment.

In other words, three-quarters of the Earth’s land surface has lost some of its innate productive potential. In the absence of artificial inputs, soil is less able to support plant growth than it was. It is less healthy.

The loss of healthy soil is driven by intensive agriculture, erosion, deforestation, salinisation, overgrazing, and pollution. It amounts to the loss of approximately 100 million hectares of productive land each year, roughly double the size of Greenland. This trend is not confined to any single region but spans continents, undermining the long-term sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems.

The impact on agriculture is particularly severe, with approximately 34% of all agricultural land (about 1.66 billion hectares) now considered moderately to severely degraded due to human activity.

I’ll just say that again.

A third of agricultural land is moderately or severely degraded.

This is the land that feeds us. It is where the milk in the fridge comes from, where the ingredients for the foot-long sub come from, and where the 137 million burgers eaten in the US every day come from.

Degraded means less productive, but in practice, it is much more. For example, soil erosion on croplands often occurs at rates 13 to 40 times faster than natural soil formation, and on tilled land, this can be as high as 100 times.

The accumulation of salt in soil (salination), which makes it unsuitable for crop growth and is caused by poor irrigation practices, has damaged more than 62 million hectares globally over the past two decades, with around 2,000 hectares lost each day.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Meanwhile, about half of the world’s rangelands and pastures are also degraded, reducing livestock productivity and increasing pressure on marginal land.

Soil carbon depletion is the loss of organic matter that reduces the soil’s ability to store carbon and support plant growth. It is caused by intensive tillage and continuous cropping, which has resulted in cultivated soils globally losing 25-75% of their original carbon content.

Total soil carbon loss from agricultural lands is approximately 133 billion tons of carbon, and the rate of loss has increased dramatically over the last two centuries. This is energy once captured by life, now diffused into the atmosphere, irreversibly lost unless vast effort and time are reinvested to restore it.

Then there is the decline in soil biodiversity, characterised by a reduction in the variety and abundance of organisms from bacteria to earthworms that maintain soil health. This decline is driven by pesticide use and monoculture farming, which have eliminated entire microbial communities across millions of hectares globally. Consequently, some agricultural soils now contain 90% fewer species than their natural counterparts.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Annual financial losses from soil degradation are estimated at US$878 billion, driven by reduced agricultural productivity, lost ecosystem services, and increased vulnerability to natural disasters such as floods and droughts. Degraded soils store less carbon, hold less water, and support fewer organisms, weakening their role in climate regulation and biodiversity conservation.

Various sources, including reports from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and academic papers, often state or imply a global land degradation rate of millions of square kilometres per year. For instance, some figures suggest up to 12 million hectares (120,000 km²) of productive land are lost to degradation each year, while broader estimates of affected land can be much larger.

I probably should stop now.

All this sensory input is probably increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to a release of stress hormones, which prepare you to flame me or run away. This is now an emotionally charged situation.

But I will press on.

I should not have to write this essay.

The idea that healthy soil is essential for life is technically well-established, having been known for decades, and the mechanisms are increasingly well understood.

In the 1980s, I collaborated with the Tropical Soil Biology & Fertility Program (TSBF) initially in Zimbabwe and later at the University of Botswana. The TSBF Programme was established in 1984 under the auspices of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme and the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), as part of the “Decade of the Tropics” initiative to

determine management options that enhance tropical soil fertility by manipulating and optimising the soil’s biological functions.

Research covered mechanistic, process-based studies into nutrient, carbon, and water cycles in tropical soils to applied work at the ecosystem level, ensuring that research findings are actionable and relevant to farmers and land managers.

TSBF placed strong emphasis on capacity building and the adoption of practices within tropical countries. It operated networks and research centres across Africa—including Kenya, DR Congo, Rwanda, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Malawi—and coordinated with CGIAR bodies like CIAT, ICRISAT, and IITA to expand its reach and impact. The programme published influential handbooks, such as Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility: A Handbook of Methods, that standardised soil research methodologies internationally and supported effective knowledge transfer.

Sadly, it no longer functions. Perhaps only a handful of greybeards remember it. Soil fertility just isn’t that important.

Soil is often overlooked precisely because it is emotionally invisible, quiet, and slow to degrade. Its deterioration happens underground and out of sight, lacking the emotional immediacy of dying coral reefs or burning forests. As a result, even educated audiences frequently underestimate its role in food systems, water regulation, carbon storage, and biodiversity.

Unlike other environmental issues, there’s no widespread “soil movement,” few headlines, and limited political momentum.

Even the language used to describe soil can be off-putting. Terms like “degradation,” “carbon sink,” or “soil organic matter” will not resonate with general audiences, and the vital functions of soil biology remain abstract to most. Soil may be “common knowledge” in a vague sense, but that doesn’t translate into active concern or informed action.

Soil is also home to a host of horrible bugs.

Instead of the biodiverse ecosystem essential to life, conventional economic frameworks have long treated soil as a means of production rather than a form of capital to be preserved. Modern agriculture has treated soil as a factory, depleting its natural capital over time, creating a disconnection between humans and this living foundation.

Similar to how we treat nature in general, soil is objectified. We treat it as inert matter rather than a living partner. This disconnection stems partly from what psychologists call “temporal discounting”, which is our tendency to value immediate benefits over future consequences. A farmer facing economic pressure may prioritise this year’s yield over long-term soil health, not from ignorance, but from very real short-term economic necessities.

In truth, this is a feeble excuse. If the farmer is forced into poor management decisions that deplete soil capital, it is we, the consumers of the production he coaxes from the soil, who need to take a close look at the production systems we allow.

So our premise sequence is necessary. A journey into the details of why we need to wake up and pay serious attention to the health of soils.

Here we go.

At the risk of boring repetition, healthy soil is a dynamic, living system that plays a central role in food security, climate stability, and ecosystem health. Soils provide essential nutrients for crops, support complex microbial networks that aid plant resilience, and help retain moisture critical during droughts.

Approximately 95% of the world’s food comes directly or indirectly from the soil.

In addition, soils are major carbon sinks, storing approximately 2,500 billion tons of carbon—more than the atmosphere and all plant biomass combined.

Beyond food production and carbon cycling, soils are integral to the water cycle. They filter and purify water, reduce flood risks through infiltration, and help maintain water tables.

Soils hold roughly 25% of Earth’s biodiversity, with a single gram potentially containing thousands of species and millions of individuals. Organisms from microbes to mites and microscopic fungi to earthworms underpin above-ground ecosystems by recycling nutrients and supporting plant growth. This biodiversity is fundamental to resilient landscapes, enabling ecosystems to recover from disturbance and buffer against climate extremes.

Recall the IPBES Assessment Report on Land Degradation (2018) concluded that the rate of soil loss is estimated to be 10-40 times faster than the rate of soil formation in agricultural lands, with 24 billion tons of fertile soil lost annually.

Admittedly, averages across the planet are a crude metric.

Soil degradation varies dramatically across regions, even within farms, with some areas experiencing severe degradation while others remain stable or even get better. Recent research indicates that improved management practices, such as conservation agriculture, cover cropping, and rotational grazing, have successfully reversed degradation trends in specific regions. The situation resembles a mosaic rather than a universal decline. You can see this if you take a drive in the country after a warm spell. Some farms are green with dark, healthy-looking soils on the rare patches that are exposed, while others are dry and dusty.

Evidence strongly supports the soil’s foundational role in ecological systems and human well-being, but the claim of a “steep decline across much of the planet” oversimplifies a more complex reality. Significant degradation exists, but it’s neither uniform nor irreversible, with regional variations and emerging evidence of successful restoration efforts providing important context.

So does the following premise hold?

As soils lose organic matter, structure, and nutrients through processes like erosion, salinisation, and compaction, their productivity declines. This reduces crop yields, increases dependence on chemical inputs, and leads to higher food prices and greater vulnerability, particularly for smallholder farmers and communities in arid and semi-arid regions.

A comprehensive meta-analysis by the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative estimated that soil degradation reduces global crop yields by 5% annually, resulting in the loss of 20 million tons of grain. Food security impacts are particularly severe in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, where studies have shown yield reductions of 2-40% directly attributable to soil degradation. These productivity losses disproportionately affect regions already experiencing food insecurity.

Degraded soils release carbon that was previously stored, contributing to atmospheric greenhouse gases, while healthy soils act as sinks, absorbing and storing carbon. Land degradation, including soil carbon loss, accounts for nearly one-quarter of global emissions when combined with deforestation and other land use changes. Thus, the loss of soil health is both a contributor to and a victim of a warming climate, creating feedback loops that further destabilise ecological and agricultural systems.

Water scarcity is exacerbated by degraded soils with reduced infiltration capacity and water-holding capacity. Compacted or eroded soils lead to increased surface runoff, diminished groundwater recharge, and greater vulnerability to both floods and droughts.

The economic dimensions of soil degradation for both commercial farmers practising intensive agriculture can be masked by higher inputs. Up to a point, they can spend to maintain yields. However, around 500 million of the world’s 570 million farmers operate smallholdings of less than two hectares that produce around one-third of the world’s food, often through more labour-intensive methods. These farmers are less flexible. The Economics of Land Degradation Initiative estimates that global economic losses from soil degradation amount to $40 billion annually, with much of this burden falling on rural communities. More locally, a study in Tanzania found that soil erosion reduced household income by up to 30% in severely affected areas. There are dozens of reliable studies like these.

Overall, the evidence demonstrates direct causal links between soil degradation and global crises, though nuanced by numerous confounding factors.

Rather than make the crisis about soil, it is much easier to focus on one or more of climate change, population growth and distribution, poverty and socio-economic inequality, unsustainable agricultural practices, water scarcity and mismanagement, failures of governance or policy, conflict and political instability. Given all this, it is easy to see why soil might not be top of the agenda.

Hence, the following premise…

A research analysis of over 4,000 climate change news stories over five years found that soil was mentioned in less than 5% of coverage, despite its critical role in carbon sequestration. Similarly, an analysis of environmental education curricula across 12 countries found that soil science accounted for less than 10% of the content compared to other ecological topics.

A year or two ago, I searched the Australian Labour Party’s federal election manifesto for the word ‘soil’. It appeared twice in over 200 pages of policy proposals, both instances being in broad descriptions of the Australian landscape. There were no explicit policy recommendations for soil. Perhaps the economic advisors to the would-be government didn’t think that an industry that fed all citizens and generated approximately AUD 76  billion in food-related exports in 2024 (roughly 4.3% of GDP) was important enough to have its foundation mentioned.

And it’s not just Australia.

While water, air, and biodiversity have dedicated UN conventions and extensive regulatory frameworks, soil lacks equivalent global governance structures. The proposed Global Soil Convention has failed to materialise despite decades of advocacy. National policies are similarly devoid. A review of environmental protection legislation across 27 countries found that while 92% had comprehensive frameworks for water and air quality, only 31% had equivalent protections for soil.

This invisibility emerges partly from historical scientific framing. Agricultural science has predominantly viewed soil as a growth medium, rather than an ecosystem. A bibliometric analysis of agricultural research publications between 1975 and 2015 showed that soil biology papers represented only 12% of soil science research until the early 2000s, with the majority focusing on soil chemistry and physics for crop production.

This premise that ‘soil remains largely invisible in public discourse’ is well-supported by evidence. Both quantitative media analyses and policy reviews demonstrate that soil receives disproportionately little attention relative to its ecological importance. The scientific literature further confirms the historical tendency to treat soil as an inert medium rather than a living system, though this perspective is gradually shifting in recent decades.

And the way we operate within a capitalist economic system, especially what we demand of the 91 million or so farmers who grow two-thirds of global food production, only seems to make it worse, which introduces the following premise…

Agricultural incentives reward extraction. A global review of subsidy regimes found that less than 15% of the $700 billion in annual agricultural subsidies include environmental conditions. Soil health is almost absent. In 54 countries, policies continue to channel ten times more public money into price supports and input subsidies than into conservation programs—even when those inputs accelerate soil degradation.

The short-term logic is hard to fault. Cost-benefit models show that conservation practices such as cover cropping or reduced tillage yield positive returns after 5 years. In the first one to three, they cost more than they save. When margins are thin and debt is high, transition costs kill viability. This makes degradation economically rational even when it is ecologically suicidal.

Land tenure structures embed this logic further.

Roughly 70% of farmland in industrialised nations and 50% in developing ones is farmed by someone other than the owner. Leasing periods typically run for 1 to 3 years. The economic benefits of soil stewardship accrue to owners over decades, while the costs land squarely on short-term operators. Economists call this a split incentive. Farmers call it untenable.

Tenure also adds external complications such as this one.

Agricultural land in New South Wales is no longer priced according to what it can produce. The historical relationship between land value and productive capacity has collapsed under layers of financial abstraction, speculative interest, and policy distortion. What was once a market grounded in yield potential is now shaped by capital flow, portfolio diversification, and macroeconomic signals far removed from the soil.

During the pandemic-era boom, prices surged across Australia, driven less by improvements in agricultural returns than by investor sentiment and fiscal liquidity. Institutional buyers, pension funds, and high-net-worth individuals treated farmland as a hedge against inflation and volatility. They made agricultural land an asset class, not a livelihood. In this context, water rights became tradable commodities, and land functioned more like infrastructure than ecosystem.

NSW was emblematic of this shift. Its farmland values soared and then fell sharply, dropping by over 24% in 2024 alone, as the speculative logic that drove the upswing lost momentum. The correction revealed that demand now reflects market psychology rather than agronomic reality. Yield is no longer the metric of value. The price of land has become detached from its productivity.

This detachment matters. It distorts decision-making, fuels extraction, and undermines ecological stewardship. When land is priced for exchange rather than function, soil becomes expendable. Capital chases short-term ownership, not long-term regeneration. In a financialised system, degradation is not a failure of farming but a rational response to the incentives in place. Investment flows toward maximum energy throughput, not conservation. Entropy is externalised, exported to the soil, which quietly collapses under the weight of short-term gain.

Meanwhile, the farmer still has to pay for inputs and operations.

The result of all this is structural soil exhaustion. Agricultural markets reward yield over regeneration, immediacy over stability. The mismatch between the timing of costs and the benefit horizons makes soil care a financial liability. Within prevailing economic conditions, destruction becomes the norm.

Soil takes a long time to make, typically thousands of years from the parent material. But its biology is fragile and can be depleted within a few years of intensive production following the initial disturbance from land clearing. We have known this since the early days of agriculture. It is the rationale behind shifting agriculture that dominates small-scale production. But slow is not easy for our cognitive and psychological responses that evolved to deal with the immediate. We struggle with the medium-term future and the ecological time of soil processes.

This brings us to the following premise…

Humans are not wired to worry about what they cannot see. Across 67 environmental risk perception studies, threats that were invisible and gradual scored consistently lower in concern. This happens even when objective risks are matched or exceeded by more visible dangers. Soil erosion, for example, evoked far less emotional response than images of deforestation or polluted rivers. The phenomenon is well known in psychology as ‘danger at a distance feels less urgent’, even if it does not.

Soil degradation sits at the bottom of this perceptual hierarchy.

It’s not that unhealthy soil is any less dangerous than biodiversity loss or pollution; it’s just that it fails to trigger our evolved warning systems.

Emotional attachment follows similar rules. Biophilia studies show that humans bond more easily with nature’s charismatic features—trees, rivers, and animals—than with the substrate beneath them. In six countries, fewer than 10% of children included soil in their drawings of “nature”; over 70% drew forests, birds, or water. What is not seen is not felt.

Soil becomes ecologically essential yet emotionally irrelevant. The result is a collective blind spot. We talk of planetary care while ignoring the biological infrastructure that makes life possible.

The neural mechanics reinforce the bias. The human brain evolved to detect movement, change, and surface cues. Soil, even in the hand, offers none. Its living components operate at the microbial scale. Its functions unfold over seasons, not seconds. Even tactile engagement, like the feel of humus between the fingers, struggles to create emotional traction. Soil remains cognitively inert, neurologically quiet. The systems designed to alert us to threats barely register their decline.

This perceptual indifference is a problem in cognitive architecture. Soil’s invisibility, its slowness, and its structural subtlety place it outside the bounds of ordinary concern. This makes it dangerously easy to overlook, especially when industrial agriculture masks its degradation with inputs and yield charts.

What cannot be seen cannot be felt. And what cannot be felt rarely gets protected.

So the last premise follows…

Technological optimism has long concealed the erosion beneath our feet. The Green Revolution boosted global cereal yields by around 150% from 1960 to 2000, driven not by soil regeneration but by seed genetics, synthetic fertilisers, and irrigation infrastructure. These tools delivered impressive gains. But as soil scientist Rattan Lal observed, they also created an “illusion of permanence,” a belief that yield declines could be indefinitely reversed through new inputs. Longitudinal data sacross 38 countries shows that nitrogen efficiency fell by 22% between 1961 and 2010, signalling a system that demands more to achieve less.

The limits are no longer theoretical.

A meta-analysis of 610 studies shows that once soil organic matter drops below key thresholds, additional fertiliser cannot restore lost productivity. The same pattern holds for irrigation where declining soil structure undermines gains in water efficiency. Biology resists substitution. Mycorrhizal networks and microbial diversity, foundational to nutrient cycling and plant health, cannot be engineered at scale. Their loss marks a boundary that no amount of capital or chemistry can cross.

The most sobering data comes from the Rothamsted Experimental Station, where agricultural field trials have been running since 1843. Yep, that’s close to 200 years. These plots offer a rare longitudinal lens: fields managed solely with synthetic inputs show long-term productivity decline despite ongoing technological upgrades. By contrast, those maintaining soil organic matter have sustained yields for over a century. Decadal data reveal that soil decline unfolds slowly, then all at once, a pattern hard to see in short-term studies. They also show that technological substitution only delays, never prevents, collapse.

The premise holds across the evidence base. Innovation has masked degradation, but not reversed it. Industrial agriculture engineered a mirage of sustainability on weakening foundations and high yields. The illusion persists until the soil no longer does.

What remains is the biophysical fact that without living soil, there is no long-term agriculture, no ecological buffer, and no stable food system. Only the memory of a yield curve and the cost of ignoring what it caused.

Since the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process has poured synthetic nitrogen into agriculture, rewriting the planet’s nitrogen cycle and enabling billions to be fed.

The mark of this intervention is inside us. Half the proteins in our bodies are built from crops and livestock raised on artificial fertiliser. Isotope analyses show that most people alive today get their nitrogen not from microbes in living soil, but from machines burning fossil fuels. We are no longer just biological organisms. We are, at least in part, biochemical artefacts of an industrial process.

The nitrogen that sustains us is also the nitrogen that leaks into rivers, fuels ocean dead zones, and strips soil of its innate fertility. Human health and planetary health are chemically entangled. The same process that keeps us alive degrades the foundation that feeds us. We live inside a system that turns fossil energy into food and quietly dismantles the natural cycles it replaced. This is not an external threat. It is a system we embody. Humanity and its livestock are the consequence of a massive injection of fossil energy.

Nature no longer exists apart from human design. Our bones, blood, and muscles bear the signature of industrial systems, just as landscapes and climates do. This shatters the romantic idea of an untouched nature. It makes us hybrid beings, metabolising a planet we have remade. And if we carry the trace of that transformation in our bodies, we also carry the responsibility for deciding whether the next imprint will be regeneration or collapse.

And in this, we deflect responsibility. We ignore the ecological remake and its consequences, especially for the foundation of our food.

The neglect of soil is often blamed on poor communication. We just don’t make it alive and sexy enough. But the problem is that human attention is tuned to movement, threat, and social cues. We pay attention to fast, visible, and emotionally charged events. Soil is slow, quiet, and mostly hidden. It changes in increments too small for the senses, offers no immediate danger signal, and seldom enters conversation unless it fails.

In the hierarchy of human perception, soil sits below the threshold for notice.

Modern life widens this gap. Urban infrastructure and digital immersion keep most people from direct contact with the ground. For a billion or so in the Global North, milk comes from the fridge after a trip to the supermarket, perhaps even delivered to the door. In this world of convenience, soil has shifted from a medium of daily engagement to a distant abstraction. Even in environmental discourse, air and water command the headlines while soil barely registers. No matter that it is the base layer of food, climate regulation, and biodiversity.

All this is a collapse of imagination. People rarely defend what they cannot picture, touch, or emotionally recognise. Out of sight really is out of mind, even when it is where almost all your food comes from.

This blindness has consequences. What remains unseen will not be defended, even as it erodes, acidifies, or loses its living architecture. Protecting soil requires more than data or legislation. It demands ways of making it visible again and not as inert matter but as a living system on which all terrestrial life depends. Until we recalibrate our awareness, the ground beneath our feet will remain overlooked and continue to disappear.

And when the problem does come to mind, we cannot blame the messenger.

The idea that farmers degrade land because they lack knowledge is lazy thinking. Most know exactly what their practices do to the soil. They also know the numbers. They know that subsidies, commodity prices, insecure tenure, and debt push them toward short-term yield. The quickest route to income is intensive, input-heavy farming, even if it erodes the base it stands on. In an economic system that ignores ecological costs, extraction is not ignorance. For a farmer, it means feeding his family.

This logic embeds over generations. Land and techniques pass together, along with the expectations that keep farmers locked into the same patterns. Sustainable alternatives may exist, but they often demand more capital, more risk, and less immediate return. For anyone operating on thin margins in volatile markets and shifting weather, such choices look like gambles, not improvements. What appears irrational from an ecological standpoint is adaptive from an economic one.

Behaviour change campaigns and awareness programs will not fix a system that rewards depletion. Reform must alter the incentives so that care for the land pays better than stripping it. That requires policies and markets that make stewardship the rational default. And it requires recognising that many farmers are caught in a cycle they did not choose, one that extends far beyond their fields.

We say we value resilience, sustainability, and future generations. Yet we eat from degraded fields like aristocrats in a collapsing empire, clinking glasses while the floorboards rot beneath us. The more honest admission is that we value cheap calories today over a livable planet tomorrow. This is not a case of people being unaware of the soil’s role. Farmers know. Scientists know. Policy staff know. The neglect persists because the cost of protecting soil falls on those least able to absorb it, while the benefits are too far in the future to tempt anyone with power.

We have built climate frameworks, biodiversity targets, and water policy on the assumption that soil will quietly keep doing its job. The truth is the reverse. Those frameworks stand on soil. Remove every other environmental policy tomorrow and leave the soil intact, and civilisation will still muddle through. Remove the soil, and the rest is theatre. The foundation we ignore is not just beneath our feet; it is beneath every plan we think will save us.

In the summer of 1985, I was a postgraduate student spending long hours in the laboratory and on trips to chalky grasslands. My research focused on whether woodlice populations showed signs of density-dependent population regulation. Can a relative of shrimps that lives in compost control its numbers?

The academic buzz among ecologists at the time was the theory that populations could regulate their numbers in response to resource constraints. I was running around to find out whether they could, and they did. When woodlice compete for food, they grow less, have fewer but bigger offspring, and this reflects in stable populations, more or less. You can imagine my enthusiasm when the research was published in prestigious academic journals.

Hassall M., Dangerfield J.M. (1990) Density-dependent processes in the population dynamics of Armadillidium vulgare (Isopoda: Oniscidae). Journal of Animal Ecology 59: 941-958

Dangerfield J.M., Hassall M. (1992) Phenotypic variation in the breeding phenology of the woodlouse Armadillidium vulgare. Oecologia 89: 140-146

While this was happening, a defining global moment in music and humanitarian activism occurred. Live Aid happened. Conceived by musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure as a response to the ongoing famine in Ethiopia, which had been widely broadcast through harrowing news reports since 1984. A monumental event was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. It was one of the first truly global satellite broadcasts, reaching an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion viewers across more than 150 countries.

The concert featured some of the most iconic names in rock and pop music at the time, including Queen, U2, David Bowie, Elton John, The Who, and Paul McCartney in London, as well as acts such as Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Madonna, and Mick Jagger in Philadelphia. Queen’s performance, in particular, is often hailed as one of the greatest live shows in rock history.

The event combined the spectacle of entertainment with a sense of urgent moral purpose, generating around £150 million (in today’s money) for famine relief and setting a new benchmark for celebrity-led activism. It demonstrated how mass media could be harnessed for charitable causes on a scale never before seen.

It also sparked in me—and presumably in many others—the notion that famine was a real phenomenon. There were people less fortunate than I in lands far away who lacked access to sufficient food.

These people were hungry, their children were hungry, and starvation was an everyday reality. As a nascent population ecologist, I knew what this meant. When resources are limited, density-dependent mechanisms begin with poor juvenile survival, slow development, and slower reproduction and, after the children die, end with adult starvation.

Easy to see and study in woodlice, but much harder to accept in human populations.

What’s better than avoiding these implications by bathing in popular culture and still feeling like the starving will benefit?

It didn’t take long for the 1983–1985 Ethiopian famine to end and the catastrophe to be forgotten. However, in the four decades since, famines—formally defined as crises with extreme food scarcity leading to widespread malnutrition and excess mortality—have continued, with more than 30 significant famines globally, primarily driven by conflict, climate extremes, economic instability, and governance failures.

Prominent examples include the Somalia famine of 1991–92, caused by civil war and state collapse; the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s which was worsened by state isolation and economic mismanagement; the South Sudan famine of 2017, declared in Unity State due to conflict and restricted humanitarian access; and the ongoing Yemen crisis, where years of war and blockade have pushed millions to the brink.

Other regions severely affected by famine include Sudan, Nigeria (especially the northeast due to the Boko Haram conflict), Syria, Afghanistan, parts of the Sahel, and now Gaza.

In many other cases, famine was either declared or narrowly averted thanks to humanitarian intervention.

Global inequality, displacement from climate change, and deliberate obstruction of aid continue to make famine a real threat for tens of millions. It remains a persistent and acute political and ethical failure.

Significantly, while the frequency of declared famines has decreased, thanks to improved monitoring and crisis interventions, the scale of food insecurity is growing, with 2024 data showing over 250 million people worldwide facing acute hunger.

I doubt I could list these famine events or the statistics for the hungry without looking them up. After Live Aid made me aware, famine did not persist in my consciousness even though I spent a decade living in Africa, probably because I never went hungry.

Even when researching for The Mindful Sceptic Guide to Food Security, where I went beyond supermarket shelves into the complex, precarious systems that feed humanity, I didn’t mention famine. Instead, I examined how soil health, geopolitics, and human behaviour intertwine to create vulnerabilities and opportunities, ensuring everyone has reliable access to nutritious food in a changing world.

My tacit assumption has always been that it was not a food problem. I did not see any reason to question the first premise for this essay…

I was right not to question the global food system’s capacity to generate calories, as evidence suggests this premise holds.

The world produces approximately 5,935 kilocalories per person per day from crops and livestock that humans could consume, with an additional 3,812 kcal of vegetable matter produced for animal consumption. This production capacity significantly exceeds basic human requirements. The actual food available for human consumption (after accounting for waste, losses, animal feed, and industrial uses) is called the per capita energy from food and has continued to increase over time, reaching 2,978 kcal/person/day in 2021.

This per-person energy production from food exceeds basic needs by a significant margin.

Whilst the minimum dietary energy requirement (MDER) varies by country, the FAO suggests that the average minimum is approximately 2,000 kcal per adult, ranging from 1,600 to 3,000 calories per day, depending on a person’s age, size, height, lifestyle, and activity level. So, an average daily production of close to 3,000 kilocalories exceeds the minimum requirement by a third.

Of course, averages mask significant disparities.

North America had 3,752 kcal/person/day available in 2016-18, whilst Sub-Saharan Africa had only 2,386 kcal/person/day during the same period. While calorie availability in Southern Asia rose by 6% over a decade, in Sub-Saharan Africa it almost stagnated, increasing by only 0.6%.

Go a little closer still, and within countries, food distribution follows economic inequality. For example, estimates from research in Mexico suggest that the bottom 25% of the population by income consumed approximately 1,657 kcal/day, while the top 25% consumed 2,727 kcal/day. Diet composition also varies significantly, with the poor obtaining a much higher percentage of calories from cereals (63.8%) than the wealthy (43.9%).

Food security nuances aside, global food production generates enough calories to adequately feed everyone.

We are not short of food.

However, we are short of slack in the system that keeps it flowing. The Second Law of Thermodynamics quietly guarantees that slack evaporates over time because energy disperses, and systems drift toward disorder unless actively maintained. In food systems, that slack isn’t a luxury; it’s the buffer that slows collapse when shocks arrive.

And so, with approximately 5,935 kilocalories of human-edible crops produced per person per day and 2,978 kcal available after accounting for losses and other uses, current production exceeds the typical minimum requirement of around 2,000 kcal per day.

The premise, therefore, holds with respect to global production capacity. Enough calories are grown to feed everyone.

Apologies for the repetition, but this blind spot is big enough to hide a semi-trailer. Whatever motivated Sir Bob Geldof to take action against a famine in Africa in the 1980s shouldn’t happen today. There is enough food produced.

This is true because modern farming converts fossil fuels into food through energy-intensive fertilisers, mechanisation, and global supply chains. Over half of the worldwide population of 8 billion, increasing by 8,000 people an hour, is fed sufficient calories through an energy-intensive and technology-rich food system. The rest of humanity feeds itself by growing food in smallholdings, some 500 million of them.

So are recent famines occasional aberrations or systemic risks? The answer depends on the relative vulnerability of the food system that delivers 3,000 kcals per day, which prompts the following premise…

This premise is strongly supported by evidence. The principal vulnerabilities stem from volatility in input costs, climate change, monoculture production, the corporatisation of food, the energy transition, and soil health.

Each can destabilise the supply chain, in part or even bring it to a total collapse.

Fertiliser production relies heavily on natural gas for ammonia synthesis and on oil for pesticides, meaning that energy price spikes directly translate into food cost increases. For example, UK farmers faced an additional £760 million in costs during the 2021 energy crisis alone. Geopolitical tensions amplify these vulnerabilities, as we saw when Russia imposed fertiliser export restrictions, sending shockwaves through global agricultural markets. Moving agricultural produce from paddocks in the countryside to plates in the cities requires more than just transport. Along the food chain, petrochemicals support the production of plastics, preservatives, and chemical inputs. The apparent abundance in supermarket aisles depends on extractive processes facing physical limits and market turbulence. It’s easy to discuss food security in terms of yield and distribution while overlooking the fundamental energy dependencies that could rapidly unravel seemingly stable food systems.

Industrial agriculture contributes roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions through fertiliser production, machinery operation, and transportation. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers alone generate more greenhouse gases than commercial aviation while simultaneously degrading soil health and biodiversity. This emissions burden then returns as climate chaos through intensified droughts, floods, and heatwaves that further disrupt the very food production systems that created the problem.

Particularly concerning is how this self-reinforcing cycle could accelerate. Climate impacts reduce yields, prompting farmers to apply more fossil-intensive inputs to compensate, thereby increasing emissions and exacerbating climate destabilisation. This is more than an environmental concern for youngsters to march about because it is an existential threat to food security and another blind spot.

Fossil-fuel-based agricultural systems have enabled unprecedented agricultural specialisation. In the U.S., in states like Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas, which are key wheat producers, it’s not unusual for a single wheat field to exceed 400 hectares, with entire farms comprising multiple such fields. This enables the efficient use of large-scale combines, seed drills, and aerial spraying, which are crucial to maintaining profitability, given the relatively low market price per ton of wheat compared to other crops.

Cheap energy inputs also enable the cultivation of massive monocultures of corn, soy, and rice, which together with wheat now account for approximately 60% of global calories, resulting in a precarious lack of diversity. Monocultures require constant applications of fossil-derived pesticides because they lack the ecological resilience of diverse systems, essentially substituting biodiversity with petrochemicals. The vulnerability becomes particularly evident in disruptions. A novel pest or pathogen affecting just one of these staple crops could threaten global food security in ways unprecedented in human history.

Lack of crop and production diversity is another blind spot.

We have replaced ecological resilience with petrochemical consistency and called it progress. In complexity terms, we’ve traded adaptive webs for a single-thread lifeline. Petrochemical uniformity depletes low-entropy resources rapidly, accelerating disorder while eliminating the feedback loops that ecosystems rely on to mitigate disruption.

The fossil-food relationship persists partly through powerful institutional inertia and deliberate industry strategies to maintain dependency. Fossil fuel companies are actively expanding into agricultural petrochemicals as the energy transition threatens their core business. At the same time, agrochemical firms promote technological fixes like carbon capture and “blue ammonia” that greenwash rather than resolve fossil fuel dependence. These corporate strategies effectively delay transitions to more sustainable practices by promising easy solutions that maintain existing power structures and business models.

Transitioning food systems away from fossil dependencies is an obvious solution to these risks.

‘Green’ alternatives, such as electric tractors and fossil-free fertilisers, remain underdeveloped, while critical minerals needed for renewable technologies face scarcity and environmental concerns. The sheer energy intensity of industrial agriculture, which consumes approximately 15% of global fossil fuels through processing, refrigeration, packaging, and transport, makes decarbonisation particularly challenging.

The daunting reality is that, just to reduce systemic risk, the intensive food system that feeds most people in cities must undergo a fundamental redesign during the same period that climate impacts are intensifying.

For now, it is enough to know that industrial agriculture’s fossil fuel dependence creates interconnected risks from price shocks, climate degradation, monoculture fragility, corporate entrenchment, and stalled transitions. These vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to global food security, particularly as climate impacts intensify.

As I present them here, these risks may seem abstract, but they can quickly become realities that affect millions of lives. These vulnerabilities aren’t theoretical concerns for some distant future because they’re actively reshaping our present.

During Australia’s Millennium Drought, which lasted nearly 13 years, unprecedented dry conditions devastated agricultural output and threatened water security. Industrial production systems were particularly vulnerable due to their reliance on irrigation and fossil-powered infrastructure. Having walked through parched Australian farmland during this period, I witnessed firsthand how quickly century-old agricultural assumptions can unravel when climate patterns shift.

What strikes me as particularly concerning is how these disruptions are occurring while we’re still in the early stages of climate change, the impacts at just 1.2°C of warming, while current trajectories point toward far greater destabilisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war brutally exposed the brittleness of our globalised food networks, which depend on abundant, cheap, fossil-fuelled transportation. When pandemic restrictions and conflict disrupted shipping and trucking, we witnessed the surreal contradiction of food rotting in fields while supermarket shelves stood empty and hunger increased. Just-in-time supply chains, optimised for efficiency, are fragile.

They are vulnerable to shocks.

Efficiency is a fair-weather friend. From a complexity perspective, efficiency pares away the redundancies that act as entropy brakes. When the storm hits, only systems with diverse pathways and internal slack can slow the drift toward disorder long enough for societies to adapt.

And if all this wasn’t enough, there is another, even more critical risk, an even bigger blind spot than intensification with finite fossil energy. The headline statistic comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation… 40% of global soils are degraded.

I’ll just leave that one hanging in bold.

Lose the soil, and we lose the plot entirely. Remember that healthy soil is a concentrated order with billions of living agents cycling energy and matter in intricate loops. Strip that away, and entropy wins fast; the energy pathways collapse, and rebuilding them takes centuries in nature’s slow time.

All this deserves a book on its own, but for now, it gets the following premise…

Soil degradation directly threatens agricultural productivity through erosion, salinisation, acidification, and loss of organic matter. The impacts are already severe and widespread. For example, Australia faces salinity affecting 1 million hectares of farmland, with 2.8–4.5 million more at risk, while Central Asia has experienced crop yield declines of 30% over three decades due to soil erosion and desertification.

The scale is staggering: 75% of South American soils are now degraded, resulting in $60 billion in annual agricultural losses. If current trends continue, projections suggest 95% of global soils could be degraded by 2050.

While climate change poses independent threats through shifting weather patterns and ocean acidification, many of its impacts on food systems are ultimately mediated through soil health.

And I chose that last word carefully because soil is alive. Healthy soil teems with a myriad of life forms, including bacteria, fungi, earthworms, nematodes, arthropods, and plant roots, each playing essential roles in nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, water filtration, and plant health. These organisms create a dynamic living system that underpins terrestrial ecosystems and food production. However, widespread land-use change, intensive agriculture, pollution (notably pesticides and heavy metals), deforestation, soil sealing by urbanisation, and climate change are leading to a measurable decline in soil biodiversity everywhere.

A teaspoon of living soil holds more solutions than a warehouse of fertiliser.

The consequences of soil biodiversity loss are profound. Without the organisms that aerate the soil, break down organic matter, and suppress diseases, soils become compacted, less fertile, and more prone to erosion. Reduced microbial diversity can weaken plant health, making crops more susceptible to pests and diseases while increasing the need for chemical inputs. Furthermore, the diminished biological integrity of soil impairs carbon sequestration processes, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the land’s capacity to adapt to climatic shifts. Such losses are often insidious and complex to detect until degradation becomes visible and challenging to reverse.

Soil degradation poses a more immediate and foundational threat to food security because it directly undermines the agricultural productivity bedrock of food systems.

However, it is not all doom and gloom. I can point you to evidence showing how it is possible to restore soil health through regenerative agriculture, reduced tillage, and organic amendments. Regeneration and restoration offer the dual benefit of boosting food production and sequestering carbon to mitigate climate change.

These aren’t blind spots, more like fumbling around in the depths of a cave a few hundred meters underground with no light.

There is a glimmer, though. A faint light in the distance encapsulated in the last premise…

Degraded soil results in crop and livestock production losses because damaged soils lose their water retention capacity. For example, loss of organic matter can reduce the soil’s ability to hold water by up to 90%, significantly worsening vulnerability to drought.

And it takes centuries for degraded soil to naturally replenish.

Forming just 1 cm of topsoil from bedrock typically takes several hundred to over a thousand years, depending on climate and geology, and current human-driven erosion rates often outpace this many times over. Yet it is possible to restore soil function far more quickly. Regenerative and agroecological practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping, composting, and reduced tillage can rebuild organic matter, enhance microbial life, and reduce dependence on synthetic inputs.

These methods improve fertility, sequester carbon, and strengthen resilience to climate extremes. Where degradation is modest, such practices can restore much of a soil’s productivity within a few seasons or cropping cycles, with deeper recovery continuing over years.

Work with nature, and it will reorganise life from the ground up. Complex systems thrive by self-organisation. Allow the right flows of energy and diversity of actors, and they rebuild structure and function without central control. Regenerative agriculture plugs into this property, letting nature do the work that entropy has undone.

Conventional narratives often frame these practices as less productive or difficult to scale, yet growing evidence shows they can rival or even surpass conventional yields while sharply reducing reliance on fossil fuel–derived inputs. Fields managed regeneratively typically show richer soil structure, greater biodiversity, and improved water-holding capacity, evident even to the untrained eye.

Here is another doable option. Shortening supply chains and diversifying production builds resilience against the shocks we’ve seen in recent years. Local food systems with varied crops reduce reliance on global transport and fragile monocultures while keeping more value in communities.

Community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets are spreading worldwide, fostering direct producer–consumer ties and bypassing fossil-intensive distribution. I’ve seen how these models create not just alternative supply chains but new relationships to food itself, often reviving traditional practices that sustained communities long before fossil fuels made distance and specialisation seem advantageous. Critics dismiss localisation as inefficient nostalgia, but a mindful sceptic sees it as sophisticated risk management.

Integrating renewable energy into agricultural operations is one of the most promising paths to reduce fossil fuel dependence while maintaining productivity. Solar panels, wind turbines, and biogas digesters can power farm operations while often lowering long-term energy costs and creating additional income streams.

Many Australian farms now operate partially or fully on solar power, utilising renewable energy for irrigation, refrigeration, and machinery. Farmers take pride in achieving energy self-sufficiency as both an environmental choice and a business strategy that reduces their vulnerability to price volatility. The conventional narrative often frames renewable transition as prohibitively expensive for agriculture, but declining technology costs and innovative financing models are rapidly changing this equation. What’s particularly noteworthy is how this energy transition can reshape power dynamics in food systems, reducing farmers’ dependence on both fossil fuel suppliers and centralised energy infrastructure.

Here are some more real-world examples that demonstrate both the urgency of reducing fossil fuel dependencies and the practical pathways already emerging.

• Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has demonstrated significant benefits across multiple metrics. CSA practices such as drought-resistant crops and precision farming have increased rice yields in Sri Lanka by 15% during dry seasons, while simultaneously reducing water use by 10–20% and fertiliser use by 27%. On the resilience front, improved water management techniques and early planting strategies have helped farmers adapt to erratic rainfall patterns, ensuring stable crop yields even during drought conditions.

• Regenerative Agriculture has proven its effectiveness in both productivity and resilience. In Brazil, the Balbo Group achieved 20% higher sugarcane productivity using regenerative methods, including organic waste recycling and reduced soil compression. Studies by the Rodale Institute have consistently shown that regenerative farms outperform conventional operations during droughts, primarily because healthier soil systems retain water more effectively.

• Agroforestry and Diversification approaches have transformed landscapes and livelihoods. Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration initiatives in West Africa have successfully restored 5 million hectares of previously degraded land, directly boosting food security for 2.5 million people. The integration of trees with traditional crops provides a natural buffer against extreme weather events and pest outbreaks, while simultaneously enhancing overall soil fertility and ecosystem health.

• Precision and Sustainable Input Use create efficiencies that benefit both farmers and the environment. Soil testing and targeted fertilisation programs in Sri Lanka have reduced fertiliser use by 27% without affecting crop yields. This efficient resource utilisation not only lowers operational costs for farmers but also reduces their dependency on volatile external inputs, creating more stable and sustainable agricultural systems.

The alternative agricultural premise is strongly supported by evidence from diverse global case studies and research.

It can be done and is being done even within conventional food systems.

The regenerative solution might be contrary to the agenda of agricultural conglomerates and fossil fuel companies, and even to politicians frightened of the blame they will get if supermarket shelves are empty for even a second, but it makes logical sense to everyone else. It easily passes the pub test.

So here is the heresy.

In the Global North, we are blind to how precarious our food security has become.

Our blind spots of fossil fuel dependency, soil degradation, and monoculture vulnerability persist not as isolated failures but as interconnected consequences of how we’ve designed our agricultural systems.

The premise that global food production currently generates enough calories to feed everyone adequately technically holds true, yet masks the profound fragility built into that production. We remain collectively blind to these vulnerabilities until crisis strikes, not because evidence is lacking, but because our siloed thinking prevents us from seeing across system boundaries.

Seen thermodynamically, these policy errors express a deeper law. We’ve built systems that accelerate entropy while dismantling the complexity that could pace it. The result is fragility by design.

And this blindness persists for three critical reasons.

First, the very success of industrial agriculture in producing abundant calories creates the illusion of permanent security.

Second, the compartmentalisation of expertise, with energy experts rarely engaging soil scientists, and economists seldom consulting ecologists, fragments our understanding of these interconnected systems.

Third, powerful economic interests benefit from maintaining these blind spots, as addressing them would require fundamental restructuring of global agricultural business models.

A mindful sceptic approach allows us to transcend these limitations by questioning not just whether we produce enough food, but how we produce it and at what hidden costs. It requires intellectual humility to acknowledge that our modern food miracle rests on temporary subsidies of fossil energy and depleting soil capital. When we approach food security with this broader awareness, we begin to see that resilience requires diversity in crops, in production methods, and in supply networks.

Overcoming our collective blindness requires that we learn to see systems rather than symptoms, tracing connections between energy, soil, climate, and food that typically remain invisible. The security of our food future depends not merely on producing more calories, but on recognising the fundamental ecological relationships that make any food production possible. Systems thinking means seeing that energy, soil, climate, and food are all part of the same dissipative structure. That is an ordered flow held together temporarily against entropy’s pull. Without that frame, we’ll keep treating symptoms while the structure continues to erode.

This shift in perspective isn’t simply academic; it’s essential for anyone who expects to eat in the coming decades of increasing instability.

And what about that density-dependence?

When food is scarce, organisms will compete for it, with increasing intensity as the scarcity deepens. This begins as a bit of shoving and scurrying and ends with some individuals missing out. They survive for a while but get weaker and less able to compete as their calorie intake slows. They find it hard to reproduce, and eventually they stop growing and starve, especially youngsters.

This is woodlice, of course, but it could easily be people.

TL;DR

Western liberal democracy governs just 13% of humanity, yet we’ve built our entire worldview assuming this minority experience defines universal political aspiration. Democracy emerged during the era of fossil fuel abundance and promised perpetual growth for a billion privileged people. Extending this model globally would require 400% more resources, even though we’ve already breached six planetary boundaries. The mathematics are brutal. Meanwhile, 7 billion people navigate life under alternative governance systems that evolved strategies for resource scarcity rather than abundance fantasies. These systems feature stronger state coordination, fewer consumption promises, and cultural adaptation to limits. The uncomfortable reality is that our democratic institutions become brittle when defending their form against resource constraints, thereby consuming energy that would otherwise be used for practical adaptation. Because the polycrisis operates according to physical laws, not political preferences, we need governance that enables legitimate decision-making, adaptive capacity, distributed experimentation, and fair resource allocation, all within ecological limits. But the governance systems we cherish most may not be the ones humanity needs when abundance ends.

After Donald Trump won his second term, I stopped listening to political podcasts. I had been an avid consumer, soaking up all the analysis and gossip from the pundits as though they were genuine gurus; the real deal.

The Rest is Politics was one of my favourites, and for months, the 2024 UK election held sway with its prospects for a landslide into power for the left in a country that has always thought it was right. No matter that it had been run for years by pathological liars and the ultra-privileged, with all traces of empathy gone.

Will they do it? Surely they must. Can it be? Yes.

I felt the anticipation and the relief all the way from the Antipodes.

When the podcasts had milked all the tension, they swiftly transitioned. Soon they were asking, ‘How would the Democrats go? ’ in the US. And when the US results came in, my gurus were stunned, near speechless, and wrong. They had assumed that the process of democracy was proper and would deliver a sensible result. When it didn’t, they were speechless and couldn’t admit why their hubris failed them, and I ghosted them all in dismay.

But my cold turkey on the commentary didn’t negate the political turmoil or my emotional exposure. I had to do something. So I thought about it, had a few conversations with the chatbots and came to a realisation… I, they, we, don’t know the half of it.

Because we are not even half of it.

The billion or so people in mature economies, which we refer to as Western or the Global North, have a consolidated worldview of capitalism dressed in a dark grey suit of democracy. I have been indoctrinated into this framework, using it to view the entire world order. This is both naive and stupid. There are 7 billion other humans who don’t have this specific experience of neo-liberalism and its entitled leadership. What do they think?

But before I could explore the social contracts employed by the vast majority of humanity, I had to start with the fear that my worldview—the trick that is liberal democracy—was in trouble.

Because I write about them all the time, I know the threats. They cascade across ecological, financial, and social systems, with each crisis making subsequent crises harder to solve. The polycrisis represents a new emergent condition of global vulnerability that requires understanding systems as a whole rather than addressing each crisis in isolation. It is the collective consequence of material progress and energy risk.

I can summarise it for you like this…

The global population of 8 billion people, increasing by 8,000 every hour, relies on a daily supply of 23 trillion kilocalories of food energy, generated through a fragile mix of subsistence farming and fossil fuel–driven industrial agriculture that, while sufficient in volume, is undermined by inefficiencies in distribution, waste, and nutritional quality. And it all has to follow the second law of thermodynamics.

We have ourselves a people problem.

https://open.substack.com/pub/mindfulsceptics/p/the-polycrisis-problem?r=4o0vy1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Writing about food security, population, biodiversity loss, and the myriad consequences of polycrisis in the Mindful Sceptic newsletter and various books is scary, borders on illegal, and readily brings on anxiety and depression. But it helps me to see the patterns. One is that more and more people are living in and seeking to join a system that exploits nature for human benefit because it offers comfort, safety, and luxury.

At the same time, many people in the Global North feel that the fruits are under threat or becoming increasingly scarce and hard to obtain. They somehow sense that the neoliberal economic system that has underwritten them for decades is being disrupted by the prospect of slower growth and the reality that Earth’s resources are finite.

One way out of such fear is to attach yourself to anyone brave enough to question the status quo, especially if they can identify with your tribe and promise a return to the good old days of plenty. This has, among other things, brought various right-wing political ideologies to power or to the brink of power.

So here is my first premise…

The disruption of Western democracy and its underpinning neoliberal economic model, driven by slowing growth and finite resources, has contributed to the rise of right-wing political movements.

For much of the post-World War II period, Western democracies operated within a broadly neoliberal economic framework built upon free markets, deregulation, and global trade. When all those factories that used to churn out munitions and warplanes were retrofitted for cars, tractors and whitegoods, it, for a time, delivered sustained growth and rising living standards.

When I was a kid in the UK, a colour television was a requirement for living above the poverty line. Now, everyone who wants one has at least two. They can go to a supermarket with 30,000 different food products and be told these wonders are theirs for a little hard work.

However, growth rates have slowed, inequalities widened, and the ecological limits of Earth’s resources have become undeniable. The neoliberal growth model’s assumptions are exposed. Its promises have become increasingly hollow. Voters disillusioned by stagnant wages, diminished opportunities, and environmental degradation question the legitimacy of political and economic elites who champion the old order.

If your wages have been declining in real terms, your landlord raises the rent, and all your utilities cost more, maintaining your living standard is becoming harder every day. A spike in egg prices, however temporary, becomes more than trivial. It signals a bleak future and a present marked by struggle.

In this uncertainty, right-wing political movements have found fertile ground. They offer simple, often nationalist, narratives that blame “outsiders”, especially immigrants, supranational institutions, or global corporations, for declining national prosperity and autonomy. They promise to restore control to the people, albeit through exclusionary or authoritarian means, positioning themselves as defenders against the failures of neoliberal globalism and liberal democratic institutions. In some countries, such groups have already attained power; in others, they are major opposition forces shaping national discourse.

In 2016, Donald Trump’s America First platform explicitly rejected free trade agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, criticised globalisation for harming American workers, and promised to restore manufacturing jobs. His appeal to economic nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment resonated, especially with voters who felt abandoned by both traditional conservative and liberal elites. In 2024, he came around again with more of the same, then carried out and carried on.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party consolidated power through an illiberal democracy that prioritised national identity and border control, and rejected supranational governance, particularly that of the European Union. Orbán’s government frames its policies as a defence against economic globalisation and demographic change, often blaming external forces for Hungary’s social and financial challenges.

Similarly, Italy’s right-wing parties, such as Lega and Brothers of Italy, have gained significant support by opposing EU fiscal rules, promoting strict immigration controls, and appealing to voters disillusioned with low wages and bureaucratic governance from Brussels.

All this is populism, less a fixed ideology than a political style or logic that sets up a binary conflict between the pure people and the corrupt elite. In these examples, it is right-wing populism, grounded in nationalism, cultural identity, and opposition to immigration or global institutions. It works through the rhetorical appeal to the will of the ordinary people, who are portrayed as morally superior to those in power.

While many find solace in the rhetoric, others are nervous. Some people see all this as new, disruptive and a threat to the liberal democracy that they were born into. But students of history can be more sanguine. None of this is new. It has happened before, to varying degrees. For example, in Europe between the wars and during the 1970s oil crisis. Even the Romans had populist leaders.

History prompts a second premise…

Historically, periods of economic disruption, perceived resource scarcity, and declining trust in political elites can fuel the rise of nationalist and authoritarian movements, reshaping or destabilising existing democratic systems.

Between the two World Wars, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, many European nations experienced profound economic hardship, exacerbated by the Great Depression. One minute, you are partying hard through the Roaring ‘20s, and the next, 15 million Americans are unemployed—a quarter of the labour force. Traditional liberal economic models failed to restore prosperity, and democratic governments appeared incapable of solving massive unemployment, inflation, and social unrest.

In this environment of instability and fear, authoritarian nationalist movements, such as Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany, rose to power. They offered simple, emotionally charged narratives that promised economic revival, national restoration, and the identification of scapegoats (minorities, immigrants, foreign powers) for the nation’s problems. There was endless hardship and tragedy before they were replaced.

In the late Roman Republic, as Rome’s expansion slowed and the costs of maintaining its vast empire increased, wealth became concentrated among a small elite. At the same time, ordinary citizens faced declining economic security. Political institutions that had once managed competing interests became gridlocked and corrupt, creating space for populist leaders like Julius Caesar to mobilise discontent against the traditional ruling classes. The Republic ultimately gave way to imperial autocracy, a transition primarily driven by the erosion of economic and social stability.

A more recent, yet instructive, case is the 1970s energy crisis. When oil prices quadrupled and economic growth slowed sharply, faith in post-war liberal economic management eroded, setting the stage for the rise of new political ideologies, including neoliberalism itself, championed by Reagan and Thatcher. While short of authoritarianism—although coal miners in the UK might disagree—neo-liberalism was a political shift to the right in an economic sense towards free markets and deregulation. The current shift extends further to the right, rejecting free-market orthodoxy, favouring economic nationalism and social conservatism.

So, something like modern populism has happened before. But surely this one is different. Today, there are more people with more crises in a highly interconnected world with an addiction to fossil fuels.

‘But today is different’ prompts a third premise…

While today’s political disruptions echo past crises, global interdependence, environmental constraints, and widespread digital communication make the current situation more complex and less predictable than historical precedents.

Today’s world is deeply interconnected economically, technologically, and environmentally. In the 1930s, it was much simpler. Back then, nations could retreat behind tariffs and nationalism without immediate global repercussions. They were somewhat self-sufficient, and their people had lower expectations of what would be available.

Today, supply chains, financial systems, and even basic resource distribution are tightly interlinked. For example, in 2023, the UK imported half of the food it needed to feed its population, at a cost of approximately £61 billion (US$76 billion) for food, feed, and drink. The trade gap between exports and imports was £37 billion (US$46 billion).

This is big money, equivalent to the GDP of Bulgaria ($77.8 billion), Myanmar ($76.2 billion), Ghana ($74.3 billion), or Oman ($74.1 billion). Attempts to radically decouple from globalisation, while politically appealing to some, risk causing immediate and severe domestic and international disruption. Unless you can be sure where the food is coming from, pause before you mess with your suppliers. It can get ugly fast.

The environmental context is also radically different.

Previous political crises were primarily human-driven and reversible through policy changes or economic recovery. Today, humanity faces irreversible ecological thresholds related to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, and the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. Ecological limits impose rigid boundaries on economic and political choices. Leaders cannot promise unlimited growth or the exploitation of resources without worsening systemic risks. No amount of political rhetoric, however hard they lie, can ultimately dismiss this limit to growth.

The digital information environment changed the game. Mass media once moved slowly and sat in the centre. Now social platforms fracture discourse, speed polarisation, and give fringe ideas reach. Grassroots groups gain power, but extremists do too. Gatekeepers no longer mediate because they are also after clicks. Outcomes swing fast on emotion and, as a result, political outcomes have become increasingly difficult to predict. Not least because they can shift rapidly in response to emotionally charged narratives that often lack factual grounding.

This is just the helicopter view.

As you get closer to the ground, more nuance emerges. Here are a few for added flavour…

• Automation, AI, and other technological changes are fundamentally restructuring labour markets and contributing to economic anxiety. This technological transformation is happening alongside resource constraints and may be equally important in driving political realignment.

• While economic factors are important, many right-wing movements gain significant support from cultural anxieties about changing demographics, immigration, and perceived threats to traditional values and national identity. These cultural motivations often operate independently from economic concerns.

• The effects of globalisation and neoliberalism have been unevenly distributed not only between social classes but also within regions of countries. This regional inequality (urban/rural divides, deindustrialised areas vs. tech hubs) often maps closely to political divides.

• Populism is portrayed as primarily grassroots. Still, many right-wing movements have been actively cultivated by segments of existing elites for strategic purposes, from wealth creation to control.

• Right-wing nationalism may be the primary response to neoliberalism’s challenges, but there are multiple competing visions emerging from progressive internationalism, green new deal proposals, digital libertarianism, renewed social democracy, to various forms of localism. The competition between these alternatives is a crucial dynamic shaping our political future.

And then there is the elephant of inequality pooping all over the carpet.

According to the UBS Global Wealth Report, as of 2023, the top 1% of the global population, encompassing individuals with a net worth exceeding $1 million, collectively own about 47.5% of the world’s total wealth, amounting to approximately $214 trillion. While the ultra-wealthy accumulate vast resources, a significant portion of the global population struggles with minimal wealth. For instance, adults with less than $10,000 in assets constitute nearly 40% of the world’s population (over 3 billion people), but hold less than 1% of global wealth.

From here I could, and have, disappeared down into the rabbit warren to try and comprehend the patterns, learn and predict the future. All the while, assuming that the helicopter was hovering over a liberal democracy somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

I have a myopic view of the world.

And because I have such a narrow view, the next premise becomes…

The paradigm of disruption that describes the political and economic reality for the billion or so people living in mature economies that identify as liberal democracies must be the dominant paradigm that defines the other 7 billion souls, especially given that they face similar global resource constraints.

Does this premise hold?

No, not even close. I find it hard to believe that liberal democracy is the only one everyone knows, just because it’s what I’ve come to understand and internalise through decades of experience. Far from it.

As of 2023, approximately 13% of the global population lives under liberal democracies, according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. This is around 1 billion. So the vast majority of people in the world, the other 7 billion people, are governed by design or choice, under an alternative to Western liberal democracy and neoliberalism.

It would take a while to cover the alternatives, but here is a shortlist of the obvious ones…

• State-led developmental capitalism, most prominently represented by China, but also visible in Vietnam, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and others. This model features a strong central authority directing economic development, prioritising stability and growth over individual liberties, and engaging strategically in markets while maintaining state control of key sectors. It’s often described as “authoritarian capitalism” and has gained legitimacy through delivering material improvements and national pride.

• Religious-cultural governance models are seen in various forms across the Middle East, parts of South Asia, and elsewhere, where religious values shape political institutions and economic priorities. These systems usually reject Western secularism while selectively adopting economic liberalisation.

• Neo-patrimonial and clientelist systems are common across parts of Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America, where formal democratic institutions exist alongside informal power networks based on patron-client relationships. A significant proportion of economic resources is distributed through personal connections rather than market mechanisms or formal state structures.

• Post-colonial resource economies exist where nations remain primarily defined by resource extraction, with wealth concentrated among elites connected to global markets. International corporations, foreign governments, and multilateral institutions heavily influence the economic and political systems of their countries.

• Subsistence and informal economies are the social governance system for billions in rural areas and urban slums. Neither the state nor formal market institutions significantly shape daily life. Instead, local community arrangements, traditional practices, and informal economies predominate.

Unlike Western democracies, which are experiencing disruption after decades of relative stability, many of these alternative systems emerged from colonial legacies and have long been adapting to resource constraints, international pressures, and internal challenges. They are a response to regular disturbance, risk, and uncertainty, and have evolved a complex tapestry of adaptation strategies developed with, rather than despite, resource limitations.

For example, many non-Western nations are pursuing aggressive resource nationalism, tightening state control over critical assets while simultaneously engaging strategically with global powers to leverage geopolitical advantages. Regional economic integration has gained momentum as countries seek collective resilience against external shocks.

Population approaches vary dramatically across these nations. Some implement pro-natalist policies to maintain demographic strength, while others pursue aggressive family planning to reduce resource pressures.

Perhaps most pragmatically, many selectively adopt green technologies, not necessarily out of environmental conviction, but because such innovations offer competitive advantages or resource security in an increasingly constrained world.

So, not only is the ‘liberal democracies must be the dominant paradigm’ false because the numbers don’t stack up, but also because resource constraints and environmental challenges ultimately reinforce rather than undermine many of the alternative governance models. Most of them already incorporate a stronger state direction of resources and make fewer promises about unlimited individual consumption than Western liberal models.

The point here is that my experience of democratic primacy might feel good, and indeed may even be good if it were true, but it is not.

Here is another way to see it…

Take 100 people at random from the global pool, and just 13 of them will be living under a Western-style democracy. Numerically, at least, people like me are in the minority. I’ll come back to this crucial point.

Of course, if I selected based on economic grunt, a very different proportion appears. According to the Global Wealth Report 2023 by Credit Suisse, North America and Europe together account for a substantial share of global wealth, with North America alone accounting for approximately 29.4%. When combined with the wealth held in Western Europe and Oceania, the total share held by Western democracies rises to an estimated 60% to 70% of the total.

If I simplify the issue and assume there are 100 units of wealth globally, then those 13 folk hold 65 of them, roughly 5 each. The other 87 share the remaining wealth, 0.4 units each.

This is the well-established north-south divide, which is in no small part why I prefer it if the helicopter flies only over my patch. From this view, I see the majority of folk with the 5 units and can ignore the majority with their 0.4 units.

But what if I see the proportions and realise that numbers and the impact are very different?

Perhaps I succumb to the guilt of my good fortune and decide that denying the majority a fairer share is unjust. But rather than give up my share, which is hard to do, I decide that the Western paradigm should prevail and spread out to the other 7 billion to see everyone at 5 units of wealth.

This approach is morally sound, makes me feel good, and still leaves me in possession of my SUV, but it requires an initial 100 units of wealth to increase by 400 units.

How awesome is this? If Western democracy and its underpinning neoliberal economic model spread to everyone on Earth, how much money could be made?

Sound familiar?

Except that every dollar is attached by the umbilical to a unit of energy and, by extension, physical resources. Energy use and resource use have to quadruple to increase the 100 to 400 units. But you already know the problem and what comes next.

The concept of planetary boundaries, developed by a team of Earth system and environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen, defines limits within which humanity can safely operate to avoid destabilising the Earth system. The nine boundaries include climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities (e.g. chemical pollution). Each boundary represents a threshold or tipping point beyond which abrupt and potentially irreversible environmental changes could occur.

According to the most recent data from 2023, six boundaries have been transgressed:

1. Climate change results from greenhouse gas emissions exceeding safe levels.

2. Biosphere integrity is marked by accelerating species extinction and loss of ecosystem functions.

3. Biogeochemical flows are primarily from the overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus in agriculture.

4. Land-system change resulting from large-scale deforestation and agricultural land conversion.

5. Freshwater change through over-extraction and disruption of natural water flows.

6. Novel entities such as plastic pollution and synthetic chemicals, including PFAS, are pervasive and often persistent in the environment.

These breaches interact and amplify one another, creating compounded risks. For example, biodiversity loss undermines the resilience of ecosystems needed to adapt to climate change, while pollution exacerbates freshwater stress and harms aquatic life. The planetary boundaries framework warns that continued pressure in these domains risks tipping Earth into a less hospitable and more unstable state.

If current human activity strains the planet’s capacity for available energy, resource use and waste to produce the equivalent of 100 units of wealth, raising that amount by 400 is impossible without collapse.

Feeling a little nauseous, I ask the pilot to land the helicopter.

Once back on the ground with soil under my toes, I came up with a new heretical premise.

Alternative paradigms and ideologies to liberal democracy are better positioned to address a global resource crisis.

Does this premise hold?

“Wo’ah, hold on there, buddy,” said the pilot, taking off his sunnies to better stare into my face. “We can’t have any commies here.”

I smile and ignore my inclination to grasp the yolk of capitalism for dear life because certain aspects of non-Western paradigms may indeed be better positioned to navigate resource constraints. Non-Western governance models often feature centralised decision-making capacity that enables rapid, coordinated responses. They avoid the political gridlock common in liberal democracies, allowing long-term planning and swift crisis management when needed.

Many societies outside the Western sphere haven’t constructed their social contracts around promises of perpetually increasing material consumption; their citizens often have cultural practices that emphasise collective adaptation and greater familiarity with resource limitations.

In regions where formal institutions have historically been limited, informal community networks have developed remarkable skills at distributing scarce resources and adapting to changing conditions. These social technologies represent significant adaptive capacity that formal systems often lack.

Additionally, many developing nations are building infrastructure now rather than decades ago, allowing them to incorporate resource-efficient designs from the outset rather than face the costly challenge of retrofitting aging systems built during an era when resource abundance seemed limitless. This timing advantage may become increasingly significant as global resource constraints tighten.

Alright, so I might not like the idea of authoritarian control, but I have to admit that versions of the social contract exist that do not have growth baked into them.

But it is not all roses.

Population pressure remains a critical concern, with several regions experiencing ongoing demographic growth that intensifies competition for essential resources such as water, arable land, and energy. Authority and realistic social contracts might better manage shortages, but they can’t conjure food security, clean air and general well-being from thin air. Apparent advantages in centralised decision-making may not be enough if economic activity sufficient to meet the more modest social expectations becomes ecologically impossible.

The post-colonial economic structure presents another vulnerability, as many nations remain heavily dependent on exporting raw materials or agricultural commodities. They lack local value-add capabilities and are exposed to market volatility in raw materials and to resource depletion.

Aside from constraints on liberties, history suggests that authoritarian systems can be fragile. The balance between expectation and delivery is a fine one, no matter the governance system. ‘Better placed’ might not be the right question, as it sets up a comparison rather than an assessment of what will make an economic and governance system robust in a time of crisis or, as now, a polycrisis.

Instead, here are some features that the most resilient systems will likely possess…

• Strong state capacity for coordination and planning

• Distributed local adaptation capacity

• Cultural flexibility to accept changing consumption patterns

• Technical innovation capacity

• Legitimate governance that can maintain social cohesion during difficult transitions

These combinations exist across different governance paradigms. Success in the face of resource constraints may depend more on specific implementation than on broad ideological categories. You can have these features in more than one flavour of government and economy.

When abundance ends, a liberal, money-making free-for-all is unlikely to persist for long, but neither would a draconian ruler or a fully social ideology. What works might not even exist just yet.

The helicopter pilot tuned out long ago and is passing the time flirting with the receptionist. I pull him away to take one last flight above liberal democracy for the last premise that I can’t shake…

Fear and anxiety over the risks to liberal democracy hinder the ability of the 1 billion in the West to cope with the polycrisis

Does this premise hold?

Yes, it does.

When political discourse fixates on threats to democracy, it compounds the short-term thinking inherent in election cycles. Planning becomes increasingly difficult. Politics turns even more to symptoms rather than underlying systemic challenges, and policy is forgotten in the heat of the political battles.

The us-and-them mentality pervades and transforms resource allocation, turning pragmatic problem-solving into zero-sum political warfare. As citizens divide into camps viewing the “other side” as an existential threat to democracy itself, collaborative action becomes nearly impossible. Even basic infrastructure decisions that could enhance resilience become battlegrounds for identity politics, preventing the unified response that resource constraints demand. Climate adaptation strategies are particularly affected by this problem.

Democratic institutions often become brittle.

Rather than experimenting with novel approaches, they become rigid and defensive, even at the cost of preserving existing structures. This institutional calcification reduces the capacity for learning and evolution precisely when flexibility becomes most crucial. The irony is that in defending democracy’s form, we risk sacrificing its essential adaptive function.

Then the people lose faith in the system just when resource constraints require difficult trade-off decisions. Inevitably, some consumption patterns must change, some industries must transform, and some comfortable habits must evolve. When citizens no longer trust democratic institutions to distribute these sacrifices fairly. People resist even necessary changes as illegitimate impositions, and soon we see vicious cycles of institutional failure.

Perhaps most insidiously, battles over democracy’s future consume social energy that might otherwise be devoted to practical adaptation to environmental challenges. These democracy-centred debates, while undeniably important, can function as sophisticated displacement activities. Chairs on the Titanic are moved, rearranged and moved back again, perhaps replaced with recycled plastic ones, and we feel like we engage with critical issues, while avoiding the more uncomfortable material realities of planetary boundaries.

But democratic systems also possess unique strengths that resilient systems possess…

• The capacity for decentralised innovation and problem-solving

• Robust feedback mechanisms that can identify failures quickly

• The ability to build broad legitimacy for difficult transitions when done well

• Transparency that supports accountability and learning

Of course, instead of contemplating alternatives to liberal democracy and its neoliberal economics, we could hold on to all the good bits and realign the wealth differently.

The 13 folk in the west among the 100 in the world could go from 5 units of wealth each to one unit, still a full 60% more than the current wealth of those not in a liberal democracy. If the 52 units of wealth this liberates are spread evenly, everyone gets 1 unit.

This sounds fanciful and is the exact opposite of what capitalism has delivered for the last 50 years, but we could. We could change the relationship between democracy and resource constraints, making them interconnected rather than in competition.

For this premise, protecting democracy is essential precisely because navigating reallocation on such a scale requires legitimate governance that can distribute sacrifices fairly and adapt quickly.

“Can we land now, buddy?” said the pilot, “I have a date.”

The helicopter touches down, and the pilot heads off, leaving me with uncomfortable realisations.

I’ve lived within a worldview representing just 13% of humanity, believing it to be universal. And I’ve worried about threats to liberal democracy without questioning whether its current form suits our resource constraints. But the truth is that the polycrisis we face doesn’t care about our political preferences. Climate disruption, resource depletion, and ecological breakdown operate by physical laws, not ideological ones.

Perhaps the most mindfully sceptical position isn’t defending liberal democracy against all alternatives, but asking the more fundamental question…

What governance features, regardless of their ideological packaging, best support human flourishing within planetary boundaries?

This isn’t about abandoning democratic values but expanding our field of vision. When we obsess over protecting our familiar systems against change, we burn precious adaptive capacity that could be directed toward the underlying resource challenges. Meanwhile, billions of people already navigate life under different governance arrangements, some of which may be better attuned to resource constraints.

Rather than viewing this through the binary lens of “liberal democracy versus everything else,” a mindfully sceptical approach suggests focusing on specific governance capabilities that foster resilience…

• Legitimate decision-making processes that can distribute necessary sacrifices fairly and maintain social cohesion during transitions

• Decentralised experimentation that allows communities to develop context-appropriate solutions

• Long-term planning capacity that can transcend electoral cycles and market short-termism

• Cultural narratives that define prosperity beyond material consumption

• Transparent accountability mechanisms that prevent corruption and maintain public trust

These features can exist within various governance frameworks; some more democratic, some less so. In the coming decades, hybrid approaches will likely emerge as societies pragmatically adapt to ecological realities regardless of ideological purity.

For those raised in Western liberal democracies, this requires intellectual humility. We must acknowledge that our systems were developed during an anomalous period of resource abundance and may require profound evolution. Yet this needn’t mean abandoning core values like human dignity, transparency, and accountability.

The mindful sceptic’s approach isn’t to defend democracy’s current form at all costs or abandon its essential virtues, but to engage in the messy, creative work of evolving governance for a resource-constrained world.

This means learning from diverse systems globally while applying the best aspects of democratic feedback, legitimacy, and adaptation.

Perhaps what emerges won’t neatly fit into our current political categories, precisely as it should be. The challenges ahead demand something new.

The stale binary of “population is a problem” versus “population isn’t a problem” is reframed through energy systems, ecological limits, and thermodynamics. From pre-agricultural times to the Green Revolution, modern population growth emerges not from human exceptionalism but from a temporary fossil energy surge. Technological advances have delayed collapse in some regions, yet planetary boundaries and entropy remain inescapable. Much of the population debate functions as displacement activity, allowing avoidance of the harder truth that civilisation rests on a one-off energy windfall. Replacing abstract headcounts with analysis of energy flows, carrying capacity, and systemic resilience is essential to confronting the limits that shape our future.

I am a population ecologist. Well, I used to be, for ‘woodlice numbers’ is where I began my ecological career. How many were there in the chalky grasslands of eastern England, and could they regulate their numbers as the theory of density-dependence said they should? After a PhD's worth of research, I said that they could. It was a brave assertion, very Malthusian.

When a post-doctoral scholarship took me to Zimbabwe, I was distracted by termites, millipedes, the occasional elephant and especially how organisms contributed to soil fertility. And because soil biology was a systems problem, I drifted from population ecology and was eventually captured by biodiversity, the trendy new topic of the mid-1990s. My woodlouse research continued, but it found new hypotheses to test in evolutionary ecology, specifically whether a female woodlouse should invest in fewer large or many small offspring, and provided any insights into population dynamics through this proxy.

Hindsight tells me that this was fortunate because of population, a word that in my time was a neutral descriptor in demography and planning had acquired a controversial edge, especially in environmental and political discussions. Historically linked with Malthusian warnings about overpopulation and famine, it became a shorthand for fears that rising human numbers would outstrip Earth’s resources.

These concerns resonated during the 1960s and 70s in popular works like The Population Bomb, and it didn’t help that I met and liked its author, Paul Ehrlich. Partly as a consequence of these warnings, ‘population’ now carries undertones of racial and geopolitical bias, often targeting growth in the Global South. As a result, the word now evokes not just demographic concerns, but ethical debates around power, control, and whose lives are deemed burdensome.

In politics, population surfaces in debates about immigration, housing, and infrastructure, often serving as a coded term for social unease or xenophobia. In countries like Australia, the UK, and the US, concerns about ‘population pressures’ tend to mask deeper fears about changing demographics, economic insecurity, or cultural identity. More than one white man is scared of being in the minority.

Like many scientifically neutral terms, including biodiversity, sustainability, ecosystem services, and resilience, the term population is now an ambiguous floating signifier. It means whatever is on your mind. More often than not, the resource constraint debate becomes a binary issue between "population is a problem" and "population is a boon".

It is a risk to speak constructively about population today. Somehow, you must be sensitive to historical misuses and more than a little woke, making sure rights-based, equitable, and context-specific perspectives are given plenty of attention. Even then, you will get flamed by either side for no reason.

Even speaking the word requires courage. It’s not the number of people that scares us, it’s what counting them forces us to admit about how we live.

But before I dust off my PhD thesis and tackle human numbers with the objectivity of a population ecologist, I do need to remind you of a few details.

• For around 290,000 years, Homo sapiens were few, perhaps 10 million across the world and often fewer, into the tens of thousands at times.

• When we cleverly invented agriculture 12,000 years ago, there were 5–10 million people mainly in Asia. …that is million with an “m.”

• Agriculture gave us an energy boost, and we increased in number to 1 billion by 1800, an exponential increase to 1,000 million with an exponent that would have seen 2 billion by 2025 if it had followed the historical trend. It didn’t because we cleverly found fossil energy and ploughed it, quite literally, into the intensification of agriculture, which in less than 200 years created a highly efficient global food system that, along with some clever healthcare, produced a population spike.

• Since 1800, the population has quadrupled to 8.1 billion by 2025. That is 8× more people in 7 generations.

• A population over 8 billion requires a minimum of 23 trillion kilocalories per day in food energy just to stave off hunger.

• Contrary to popular opinion in the global north, where the demographic transition has led to lower fertility and, for some countries, negative population growth, the global numbers are still rising at 8,000 an hour. In a year, the net increase in the global population is about 70 million, many times more than the total population 12,000 years ago.

Now that you have the population consequences of a fossil energy pulse to hand, there is one more detail before the first premise.

What looks like an orderly leap in capacity is, in thermodynamic terms, a spike in the rate of energy dissipation. Agriculture didn’t just feed more mouths; it pushed more low-entropy sunlight through human systems at a speed nature hadn’t budgeted for, accelerating the disorder we’d later have to reckon with. In thermodynamic terms, every added calorie of low-entropy input not only builds temporary human order but also hastens the breakdown of the wider ecological order. The faster we run energy through our systems, the quicker we strip away the gradients that make life possible.

So here is the first premise…

The classic narrative, originating with Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century, posited that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, leading to widespread famine and societal collapse. This assumption was based on Malthus’ idea that populations grow geometrically while resources, particularly food, increase only arithmetically. Malthusian ideas, both for and against, have dominated population discourse for over two centuries, influencing everything from colonial policies to modern environmental movements.

At first glance, Malthus got it wrong. Historical data reveal a profound disconnect between Malthusian predictions and reality. The global population has increased from 1 billion in 1800 to nearly 8 billion today, largely due to improvements in per capita food availability.

You can't have exponential population growth in any animal without an excess of food because, without food, the animal dies or its offspring do. It can't make its own energy. Apologies for being trite, but it is fundamental to any understanding of density dependence.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s-80s exemplifies how technological innovation shattered Malthusian constraints. High-yielding crop varieties, combined with synthetic fertilisers and improved irrigation, increased cereal production by 250%. Countries like India and Mexico, once facing predicted famine, became food exporters.

Not only was more food grown, but it was also harvested, processed and transported to where people lived, over 50% of them in urban areas. With the help of exogenous energy, human ingenuity could fundamentally alter the population-resource equation through institutional changes, knowledge transfer, and coordinated global action.

And then there was a demographic transition.

In some countries, urbanisation, women's education, access to healthcare, and economic development contributed to a slowing of population growth into a demographic transition. At the same time, resource use became more efficient, and innovations in recycling, synthetic biology, and renewable energy suggest that absolute scarcity is not a given. As such, the simplistic equation of more people equals less to go around no longer captures the nuanced dynamics at play in modern systems.

The seductive demographic transition theory suggests that development typically leads to lower birth rates, not resource collapse. Studies by demographers like Hans Rosling demonstrated that the relationship between population and well-being is mediated by factors Malthus never considered, including education, healthcare systems, economic institutions, and social cooperation. And where the Malthusian narrative of resource constraint persists in climate discussions, migration debates, and conservation efforts, it is heavily criticised for ignoring the institutional and technological transformations of the past two centuries. The evidence is that simplistic population-pressure assumptions are unrealistic. It is remarkable what can be done with a six-continent supply chain.

However, dismissing the Malthusian perspective entirely would be premature. While we have mostly avoided the famines Malthus feared, the unsustainable overuse of ecological resources, biodiversity loss, and climate change reveal that technological progress alone cannot decouple human activity from environmental impact. There is an energetic and a resource degradation cost of 8 billion souls and their livestock.

Many recognise these consequences and decide to shift the population issue to be less about the number of people and more about patterns of consumption, inequality, and the biophysical limits of certain ecosystems. Thus, many consider the Malthusian model to be obsolete as a universal law, but it might retain analytical value, especially to help understand the uneven distribution of risk.

Not that it ever was a law. Malthusian assumptions have indeed been repeatedly contradicted by historical experience. The number of people has risen to levels that Victorian gentlemen could have barely imagined. And with the demographic transition kicking in to slow population growth, the new conventional wisdom on population is captured in the following premise…

Since 1961, when I was born, global cereal yields per hectare have increased by over 180% while the total harvested area expanded by only 12%. This means the global food system is feeding nearly three times as many people using roughly the same amount of farmland. Clearly, population growth does not ‘inevitably outstrip food supply,’ and thus, it doesn't automatically translate to proportional resource pressure.

The Netherlands has one of the world's highest population densities of over 400 people per square kilometre. Yet, it's also the world's second-largest agricultural exporter by value, achieving this through advanced greenhouse technologies, precision agriculture, and sophisticated logistics.

Modern global trade networks allow regions to specialise based on comparative advantage rather than attempting local self-sufficiency. Singapore, with virtually no natural resources and extreme population density, maintains one of the world's highest living standards through strategic positioning in global supply chains. Similarly, urban planning innovations have enabled cities to house billions efficiently. Manhattan, for example, supports a population density of over 25,000 people per square kilometre while providing access to resources that would be impossible in dispersed rural settings.

The knowledge economy represents the most profound decoupling. Software, finance, and creative industries conjure extraordinary wealth from almost nothing tangible. Each innovation, such as GPS, the internet, and blockchain, can ripple across countless domains, reducing resource use while sustaining ever larger populations. Romer’s growth theory shows how ideas, not acres or ores, can fuel compounding productivity. Cleverness becomes capital.

But the illusion has ballast. The cloud is a warehouse of servers, each gulping coal-fired electricity and laced with rare earths torn from fragile soils. Digital tools save paper and airfares, but they also spawn e-waste mountains and train energy-hungry models that consume more watts than entire nations. Every ‘weightless’ app rides on a heavy infrastructure of extraction and entropy.

Any apparent decoupling isn’t complete or universal. Many rural agricultural communities remain closely tied to local resource availability, as shown during COVID-19 when lockdowns caused labour shortages, transport delays, and market disruptions that directly impacted food production. Even in wealthier countries, local and regional food systems proved critical, with U.S. producers adapting more nimbly than national supply chains. At the same time, disruptions to labour, logistics, and just-in-time manufacturing cascaded into widespread shortages, revealing how institutional complexity can rapidly turn into institutional vulnerability.

However, from a population perspective, decoupling appears as real and significant in many contexts, particularly in urban and developed economies.

Over the past century, conventional thinking among economists, demographers, and development theorists has shifted. It used to be rigid population-resource determinism where there were perceived limits. Now thinking is dominated by technology, markets, and institutions in shaping resource availability. Technological innovations and strong governance structures, trade networks, property rights regimes, and regulatory frameworks are expected to allow for more effective resource management and distribution. For example, international grain markets can compensate for localised droughts, and energy grids can stabilise supply despite regional variability in renewable generation. If you or your country has money to buy, there is a producer willing to sell.

Not everyone is free of resource scarcity.

There remain over 750 million people in extreme poverty. That is one in eleven humans and an acute reminder that, for all our cleverness, progress leaves almost a billion people outside the story we like to tell ourselves. So while the conventional wisdom affirms the power of innovation and institutional resilience to mitigate scarcity, it also increasingly recognises the importance of equity, ecological boundaries, and systemic risk.

Most techno-optimists generally hold that science, innovation, and adaptive systems can solve or sidestep many of the environmental and resource limitations that once defined human existence. They point to history and argue that any constraints imposed by nature are challenges to be solved rather than permanent barriers to growth or wellbeing. This mindset sees nature not as an immutable ceiling but as a dynamic set of parameters that can be reshaped through knowledge, engineering, and institutional evolution. For instance, scarcity of arable land may be met with vertical farming or lab-grown meat; freshwater limitations may be solved through desalination and smart irrigation; and fossil fuel constraints bypassed by solar panels, batteries, and fusion research.

In this view, nature provides the canvas, but human creativity offers the tools for constant reconfiguration. As a result, techno-optimism often places its faith in innovation outpacing degradation, and in the resilience of systems engineered by humans. In this view, Malthus overlooked the cleverness of people.

But what if we underestimate ecological feedbacks, tipping points, and the complex interdependencies of natural systems? What if the urgency of living within biophysical thresholds is prudent risk mitigation against the assumption that future breakthroughs will arrive in time?

Here we reach the alternate premise to technological innovation…

Population ecology is all about the dynamics of species populations and how these are influenced. First of all, the population is the unit of study defined as a group of individuals of the same species occupying a defined area and capable of interbreeding. A population ecologist measures the attributes of population size, density, age structure, birth and death rates, immigration and emigration, and sex ratio to determine and understand how populations change. Often, this information feeds into population growth models, such as exponential and logistic growth, which describe how populations expand under ideal or constrained conditions.

Population ecology examines not just isolated species but how they interact with other species and within food webs through competition, mutualism, predation, or parasitism, not least because these interactions are often the source of impact factors.

A few features are consistent with all populations of any organism.

Populations are impacted by density-dependent factors (e.g., competition, predation, disease) that intensify as population size increases, and density-independent factors (e.g., climate, natural disasters) that impact populations regardless of size. They are ultimately constrained by resources, be that food, space, access to light, water or some critically limiting requirement. In times of plenty when it can seem like a population will grow forever, they never do because, ultimately, the planet is finite. Soon enough, the Water Lily runs out of surface water in the pond.

The reality of an upper limit to population size brings in the concept of carrying capacity, or the maximum population size an environment can sustain over time without degrading the resource base. It suggests there is a clear, quantifiable limit to growth in a complex world. People like this idea because it echoes our desire for predictability, control, and moral boundaries. And a maximum number of individuals an environment can support resonates with intuitive notions of balance and sustainability.

This is population ecology, the integration of empirical observation and mathematical modelling to reveal patterns and processes that govern how life persists and fluctuates. A population ecologist’s role is to predict population stability, boom-bust cycles, or extinction risk.

Still, I have to say that we are easily suckered into the idea that population is regulated. We can easily imagine that these factors combine in some way to keep populations at or below that carrying capacity.

Human populations are no different to any other species. We have always been constrained by the carrying capacity of the habitats in which we lived. This was a heavy constraint for over 290,000 years of foraging on savannas, next to rivers and lakes, or coastal fringes. Agriculture increased the capacity by making more calories available overall and for safe storage of calories during lean times. Livestock was a terrific boon as a larder that kept itself fresh.

But then, almost overnight, we were no longer constrained.

Fossil fuels, combined with technology, have increased the human carrying capacity to such an extent that its exact location remains unknown. From a complexity perspective, this is less a permanent elevation and more a high-wire act. Systems bloated on fossil calories become more intricate but also more brittle, because every new layer of complexity requires constant, high-quality energy to hold its shape against entropy’s pull. In this sense, complexity buys time but not immunity. The trick is to build complexity that can persist within nature’s energy budget, rather than one that collapses the moment the fossil subsidy is withdrawn. Nonetheless, some think carrying capacity has been lifted out of existence, and we are no longer animals. However, the planet is finite. There is only so much space, so much net primary production, so much fresh water, and so much available nutrients. There are physical and ecological limits.

The planetary boundaries framework, first developed by Johan Rockström and colleagues in 2009 and updated by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, provides scientific grounding for these absolute ecological limits. The research identifies nine Earth system processes that regulate the stability and resilience of our planet, giving nine defined environmental limits beyond which Earth’s life-support systems risk destabilisation. These boundaries represent thresholds that, if crossed, could lead to irreversible ecological change and are intended to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity’.

The nine planetary boundaries are:

1. Climate Change – Maintaining atmospheric CO₂ levels and radiative forcing within limits to avoid runaway global warming.

2. Biosphere Integrity (Biodiversity Loss) – Preserving genetic diversity and ecosystem function to maintain resilience and life-support capacity.

3. Biogeochemical Flows – Managing nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to prevent eutrophication of water bodies and soil degradation.

4. Land-System Change – Avoiding excessive deforestation, urban expansion, and land conversion that disrupt ecological processes.

5. Freshwater Use – Ensuring sustainable consumption of surface and groundwater to maintain hydrological systems.

6. Ocean Acidification – Limiting CO₂ absorption by oceans to protect marine ecosystems and carbonate chemistry.

7. Atmospheric Aerosol Loading – Controlling particulates that affect climate, monsoon systems, and human health.

8. Stratospheric Ozone Depletion – Preventing loss of the ozone layer that shields life from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

9. Introduction of Novel Entities – Regulating synthetic chemicals, plastics, nanomaterials, and genetically modified organisms whose long-term effects are largely unknown.

As of the latest assessments, boundaries for climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, and land-system change have already been crossed, indicating that humanity is operating in a zone of increasing risk.

The strength of the framework lies in its systems-based approach, linking environmental integrity to human prosperity and signalling that sustainability is not merely a social or economic issue, but a biophysical necessity. And unlike local resource constraints that technology can often overcome, these represent system-level limits that affect the entire Earth system.

Let’s make this more practical.

Climate change is the boundary that exacerbates all other boundaries. Breach it, and the stress ripples outward, weakening ice sheets, raising seas, pushing weather into chaos. We’ve already warmed the planet by over 1.1°C since pre-industrial times through fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, and industrial emissions. These aren’t gentle changes. They’re non-linear, hard to reverse, and capable of triggering cascading crises in food, water, and political stability. Cross thresholds like permafrost thaw or Amazon dieback, and you set feedback loops in motion that no amount of negotiation or geoengineering can easily stop. Perhaps they cannot stop them.

Efficiency gains haven’t slowed the curve. Annual fossil fuel burning still pours more than 35 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the air. Now atmospheric concentrations are above 420 ppm and way past the pre-industrial 280 ppm. This forces more extreme weather, accelerates glacial melt, and lifts sea levels. The scale of our economy keeps outrunning the speed of our efficiency just as William Jevons predicted way back in 1865.

The Second Law ensures that every “efficiency” is only a reprieve if total energy flow increases; the faster we cycle energy through our systems, the quicker we degrade the gradients that keep them running. What looks like progress on the spreadsheet can, in physical terms, be a faster burn of the same candle. Without capping total energy flow, efficiency becomes a sleeker engine for accelerating disorder.

Meanwhile, energy return on investment (EROI) puts a hard limit on our options. Renewables keep improving, but building, installing, and maintaining them takes energy and materials. Charles Hall’s work suggests civilisation needs an EROI of at least 3:1 to keep basic systems running and closer to 7:1 to sustain a complex global economy. Thermodynamics doesn’t care how clever we are because there’s a floor below which systems can’t function.

Biodiversity loss is another slow-burn collapse with fast-burn consequences. Extinctions, habitat fragmentation, and genetic erosion weaken the very networks that keep ecosystems stable. A loss of pollinators, soil microbes, or keystone predators reduces resilience. The extinction rate today is hundreds of times the natural background, signalling a mass extinction in progress. This isn’t just about saving pandas, however cute they might be. This is about protecting the living systems that underpin our food, health, and planetary stability.

The nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are being pushed beyond safe limits, mainly by industrial agriculture. Human activity now releases more reactive nitrogen than all natural processes combined. Fertiliser runoff creates aquatic dead zones, degrades soils, and adds nitrous oxide to the atmosphere. These nutrient cycles connect directly to water use, land change, and ocean health, and they’re being breached faster than most others. Reversing them is challenging because industrial farming is heavily reliant on fertilisers.

And then there’s the quiet boundary most people miss, but any population ecologist recognises in an instant: land degradation. The FAO estimates we lose 10 million hectares of arable land every year, an area the size of South Korea. Technology can boost yields, but often by stripping soil nutrients faster than nature can replace them. It’s the thermodynamic truth of agriculture that you can mine the land for a while, but you can’t break the energy and material laws that govern it. Over-fertilisation drives more nitrogen and phosphorus into rivers and lakes, fuelling algal blooms and creating hypoxic dead zones, like the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

The obvious conclusion to all of this is that there are limits and there is a carrying capacity to human population defined by the ecological consequences of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which succinctly says that nothing can deny entropy. Life doesn’t escape entropy; it amplifies it. Every calorie we channel into sustaining human order, whether in skyscrapers, spreadsheets, or soybeans, multiplies the disorder elsewhere in the system. The only game is pacing that dissipation, so the structures we depend on don’t unravel faster than we can adapt.

However, this is highly inconvenient to humanity, which consists of sentient beings capable of perceiving their mortality, having a brain wired for survival on the savanna, where the desire to acquire, possess, and hold more resources was an evolutionary advantage.

The simple solution is to ignore the demographic facts. Hence, the following premise…

Population has become the conversation no one wants to have. In academic and environmental circles, even hinting at a link between population and sustainability risks being branded as neo-Malthusian, racist, or misanthropic, sometimes all three and more. Yet we know that voluntary reductions in birth rates in developing countries improve women’s lives, expand economic opportunities, and ease pressure on resources. Feminist scholars are right to warn that population narratives have often been tools of control, deciding whose bodies are deemed “surplus” and whose reproduction is sanctioned.

The politics of population is rarely about numbers alone; it’s about power. Environmental sociology shows how international development agencies historically pushed population control in the Global South while ignoring the vastly higher per-capita consumption in the Global North. A person in the richest 10% consumes around 25 times more resources than someone in the poorest 50%. Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute found that the wealthiest 10% generate almost half of all carbon emissions, while the poorest half contribute less than 10%. In energy, water, and material use, the pattern repeats. In 2020, Oxfam reported that the richest 1% had per-capita emissions more than 30 times higher than the level compatible with 1.5°C climate targets. Yet public discourse keeps circling back to birth rates in poor countries, because it’s easier to talk about African fertility than Western overconsumption.

History makes the pattern unmistakable. Population concerns spike during periods of economic stress, usually aimed at controlling marginalised groups. The eugenics movement in early 20th-century America targeted what they called “undesirable” populations even as growth rates were already falling. Today, anti-immigration rhetoric uses overpopulation language during recessions, regardless of actual demographic data. Jennifer Reid Keene’s research shows how this language is a socially acceptable proxy for talking about race, class, and national identity without naming them. Beneath all this is a deeper cultural anxiety about modernity, autonomy, and control.

Anthropologists note that fertility fears often mask discomfort with changing gender roles and the erosion of traditional power structures. Psychologists call it pseudo-certainty, the comfort of pretending complex, messy problems can be solved with a single neat number. Count the people, cut the number, problem solved. It’s an illusion, but one that keeps returning because it offers both a target and a sense of control.

Once you buy into a social perspective on population, it becomes even easier to ignore the demographic facts. Now it is not a resource limit problem but a social equity challenge, and we arrive at the following premise…

Complex adaptive systems theory tells us that population isn’t just about headcounts because in all ecological systems that include the human one, small changes can trigger big, non-linear shifts. And the data are unambiguous. Wealthy industrial nations burn through far more resources per person than poorer ones, regardless of their population density. That makes consumption patterns, not raw numbers, the real driver of ecological pressure.

Resilience science backs this up. What matters most for sustainability is the ability of institutions, communities, and ecosystems to learn, self-organise, and respond flexibly to change. In complex systems terms, such adaptability spreads energy dissipation across many pathways, preventing any single shock from cascading into full collapse. Diversity and redundancy are essential thermodynamic stabilisers. Because of this adaptive capacity, a high population does not automatically mean collapse, but poor governance and rigid systems almost guarantee it. The real test is whether a society can manage change, share authority, and align incentives with long-term survival.

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) provides powerful evidence. From Nepal’s forest commons to fisheries in the Philippines, small, cohesive, well-organised groups routinely outperform larger, more fragmented ones on conservation and fair resource use. Success depends not on the number of people but on the quality of governance that covers trust, accountability, local knowledge, and inclusive decision-making.

Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking work proved that the tragedy of the commons is not destiny. When communities have clear boundaries, participatory rules, conflict resolution, and local enforcement, they can manage shared resources sustainably for generations. Population size or density alone tells you nothing. What matters is the fit between social systems and the ecosystems they depend on. Similarly, Costa Rica, with a population density similar to many African countries, protects biodiversity and fosters sustainable development through strong institutions, education, and democratic governance. Meanwhile, countries with low density, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, can still see catastrophic resource loss when governance fails, inequality grows, or conflict takes hold.

Climate adaptation research finds the same pattern. Resilience depends on social capital and cooperation. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans neighbourhoods with strong local networks and active leadership recovered faster than similar areas without them. In shocks and crises, it’s social cohesion that tips the balance.

Cooperative networks also spread sustainable practices far faster than top-down interventions aimed at population numbers. In Central America, the farmer-to-farmer movement has carried agroecological techniques to millions of small farms through peer learning, adapting innovations to local conditions. Development economists like Esther Duflo confirm that these social learning effects often outweigh demographic factors entirely.

This brief foray into social cohesion suggests that it is easy enough to find evidence that social organisation, cooperation, and adaptive capacity are more important determinants of sustainability outcomes than absolute population size. And for the moment, we will ignore the scale mismatch between these localised examples and the global boundaries.

Given that population is as much a people problem as it is the number of people, the following premise is both logical and necessary…

GDP and population growth make for neat, comparable numbers, but they strip the story down to what can be counted and miss what matters. GDP logs every transaction as positive, whether it’s a productive investment or rebuilding after a disaster, and ignores whether the gains are equitably shared, ecologically destructive, or even sustainable. Population totals do the same. They count heads but skip the harder questions about how people live, consume, govern, and adapt. This numerical reductionism gives the illusion of precision while dodging the systemic and ethical complexity of sustainability and even the consequences of the energy needed to defy entropy.

Resilience frameworks turn the lens toward the ability of systems to absorb shocks, adapt, and still hold their core identity. Drawing from ecology, systems theory, and institutional economics, they focus on feedback loops, thresholds, diversity, and redundancy. Scholars like Brian Walker and Carl Folke have shown that resilient social–ecological systems can survive disruption without losing function. The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program puts this into practice, developing tools that measure resilience across multiple dimensions instead of relying on a single growth metric.

Climate and environmental justice movements add another essential layer to understand who benefits and who pays. Those least responsible for ecological damage often carry the heaviest burdens. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach shifts the question from “How much do you have?” to “What can you actually do and be?” It shows that flourishing doesn’t always require resource-heavy development models. Environmental justice research warns that sustainability efforts often fail when they deepen existing inequalities or push costs onto vulnerable groups.

Regenerative development goes further, rejecting the extractive assumption that natural and social systems are limitless inputs. Carol Sanford and others argue for development that actively improves the health of the systems it touches. Regenerative agriculture builds soil, boosts biodiversity, and restores water cycles while producing food and creating positive feedback loops instead of linear depletion. These approaches require metrics that track system vitality, rather than just throughput or growth rates.

The shift isn’t hypothetical. It is visible in policy experiments, academic research, and grassroots movements worldwide. We know that conventional metrics can’t capture the complexity of sustainability, and alternative frameworks already exist that measure what actually matters. The challenge is not inventing them, but having the courage to replace the comfortable fictions of growth and headcounts with measures that reflect the real conditions for long-term survival.

All this moralising is understandable.

Evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and cross‑cultural research converge on the fact that humans likely come equipped with a deep-seated aversion to inequity, especially when we're at a disadvantage. In the animal world, this is far from unique. Capuchin monkeys, for instance, famously reject unequal rewards, throwing away cucumbers if their neighbour gets a grape for the same effort, even refusing to trade at all. Broader studies show this disadvantageous inequity aversion in chimps, macaques, ravens, and dogs, suggesting it evolved to safeguard cooperation against exploitation.

Human infants as young as 15 months gravitate toward fair resource distribution, and by age 4, children begin rejecting scenarios where they receive less than their peers. This emerges consistently across cultures and is a near universal among children. Advantageous inequity aversion which means turning down extra for the sake of fairness, appears more selectively, shaped by cultural norms.

Disliking inequity is one thing; prioritising resilience, justice, and regeneration is another. Our instinctive fairness responses are often short-term, reactive, and self-focused. We’re quick to call a foul when we lose, slower to act when we win. Inequity aversion can be drowned out by loyalty to our in-group, fear of loss, or faith in meritocracy. In complex, hierarchical societies, injustice can be institutionalised and hidden, making it easy to ignore when it benefits us.

The implication from psychology is that if we want resilience, justice, and regenerative capacity, we can’t rely on instinct. Resilience demands long-term thinking, systems awareness, and comfort with uncertainty. These are traits that human cognition tends to resist. Justice requires accountability, representation, and redistribution. A prod in the direction of doing the right thing will not be enough.

For example, regeneration will mean redesigning economies to work with ecological limits instead of mining them for short-term gain, which is a cultural and structural pivot of historic scale. None of these are intuitive defaults. They are collective, intentional choices that often cut against immediate self-interest.

In other words, any realistic alternative to Malthusian population-resource ideas will need to exist within the planetary boundaries and explain how we might flourish there without the need for the abomination of demographic control.

So we reach the last premise…

The traditional population–resource framing is crude. It assumes that more people mean fewer resources, more scarcity, and inevitable ecological decline. From there, it’s a short leap to the politically toxic idea that controlling fertility or immigration is necessary. Yet for the last 200 years, the worst predictions of environmental Malthusianism never came to pass. In the aggregate, technological innovation and social adaptation kept supply ahead of demand. The conclusion, for many, was that population isn’t the problem after all.

That verdict ignores the complexity of the system. Population pressure interacts with consumption patterns, inequality, governance, and fossil energy. Without cheap, abundant fossil fuels, the last two centuries’ growth trajectory would look very different. Any polarised population debate of too many or not enough dodges an uncomfortable truth. Eventually, resources will constrain us. And you don’t need to be a population ecologist to know what happens when demand overshoots supply.

A better frame shifts the focus from headcounts to how we live, how resources are shared, and what we value as progress. Policies that expand education, health, gender equity, and participatory governance tend to lower fertility rates without coercion and build resilience at the same time. This is population policy by stealth, creating the conditions where smaller, healthier families are the natural choice.

This reframing aligns with the planetary boundaries framework, where ecological limits aren’t shackles, they’re the conditions for lasting prosperity. A small but wasteful population can do more damage than a larger one living regeneratively. If we focus on flourishing as quality of life, equity, health, education, and strong communities, then we can design development paths that are both humane and ecologically safe.

Living regeneratively also sidesteps the ugly history of demographic control and the ugly mechanisms of coercion, racialised targeting, and disregard for human rights. Instead, it emphasises agency, justice, and systems thinking. Sustainability isn’t about limiting people; it’s about redesigning how we inhabit the Earth. The result is a more sophisticated, ethical way to navigate the population–environment nexus in the 21st century.

Wellbeing economics shows that high life satisfaction is possible at far lower resource use than conventional development assumes. The Happy Planet Index finds countries like Costa Rica and Vietnam delivering strong wellbeing with ecological footprints near sustainable levels, while the United States consumes 4–5 times more resources per capita for only marginal gains in life satisfaction. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics builds on this, defining a “safe and just operating space” bounded by social foundations and ecological ceilings.

On the ground, community-scale initiatives prove the point. Transition Towns, eco-villages, and urban sustainability projects show that social connection, meaningful work, access to nature, and participatory governance matter more for wellbeing than high consumption. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework has improved education, healthcare, and environmental conservation while protecting cultural identity and democracy.

Demographic research backs the approach. Coercive family planning schemes tend to fail, fostering resentment and reducing participation. In contrast, education, healthcare, economic opportunity, and women’s empowerment consistently lower birth rates while boosting wellbeing across multiple dimensions.

Human flourishing within planetary boundaries is possible, and the path that leads to it isn’t through blunt demographic control, but through wellbeing, justice, and regenerative development.

All this is fine, dandy even. But, how should I tackle the human population predicament with the objectivity of a population ecologist? Without any irony, all I have to do is show you this graph.

And then break it down.

This looks like classic exponential growth where numbers increase slowly and then accelerate. Only the time scale is deceptive. What happens is that the exponent of the growth rate changes around about 1950, a change that is hard to see when the data are plotted at this scale. Better to do some maths.

Calculating the exponential growth rate (r) for human population from 10,000 BCE to 1800 CE, requires the formula for exponential growth:

P_(t)=P₀​⋅e^rt

Where:

• P_(t) is the population at time t

• P₀ is the initial population

• r is the exponential growth rate

• t is the time in years

• e is the base of the natural logarithm

The average exponential growth rate of the global human population from 10,000 BCE to 1800 CE was approximately 0.0439% per year—a remarkably slow rate by modern standards. This sluggish growth reflects millennia of constraints imposed by limited food supplies, high disease burdens, and elevated mortality rates, all of which kept population expansion in check. But only to a point.

Agriculture was a net energy source, producing more food than was available to gatherers, so growth to 1800 was still exponential, as a redrawing of the first graph shows. This is the increase that concerned Malthus.

However, if that long-term growth rate had continued beyond 1800, the global population in 2025 would be around 993 million, just under 1 billion people.

This stands in stark contrast to the actual 2025 estimate of 8.1 billion, representing a more than eightfold increase.

The vast divergence highlights the unprecedented acceleration in population growth after 1800, catalysed by industrialisation, medical and public health advances, increased agricultural productivity (notably the Haber-Bosch process), and sharply declining mortality. For context, the average annual population growth rate between 1950 and 2000 was about 1.7% which is nearly 40 times faster than during the entire pre-industrial era.

40 times faster!

So here is the data again, drawn this time on a very different scale. Change in population is now in the billions, and the growth rate is still exponential, but with a much larger exponent.

This transformation underscores how modern population dynamics are historically exceptional, driven by structural changes rather than simply extensions of ancient demographic trends. We got drunk on fossils and converted all that near-free energy into food and more people.

In population ecology terms, we raised the carrying capacity by growing more food and proved that Thomas Malthus was wrong.

Or was he?

Well, his assumptions certainly were. Food production kept pace with population expansion, as the two are inextricably linked in a deterministic dance. As we said, mammals have to eat.

Fossil fuels removed the constraint on food production through the mechanical expansion of arable land, the use of fertilisers to speed up crop and livestock growth and yield, and the development of industrial-scale food systems.

But here is the thing.

No ecologist has seen a population continue to expand exponentially. Soon enough, a resource limit is reached. Crudely, there are two basic options once the resource limit is reached.

One scenario is where scarcity leads to overconsumption, resulting in population collapse. In the other scenario, where scarcity forces competition, resulting in some winners and losers, the population declines, but it can potentially regulate itself at the resource limit. The latter is the one I looked for in the woodlouse and claimed that density-dependent effects on growth and reproduction were enough to regulate populations.

Both scenarios see contraction, but one is more brutal than the other.

Population ecologists describe the controlled contraction with the logistic equation, which describes how a population grows in an environment with limited resources. Unlike exponential growth, which assumes unlimited resources, the logistic model incorporates a carrying capacity, K, which represents the maximum population size that the environment can sustain.

Here’s a breakdown of the formula:

dN/dt = rN(1 - N/K)

Where:

• N = population size at time t

• dN/dt = rate of change of the population over time

• r = intrinsic growth rate (how fast the population grows without constraints)

• K = carrying capacity (maximum population the environment can sustain)

The term (1−N/K) slows the growth as the population approaches the carrying capacity. When N is much smaller than K, the population grows almost exponentially. As N approaches K, the growth rate declines, eventually reaching zero when N = K. This S-shaped (sigmoidal) curve reflects how environmental limits constrain real-world population dynamics, making the logistic equation foundational in population ecology and resource management.

Let’s apply this to the human population since 1800, which we know is growing at 1.7% and set K to be 10 billion people.

The curve predicts rapid growth during the 20th and early 21st centuries, which gradually slows as it approaches the theoretical environmental limit. This slowing is happening now. Fertility rates are declining worldwide, and in some countries, their populations are shrinking. Absolute numbers are still increasing at a rate of 8,000 per hour, but there is a slowing of the growth rate.

We should be pleased about this. It suggests that even as we modify K, hoping to increase it with technology and alternative energy sources, there is some regulation in human populations. The demographic transition model might have some legs.

However, the concept of carrying capacity, which underlies both Malthusian and ecological thinking, is fundamentally flawed when applied to human systems because it assumes static relationships in dynamic systems. Human carrying capacity is a function of social organisation, technology, and values that change faster than ecological timescales. Setting it up as a bar to raise and an upper limit of an equation that allows numbers to remain high is a risky distraction.

So here is my contrary premise, as presented by a population ecologist…

The entire population debate, with its Victorian gentleman as a posthumous ball being batted around, and its careful attention to consumption patterns, social justice, and adaptive capacity, serves as an intellectual displacement activity that prevents confronting more fundamental issues about energy and consumption systems.

While we argue about demographics, we avoid discussing the thermodynamic impossibility of current economic models, the inevitability of energy descent, or the psychological drivers of "more making" that transcend population size.

In professional settings, this means scrutinising every population or sustainability argument for its hidden energy assumptions. In civic contexts, it means steering discussion toward the infrastructures and resource flows that actually determine survival, rather than the headcount.

We've become so focused on whether population matters that we've avoided confronting what the numbers tell us about what happens during overshoot. Overshoot isn’t just a matter of headcount; it’s the moment when the rate of entropy production outstrips the system’s capacity to absorb and re-pattern that disorder.

After that, decline becomes the path of least resistance.

And by every measure that matters, we're already there, and what happens is not pretty.

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Imagine what it was like in Europe of the Middle Ages from the 5th to the late 15th century, when humans were immersed in feudalism and religious dominance. Our fantasy images of castles, lords, knights, and their squires saving tassels princesses allow us to forget the peasantry struggling on the land. Real people carried water, tilled the fields and could die from an infected scratch. That is about as far as we want to take it.

But people were not without technology back then. The heavy plough had just been invented, particularly the mouldboard, which enabled the cultivation of the dense, clay-rich soils of Northern Europe. This innovation expanded arable land, increased agricultural yields, and supported population growth and urbanisation. Paired with the three-field crop rotation system and the horse collar, which allowed horses to replace oxen for ploughing as they could push against the collar, medieval agriculture became far more efficient and productive than in Roman times.

The mechanical ingenuity wasn’t confined to agriculture. Watermills ground grain, and windmills powered cloth fulling and metallurgy. Machines that represented a major shift toward mechanised labour. Meanwhile, mechanical clocks, emerging in the 13th century, introduced precise timekeeping, revolutionising daily life in towns. Clocks embodied both engineering sophistication and the growing importance of regulated time in social and religious life.

Late in the Middle Ages, gunpowder arrived in Europe from China and was adapted for use in cannons and firearms, transforming military tactics and the structure of warfare. The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, was perhaps the most consequential innovation of all. By making books far more affordable and accessible, it broke the monopoly of manuscript culture, empowered vernacular literacy, and laid the groundwork for the Reformation, scientific revolution, and the spread of Renaissance humanism.

Obviously, there was little healthcare, no latex, no antibiotics or X-ray machines, and people died early and often. But far from being technologically stagnant, the Middle Ages were a period of critical innovation that set the stage for modern Europe.

And what was that like?

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my parents rented a colour television. It had a tiny screen in a huge box that stood on a stand in the corner of the living room for decades. I can’t imagine how many times they paid the purchase price for that piece of technology, ten, twenty, but the same unit provided the colour images for most of my childhood.

I don't know what this says about my parents' weird frugality, the durability of early televisions, or the fact that a signal passed through the air can create a moving picture with sound in a million living rooms. A great deal about them all, I suspect. And what does it say today when my television is paper-thin with a screen an order of magnitude larger that streams across an internet that holds most of human knowledge, much of it accessible with a verbal query of the TV.

Technology now gives many access to an unimaginable volume and variety of resources. And it brings me to the initial premise in the myth of technological salvation…

Inventing and wielding technology have been the Homo sapien superpowers for a long time.

From the taming of fire onwards, people invented and used technology to find and develop resources. Ploughs and irrigation systems increased food production; the industrial revolution’s mechanisation expanded manufacturing capacity; and the Green Revolution’s hybrid crops and fertilisers alleviated famine pressures almost everywhere. These innovations and thousands of others solved scarcity and allowed populations to grow and economies to evolve.

Humanity levelled up on those superpowers and began to believe. Societies, especially those in industrialised nations, came to view technological progress as a dependable and even inevitable solution to material problems. We can and have fixed it.

This faith is not merely practical but also cultural, embedded in narratives of human ingenuity and reinforced by education, media, and policy. The widespread belief that science and technology will continue to outpace any emerging limits is now deeply ingrained in collective thinking. It’s not just the techno-optimists who believe in the power of technology. Many of us have this faith baked in.

Belief in progress through technological innovation is strong enough to obscure the inevitable trade-offs and to push aside the fact that past success does not guarantee future applicability. We've done it before, so why not do it again?

While the premise accurately reflects historical trends and the resulting cultural mindset, the nature of today’s challenges, particularly those related to planetary boundaries and systemic risks to 8 billion humans, suggests that not all lines trend upward indefinitely. Not all dangers can be neutralised, no matter the colour of the tech bros superhero cape.

When there are 8 billion people with a daily demand of 23 trillion kilocalories of energy from food, and 40% of global soils are degraded, you are going to need some powerful technology.

The second premise reflects these changing parameters…

Unlike a mouldboard plough that was a local solution, many contemporary technologies operate on a planetary scale. Digital infrastructure, biotechnology, and global supply chains are interconnected, making their impacts far-reaching and difficult to contain. The speed and scale of deployment of artificial intelligence, geoengineering, or data surveillance, and a host of other examples, create ripple effects across societies and ecosystems that were rare in earlier eras. Such planetary-scale technologies behave less like isolated tools and more like complex adaptive systems that are interconnected, path-dependent, and prone to cascading failures when stressed. What once solved a problem locally now risks amplifying disorder globally if not carefully integrated.

A handy new device for tilling clay-rich soil was useful and spread to where such soils could be cultivated. Adoption was slow, and impacts were relatively gentle. Modern technologies are embedded in complex systems, making their outcomes less predictable and more challenging to manage. For example, integrating renewable energy into national power grids involves not just new hardware and transmission infrastructure but also shifts in economic models, social behaviour, and international cooperation. And compared to the ambling pace of the Middle Ages, today’s tech comes alive in an instant.

The biggest difference is in the ecological impacts of today’s technologies, which are unprecedented in both intensity and scope. For electronics alone, e-waste, carbon emissions from data centres, and rare earth mineral extraction are effects that extend beyond immediate human use and into long-term planetary health. In 2022, the world generated a record 62 million tonnes of electronic waste (a rise of 82% since 2010), with only around 22% documented as properly recycled. Globally, data centres currently consume around 460 terawatt‑hours of electricity, which is about 3% of the world’s carbon footprint, on par with aviation. The global rare‑earth oxide (REO) mining volume reached approximately 390,000 metric tonnes in 2024. These volumes are staggering compared to the more contained environmental footprints of earlier technologies. This shift alone justifies the premise that current trajectories are qualitatively different from past ones.

In thermodynamic terms, these impacts are features where higher energy throughput inevitably accelerates entropy across the system. Modern technology accelerates the metabolic rate of civilisation, consuming energy to maintain function.

Then there is what we didn’t see coming.

Many technologies solve one problem while quietly engineering the next. For example, antibiotics revolutionised medicine by making it possible to treat previously deadly bacterial infections, dramatically reducing mortality and enabling complex surgeries and cancer therapies. We won the war on infection. But the war evolved because the biological effectiveness of antibiotics also exerts selective pressure on bacteria, encouraging the survival and proliferation of resistant strains. When antibiotics are used excessively or inappropriately for viral infections or when patients do not complete prescribed courses, this evolutionary process is accelerated. Resistant genes can spread across bacterial species through horizontal gene transfer, making the emergence of ‘superbugs’ not only more likely but also more difficult to contain. In healthcare, resistance has become a frontline crisis. According to the World Health Organisation, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is among the top ten global public health threats, with over 1.2 million deaths directly attributable to antibiotic-resistant infections in 2019. A 2024 study from the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) project predicted a significant increase in deaths if current trends continue, forecasting that bacterial AMR will cause 39 million deaths between 2025 and 2050, which equates to three deaths every minute.

In many countries, antibiotics are used not just to treat sick animals but as growth promoters and preventive measures in livestock, often with little oversight. This non-therapeutic use creates vast environmental reservoirs of resistance genes, which can transfer from animals to humans through food, water, and soil. A joint FAO/OIE/WHO report estimates that two-thirds of global antibiotic use is in agriculture.

Antimicrobial resistance was not anticipated when antibiotics were first celebrated as miracle cures, and the dependency on antibiotics has also discouraged investment in alternative treatments. Antimicrobial resistance spreads more slowly and often imperceptibly compared to an airborne virus like COVID-19; however, AMR’s threat is cumulative and potentially just as catastrophic.

And then came technological dependency. This was not a deliberate choice, but as an accretion of convenience, connectivity, and commercial design. Modern society, from individuals and families to corporations, institutions, and entire governments, has become deeply reliant on digital infrastructure. Everything from healthcare, energy, food distribution, and finance to education and democracy itself now flows through a web of interconnected technologies. While this integration brings undeniable efficiencies and capabilities, it also embeds profound risks. The complexity and opacity of these systems mean that most people, including those in power, do not fully understand how they work, how decisions are made within them, or what vulnerabilities lie beneath the surface.

The core problem is that these technologies are not neutral tools. They are shaped by business models, incentives, and ideologies that rarely prioritise public welfare. Surveillance capitalism, for instance, drives platforms to maximise attention, not wellbeing. Algorithmic optimisation prioritises engagement, not truth or human flourishing. The result is a digital ecosystem where addictive design, behavioural nudging, and data extraction have become standard. A seemingly innocent and inescapable act of watching a cute cat video masks a deeper transaction. Your attention has been captured, your preference logged, and, in a blink, the ads are on their way to you. Our compulsions are not just quirks of habit; they are engineered outcomes.

Cute cats might not bring down society, but we know that governments rely on digital platforms for public communication, yet often cede regulatory control to the same private entities. Institutions outsource decision-making to algorithms, sometimes without clear accountability. Individuals find their daily routines, choices, and social lives mediated through technologies that offer convenience at the cost of agency. The more deeply these systems are woven into our lives, the harder it becomes to act freely within them. So much of modern society, from individuals, institutions, and governments to geopolitics, increasingly relies on opaque systems whose design priorities may not align with public welfare.

But the deeper challenge is not the examples. There are dozens of them. The problem is that their effects are increasingly illegible.

A single John Deere 1025R tractor can do way more to the soil than a whole herd of Shire horses. All the speed and intensity also created greenhouse gas emissions and land clearing that are now destabilising Earth’s climate, but to what extent?

Smartphones have dramatically improved communication, access to information, and convenience in daily life. We lived without them for thousands of generations, but now we are dependent. Their rapid adoption has led to unanticipated vulnerabilities from erosion of attention spans and mental health impacts to mass surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, and privacy loss.

AI will be power hungry and drive any amount of material and process innovation, especially once quantum computers come online, but how, where and with what speed is speculation. We know it’s a disruptor of society, but we only have speculation to guide us on how controlling it will become, either by design or as a byproduct of its proliferation.

Uncertainty like this brings on the next premise…

We know, but rarely admit, that many technologies come with externalities and issues that were not anticipated at the time of their adoption. For example, the widespread use of automobiles solved mobility challenges but led to urban sprawl, air pollution, traffic congestion, and high carbon emissions.

Similarly, adopting synthetic fertilisers boosted agricultural yields but contributed to soil degradation, water pollution, and ecosystem disruption through runoff and nutrient loading. Oh, yes, and a population explosion. This one is a huge problem that is ignored by just about everyone.

As I write this section, there is a power outage at my house. This is irritatingly common where I live in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where winds and storms tend to trip the local grid. I have set my Google Docs to offline and can keep writing while the laptop battery holds a charge, but until the power comes back, all else is lost, including the speltchecker. Digital infrastructure, while enabling global communication and commerce, has led to growing dependence on electricity, data storage, cybersecurity, and software updates. Each layer of digital functionality demands a steady stream of low-entropy energy inputs just to sustain what appears stable. When the flow falters, disorder floods back in as a thermodynamic inevitability masked by the illusion of digital permanence.

All this makes systems fragile in the face of outages, cyberattacks, or obsolescence. And the consequences are so huge, we prefer not to think about them. For example, what happens to the global finance system when quantum computers can crack end-to-end encryption?

The dependency problem is inevitable. Once adopted, technologies reshape institutions, expectations, and behaviours in ways that make withdrawal or reversal difficult. We get used to what is on offer, and our baselines shift along with our expectations. And this all happens fast when the benefits are immediate.

Meanwhile, unintended effects often emerge over time, making it hard to assess the full cost-benefit balance at the point of introduction. Efficiency is persuasive. But it blinds us to what it costs.

The big one right now is soil degradation from all that intensive agriculture. Tractors, fertilisers and pesticides are literally strangling the life out of the soil, the very foundation of what makes plants grow. Soil is a complex living system that has evolved to buffer and recycle entropy slowly. Strip it of its microbial and structural diversity, and you collapse the very complexity that sustains fertility over time. And yet, with 8 billion people, their livestock and pets to feed, we are stuck with the imperative for lots of cheap food.

As always, these emergent dependencies are not evenly distributed. They often exacerbate existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. The billion or so in the global north still maintain economic or geopolitical advantage, much of it from the current and legacy access to technology. If you are the first country to build and operate a steam ship, it can take you wherever there are resources. You were also likely to be the country that already had some experience with ships.

Technology has always done this, but modern innovations have accelerated power imbalances. The following premise in the myth of technological salvation speaks to this problem when technology becomes global…

It’s not just the ships. Wealthier countries and multinational corporations often control the design, ownership, and infrastructure of emerging technologies. This control gives them leverage over pricing, access, and standards, reinforcing their economic and strategic advantages. For instance, countries that dominate semiconductor production or the development of artificial intelligence gain not only financial rewards but also political influence and military edge.

In contrast, less wealthy regions often receive technologies in ways that create dependency rather than empowerment. Imported tools may be poorly suited to local conditions, and reliance on foreign maintenance, software updates, or proprietary systems can limit autonomy. Moreover, digital platforms introduced in developing economies may extract more value than they contribute in local capacity-building.

All this mirrors historical forms of unequal exchange, updated through technological infrastructure, but it is not always constraining. It doesn't have to be this way.

In Kenya's informal settlements, local entrepreneurs created internet infrastructure that major telecommunications companies had deemed unprofitable, serving communities that global tech giants had written off. Initiatives like Moja Wi-Fi, Mtaani Wi-Fi, and Poa Wi-Fi have emerged, offering affordable internet access to residents in areas such as Kibera and Mathare, where electricity and connectivity can be inconsistent. By leveraging mobile broadband networks from providers like Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom, these entrepreneurs have created localised solutions that cater to the specific needs of their communities.

Economic analysis shows these locally-designed systems achieve better cost-effectiveness ratios while building economic stability through "strategies that use resources optimally and effectively", not least through reduced dependency on external maintenance and replacement cycles we are psychologically hooked into in the West.

Other entrepreneurs have focused on empowering micro-entrepreneurs through digital tools. For instance, Charles Juma developed DigiKua, a USSD and WhatsApp-based record-keeping tool that enables small business owners to manage their finances using basic mobile phones.

But I have to be honest. These examples are outliers.

More generally, the technological benefits accrue to more educated, urban, or affluent populations, leaving marginalised communities with limited access or with the burden of associated harms, especially from waste and environmental degradation. For the most part, global and local power imbalances are preserved and intensified through technological adoption and control patterns, confirming the premise.

There is still plenty of obfuscation, typically through the pervasive cultural narrative that frames technological advancement as inherently progressive and universally beneficial. This belief serves a deeper psychological function in times of disruption and uncertainty. Bizarrely, the phone grounds us.

We have entered a time when technology's psychological effects are as significant as its material benefits. This leads to the next premise…

Confidence in innovative technology to resolve significant societal challenges is comforting. It provides reassurance in times of need and can even be applied to overwhelming problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or social inequality. It soothes and that’s the trick. It feels like action and reduces anxiety by offering control and continuity, especially when political or personal responses seem inadequate or difficult. In this way, it functions as a psychological buffer against fear, guilt, and uncertainty. Don’t worry, tech will fix it.

However, this feel-good factor is a coping mechanism at best. It is not really a solution, especially if it inhibits more necessary and transformative responses. Belief in future technologies such as carbon capture, geoengineering, or AI governance makes us feel good partly because they delay the urgent need for shifts in consumption, governance, economic models, and social norms. But entropy never waits. Delaying action under the guise of future fixes simply allows disorder to accumulate quietly, until the energetic cost of recovery exceeds what’s available. But the promise of imminent breakthroughs is powerful enough to justify inaction or business-as-usual behaviour in the present. In other words, no change needed… carry on, as you were.

This is a disaster about to happen.

Reliance on future fixes can be especially problematic when technologies are speculative or carry unknown risks. It allows difficult political decisions, such as phasing out fossil fuels or redesigning food systems, to be postponed. In this way, technological optimism deflects attention from the cultural, institutional, and ethical work required to build a truly sustainable and just society, confirming the psychological and social validity of the premise.

When, to my surprise, I found myself using my ecological and soil biology skills in the nascent carbon markets, the enthusiasm was palpable. I was tasked with designing carbon accounting methodologies for agriculture and forestry, as well as advising on some of the first AFOLU offset projects (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use). I saw boardroom execs facing mounting pressure about their company’s carbon footprints lean forward with genuine interest when I mentioned soil carbon or extended rotation forest management. But then they would ask about emerging technologies like carbon capture or fusion energy. The easier the fix, the better. But you know what happened if the conversation turned to reducing energy consumption, redesigning supply chains, or shifting business models. The same execs would glance at their phones and make their excuses to leave for other commitments.

Two behavioural mechanisms are happening here that researchers have labelled techno-fix attitudes and moral licensing. A 2024 Swiss study found that individuals who trust that future technologies will solve environmental problems are significantly less likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours. This relationship is partly explained by a lower concern about climate change, suggesting that technological optimism can dampen motivation for immediate action. Psychological studies on moral licensing show that when people anticipate future solutions or even imagine taking positive action, they are more likely to justify inaction in the present. In environmental contexts, this manifests as a weakened link between pro-environmental intentions and actual behaviour, with the expectation of future fixes acting as a form of moral credit. Together, these findings illustrate how hope in technological salvation can actively inhibit the behavioural change needed to address pressing ecological challenges. In other words, the psychology behind this deflection runs deeper than simple procrastination.

When facing existential challenges like climate breakdown or biodiversity collapse, our minds naturally seek ways to manage overwhelming anxiety. Technological optimism serves as what researchers describe as a "psychological buffer against fear, guilt, and uncertainty," allowing us to maintain a sense of agency and control when personal or political responses seem inadequate.

On a personal level, this is sound and logical, but it becomes dangerous when it systematically displaces action with anticipation. Studies of climate policy reveal how technological optimism enables what researchers call technowashing, which uses promises of future solutions to postpone making essential and important decisions while maintaining the illusion of progress.

Think of the countless climate summits where delegates enthusiastically discussed geoengineering possibilities while failing to commit to immediate emissions reductions. The pattern repeats across scales, with individuals buying carbon offsets that I was so eager to show them, instead of reducing consumption. Meanwhile, governments fund speculative technologies while delaying policy changes, and corporations announce net-zero targets decades in the future while expanding fossil fuel operations today.

Jevon’s paradox kicks in, too.

In short, techno-optimism can undermine the very outcomes it claims to support. What appears as hope for the future often functions as resistance to present change. The more convinced we become that technology will save us, the less motivated we are to save ourselves.

But not all technology is built by the bros in Silicon Valley ready to be leveraged by business and government. There are appropriate technology frameworks that offer a compelling alternative to the salvation myths that keep us waiting for rescue instead of building resilience.

So let’s honour them with this premise…

Appropriate technology refers to solutions designed for local needs, resources, and cultural conditions that are typically low-cost, accessible, and environmentally responsible. Unlike large-scale, centralised systems, they encourage participation, empower communities, and build local capacity. Examples include solar cookers, small-scale irrigation systems, and modular housing that address immediate needs without fostering dependence on distant suppliers or complex infrastructure.

Research evidence reveals a pattern that should humble those trained in conventional development thinking. When communities design their technological solutions, the results consistently exceed what external experts achieve through imposing "superior" alternatives.

Multi-country reviews of community empowerment show that the most effective initiatives are those that build local capacities, embed community participation in design, and measure success by increased autonomy. These programs emphasise capacity building, community control, engagement, and the integration of local knowledge and values as pivotal to sustainability. For example, the PROLINNOVA network, operating across 19 countries, leverages indigenous knowledge and enhances farmers' capacities to co-design locally appropriate systems. These self-determined solutions outlast centralised high-tech solutions, which frequently falter due to maintenance and contextual misalignment. This is a familiar story to me from my time in Africa in the 1990s.

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico's centralised electrical grid, community-managed microgrids restored power fastest and proved most resilient to future disruptions, not because they were primitive, but because local operators understood their systems intimately. Studies tracking appropriate technology implementations over decades show that these systems develop what researchers call "adaptive capacity", the ability to respond to changing conditions without external intervention.

Only a billion or so people have regular electricity, internet and three Apple products to hand. High technology requires sophisticated systems developed in industrial settings and exported globally. In most communities, low-cost, locally sourced, and user-friendly tech seems, and usually is, more appropriate.

But here’s the thing.

Despite their differences in scale, complexity, and intention, both types of technology can fail due to similar human and psychological factors. Chief among these are unrealistic expectations, resistance to change, and a lack of genuine community involvement in the design and deployment process. Whether it's a solar cooker in a rural village or a smart grid in a city, technology introduced without understanding user needs and motivations is prone to underuse or abandonment.

Psychological dynamics like status-seeking, fear of obsolescence, or lack of perceived agency will hinder adoption. For instance, people may reject appropriate technology if it appears to be “second-best” or associated with poverty, even when it suits their needs perfectly. Conversely, high-tech solutions may be embraced initially for their novelty or prestige, only to fail due to complexity, maintenance demands, or a mismatch with local infrastructure. In both cases, the problem lies not with the technology itself, but with how people relate emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

High technology often overlooks the importance of narrative and social legitimacy. A hand pump or compost toilet may be technically superior and sustainable, but without local champions or integration into cultural routines, it’s likely to be dismissed. Similarly, high-tech gadgets may be seen as alien or irrelevant if they don't resonate with user values. This shared psychological terrain explains why such different technologies can fail in surprisingly similar ways.

One consequence of this is that the appropriate technology movement has its own blind spots. Community-led solutions can reinforce local power structures, exclude marginalised voices, and create insularity that prevents beneficial outside learning. Sometimes the local expert is the village patriarch who benefits from keeping women out of decision-making. In many rural development projects, participatory design becomes code for "whatever the loudest community members want." The resulting solutions worked for some but systematically excluded others.

We might even be bold enough to say that the celebration of traditional knowledge sometimes becomes a form of technological romanticism, which assumes that because something is local and low-tech, it must be more sustainable or equitable. This can prevent communities from accessing genuinely beneficial innovations.

The tech bros have a point. We are, for the most part, better off with modern technologies.

The appropriate technology advocates have a point, too, not least because inequity persists in part because of high tech.

And then the myth of technological salvation persists because it offers something psychologically irresistible. It promises to solve complex problems without changing how we live.

Now that there are 8 billion souls alive, with most of them aspiring to more than they currently have, it will take some wild innovations that will make the plough, watermills, bellows and gunpowder look like kids' toys. Meanwhile, the pessimist, still worried about the inequity, doesn’t believe it is possible.

The problem is that technological pessimism may be as psychologically motivated as technological optimism. Many of us who critique tech solutionism get the same dopamine hit from being contrarian that tech optimists get from believing in progress. We enjoy feeling intellectually superior to the "naive" masses who think apps will save the world.

I've caught myself doing this often, rolling my eyes at corporate presentations about AI-powered carbon tracking while feeling smugly superior. But my mindful sceptic chimes in with an uncomfortable question. Am I rejecting these solutions because the evidence doesn't support them, or because accepting them would threaten my identity as someone who "sees through" technological hype?

If technological optimism serves as a psychological deflection, technological pessimism might serve as a psychological elevation. Either way, we feel wiser and more real than others. Research on motivated reasoning suggests we're remarkably good at finding evidence for positions that make us feel good about ourselves.

Perhaps instead of a tech miracle, there is hope grounded in human ingenuity, community resilience, and the power of appropriate innovation. This isn't about rejecting advanced technology or retreating to some romanticised past. Instead, it's about developing technological wisdom, the ability to evaluate innovations based on their technical capabilities and social and ecological impacts over time.

Either way, we will have to answer some tricky questions. Does this solution build local capacity or create dependency? Does it address root causes or merely symptoms? Who benefits, and who bears the costs?

The appropriate technology movement is gaining global traction as communities develop resilient, locally adapted solutions, from Kenyan entrepreneurs building community internet networks to regenerative farmers crafting climate-resilient practices. Scaling such innovations demands a shift away from top-down mega-projects toward community-led approaches, with education and policy frameworks that blend high-tech skills and traditional knowledge. This is not just a technological transition but a reimagining of how innovation is defined and delivered.

A mindful sceptic might be sympathetic to this narrative. However, the evidence is that corporations and their technology are rapacious. Where there is no market today, they see one tomorrow. And we know to question dominant narratives while remaining open to evidence from unexpected sources. In this, the solutions to our biggest challenges may not come from the R&D labs and corporate headquarters we typically look to, but from the communities and individuals who understand most intimately what it means to live within planetary limits. In part because they already are.

The most promising solutions may blend high-tech tools with appropriate technology principles to challenge the purists on both sides. For example, using satellite data and AI to support smallholder farming may seem too complex for appropriate tech advocates and too small-scale for tech enthusiasts, yet it could be precisely what's needed. Such hybrid approaches demand we move beyond ideological purity and ask hard questions like… When does technological sophistication truly serve local needs, and when is community control a means to better outcomes rather than just political symbolism?

Here's where I'd add some genuine intellectual humility. As someone who's spent decades in ecological research, I have a strong psychological investment in believing that careful, evidence-based analysis produces better outcomes than rapid technological deployment. But this belief might make me systematically undervalue the benefits of imperfect but immediate solutions. And all my mindful scepticism might blind me to the idea that the entire framework of technological optimism vs. appropriate technology is a false binary that prevents us from seeing more nuanced possibilities.

We do not lack technology. We lack the judgment to know when not to use it.

Tools are not neutral. Each one carries a logic, a tempo, and a boundary of imagination. The myth of technological salvation seduces us with its promise of progress untainted by consequence. But cleverness without context is delusion with circuitry.

The real task isn’t choosing between high-tech and low-tech. It’s learning to think in ecological time, where wisdom is measured by what doesn’t need fixing. Ecological time honours the slow churn of growth, collapse, and renewal. Resilience is all about patience and knowing when not to use a tool.

Sometimes the answer is a circuit with some code. Sometimes a shovel. But most often, it’s restraint.

What once saved us now ensures we won’t adapt. That’s not irony. That’s entropy.

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Sustainability sounds good, feels good, and mostly allows the human enterprise to continue on its merry way. It’s a floating signifier that is morally coated and operationally vague, used to defer hard choices and decorate business-as-usual. Behind the rhetoric lies a psychological balm for professionals and the public who want to feel responsible without disruption. But entropy doesn’t care. Real sustainability would demand radical material restraint, cultural deflation, and systemic redesign. Instead, we’ve built a mood around a word. Thermodynamic, ecological, and political precision is what’s missing. Until then, sustainability is less a plan and more a sedative.

Some topics are tense. You can see the furrowed brows, darting eyes, and feel the crackle before the conversation begins. Already, you know that the balance between critical analysis and constructive engagement will be delicate.

Sustainability.

There, you felt it. The room inexplicably moves to the left and the right, the polemic silent but present, an elephant seal in a confined space. Mention sustainability, and everything becomes especially delicate.

The tension is eased a little with a reminder of sustainability’s conventional definition, which originates from the 1987 Brundtland Report by the United Nations. This definition frames sustainability as…

development that meets current needs without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet theirs.

Such a forward-looking ethic links environmental stewardship with social equity and economic viability. It implies and embraces a systems-thinking approach that integrates ecological health, human development, and economic resilience.

A system to ensure there is always a cake to eat when all our hard work deserves a treat.

At its core, this version of sustainability is built on the conviction that human well-being is fundamentally dependent on the health of natural systems. This belief acknowledges planetary boundaries as finite ecological limits, and it hints that entropy (the expression of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a real phenomenon, even for humans. Humans operate under the thermodynamic constraint that all systems require ongoing energy input to maintain order, meaning sustainability is less a state to achieve and more a process of continual energetic upkeep, bounded by the laws of physics.

‘Meeting future needs’ from the laws of thermodynamics makes the strongest case for preserving biodiversity, reducing pollution, and conserving resources such as water, soil, and energy. Simultaneously, it promotes social justice by advocating for equitable access to resources, opportunities, and decision-making processes. An ability to shape shared futures.

While interpretations and applications vary, the common assumption behind sustainability remains the creation of conditions in which humanity and the planet can thrive in the long term.

However, I've witnessed a fundamental problem in this environmental discourse throughout my career. There is a gap between aspirational language and transformative action. I think you know it. There is a disconnect between the lofty goals or commitments often expressed in policies, corporate statements, or public discourse and the meaningful, systemic changes that are actually implemented. While rhetoric may signal progress, it frequently lacks the power to challenge entrenched systems or deliver measurable impact.

There are plenty of instances, attempts, and genuine efforts to be sustainable from individuals, groups, and even whole towns. The occasional company even makes an effort. But structurally, for the general populace, is sustainability a paradigm to structure the social contract around? Not so much.

And this is an existential problem. In thermodynamic terms, social systems that aren't structured to renew complexity are bound to drift toward disorder, just as isolated systems succumb to entropy when energy inputs falter.

What if the real function of sustainability rhetoric isn't to enable environmental protection at all, but to sustain our current systems? The intent might be true, especially for individuals feeling their dissonance, as will the talk that eases that emotional discomfort. It could even be argued that sustainability is an idea that buys time for technological or social breakthroughs to emerge. For instance, somebody will invent fusion power to provide the energy essential to keep everything going.

Whether all the sustainability talk and no action is misguided comfort or necessary bridge-building might depend on whether such breakthroughs materialise and whether we have time to wait.

Something like there is a new Ye Olde Bakery coming to the high street, you know, where the tobacconist used to be.

Everyone talks a big game, but no one wants to say what sustainability actually means. It is time to take a scalpel to that comforting vagueness, exposing how the word has become a placeholder for virtue while dodging the hard questions. Real sustainability should be a reckoning. Saying the word out loud should force us to name what we’re trying to preserve, admit what we’re willing to sacrifice, and confront the systems that cannot be both comfortable and enduring.

It might even question the validity of cake in a healthy diet.

Let’s start with the premise that we lack a clear understanding of what sustainability entails…

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 72% of Americans consider themselves "environmentally conscious," fewer than 30% can provide a coherent definition of sustainability when prompted.

The business world exemplifies this definitional chaos. Sustainability appears in corporate reports 340% more frequently than it did two decades ago, yet regulatory frameworks still lack standardised metrics for what constitutes sustainable practice. A 2023 study by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive found that among Fortune 500 companies claiming sustainable operations, 87% used different metrics to define their sustainability goals, making meaningful comparison impossible. Some companies measured carbon intensity per dollar of revenue, others focused on absolute emissions, while others emphasised recyclable packaging under the same sustainable business banner.

An academic analysis of sustainability discourse across policy documents, corporate communications, and media coverage revealed that the term functions more as what linguists refer to as a floating signifier. This is a word that carries emotional weight and social approval, yet lacks a fixed meaning. When meaning floats, it allows actors across the political and economic spectrum to appropriate the term without committing to specific, measurable outcomes.

Biodiversity is another good example of a floating signifier.

Sustainability gets a mention all the time, but it means what you want it to mean. Political speeches, corporate marketing, and academic papers all invoke the concept of sustainability with the ease of adding a slice of banana bread to your coffee order. Yet, when it gets real, there are endless disagreements about what we're trying to sustain and how we might measure progress.

And hardly anyone has an inkling of entropy’s tough truth.

Sustainability as a fuzzy floater has consequences that bring us to the second premise…

Organisational behaviour research confirms symbolic adoption, where institutions adopt popular terminology and frameworks without implementing substantive changes. A longitudinal study by MIT's Sloan School of Management tracked 200 companies that adopted sustainability reporting between 2010 and 2020. It found that 73% showed no significant change in resource consumption patterns despite extensive sustainability communications. These companies successfully captured the reputational benefits of sustainability rhetoric while maintaining business-as-usual operations.

Political science research reveals similar patterns in policy domains. Environmental economist Herman Daly's analysis of sustainable development policy frameworks revealed that governments often employ sustainability language to justify conventional economic growth strategies. The concept becomes what political scientists call a consensus concept, appealing precisely because it means different things to different stakeholders. A mining company and an environmental NGO can both support sustainable development while pursuing fundamentally incompatible goals.

I just call it an oxymoron.

Psychological research also demonstrates that individuals who engage in symbolic environmental actions subsequently feel permission to engage in more environmentally harmful behaviours. Buy a "green" product, get one free. This suggests that vague sustainability commitments may actually impede meaningful action, as all we need to do is feel good about it; no behavioural change is necessary.

When ExxonMobil launched its "algae biofuels" research program in 2009, the company invested $600 million over a decade while spending $3.5 billion annually on oil exploration. The biofuels research generated extensive sustainability communications and favourable media coverage, effectively deflecting attention from the company's core business model expansion. This pattern of small symbolic investments enabling large, unsustainable operations appears consistently across resource extraction industries.

Overall, multiple research domains confirm that definitional vagueness enables symbolic adoption without substantive change, often with counterproductive effects on genuine environmental action.

Here, have this doughnut. It has green icing.

All this may allow some smug CEOs to up their annual bonus, but there is a more insidious effect of psychological comfort described in the following premise…

Cognitive psychology research established that we use abstract concepts to manage anxiety about complex, overwhelming problems. For example, ethnographic studies of climate change response in Norway documented how communities embraced sustainability rhetoric as a form of socially organised denial. Participants in the survey expressed strong support for sustainability while dismissing specific policy measures that would affect their lifestyles.

Here is another example. Terror Management Theory, developed by Sheldon Solomon and colleagues, demonstrates that when people feel threatened by existential risks like environmental collapse, they gravitate toward cultural symbols and narratives that restore a sense of control and meaning. Sustainability rhetoric serves as a cultural worldview defence, helping to protect psychological well-being by suggesting that responsible action is being taken without requiring personal sacrifice or uncomfortable changes.

All cakes are good.

Studies by Yale's Cultural Cognition Project found that individuals presented with clear, specific environmental challenges experienced significant anxiety and defensiveness. However, when the same challenges were framed using sustainability language, emphasising gradual improvement and technological solutions, participants reported feeling more optimistic and less personally responsible for dramatic changes. This suggests that the sustainability discourse serves as an anxiety management tool, rendering serious environmental challenges psychologically tolerable.

Given these responses, it is no surprise that corporations use sustainability initiatives for similar psychological functions. Management scholar Joel Gehman's research on green organising found that companies often implement sustainability programs not primarily for environmental outcomes, but to maintain employee morale and organisational identity during periods of environmental criticism. Employees reported feeling more positive about their work at companies with visible sustainability initiatives, even when those initiatives had a minimal environmental impact.

We know that sustainability rhetoric serves essential anxiety-reduction functions that can impede confrontation with necessary changes. We like the feeling and have become addicted to sustainability in its vague form, which gives us the following premise…

A comprehensive study by the International Energy Agency found that while renewable energy installations increased 260% between 2010 and 2020, global energy consumption rose 18% during the same period, with fossil fuels still comprising 84% of total energy use. This pattern of absolute growth despite efficiency gains appears consistently across resource domains, suggesting that sustainability initiatives appear to enable rather than replace unsustainable practices.

The concept of sustainable intensification in agriculture, promoted by major agricultural companies and development agencies, promised to increase crop yields while reducing environmental impact. However, research by the University of Minnesota's Global Landscapes Initiative found that in practice, sustainable intensification typically involves increased input use, especially fertilisers, pesticides, and machinery, which may improve efficiency per unit of output but increase total resource consumption and environmental impact.

For me, it is another oxymoron.

Green growth strategies are another furphy. Efficiency doesn’t escape entropy; it speeds it up. Like adding fuel to a fire, increasing throughput without changing the system’s aim merely accelerates the burn. A meta-analysis of 835 studies by the European Environment Agency concluded that no country has achieved the level of resource consumption reduction necessary for global sustainability while maintaining economic growth patterns. Countries implementing green growth strategies typically improve their resource efficiency while increasing total resource consumption. This is Jevons Paradox named after the 19th-century economist who first documented how efficiency improvements often increase rather than decrease total resource use.

Oxfam's research on carbon inequality found that the richest 10% of countries account for 65% of consumption-based carbon emissions. This is quite the discrepancy. But the sustainability initiatives disproportionately focus on efficiency improvements that allow high-consumption populations to maintain their lifestyles. Meanwhile, World Bank data shows that 2.8 billion people still lack access to clean cooking fuels, and 760 million lack access to electricity.

Research indicates that sustainability initiatives often perpetuate or even exacerbate unsustainable consumption and extraction patterns, particularly when they fail to address questions of scale and distribution. Some of us are eating real and virtual cake every day and can’t wait for the Ye Olde Bakery franchise to open a store in our local shopping mall.

In short, sustainability isn’t cutting it, which brings us to the next premise…

Planetary boundaries research provides the clearest evidence for this premise.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre's comprehensive analysis indicates that humanity has already exceeded safe operating limits for four of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and land use change), with others approaching critical thresholds. Calculations suggest that achieving global sustainability would require reducing per-capita resource consumption in high-income countries by 50-90% while improving resource access for the world's poorest populations, changes that are incompatible with current economic growth models and cake consumption.

Studies by the Institute for New Economic Thinking demonstrate that renewable energy systems, although essential, cannot simply replace fossil fuels without fundamental changes to energy consumption patterns. Limited substitution, combined with storage and transmission challenges, suggests that sustainable energy systems would require not just technological substitution but dramatic reductions in energy demand, particularly in high-consumption societies.

Ecological economics supports this premise. The aforementioned Herman Daly's work on steady-state economics and Tim Jackson's research on prosperity without growth demonstrate that sustainable systems would require abandoning GDP growth as a primary policy objective, implementing resource caps, and developing alternative measures of social progress. Jackson's mathematical modelling shows that any feasible rate of economic growth, when compounded over decades, generates resource demands incompatible with planetary boundaries.

But you don't really need complex modelling. Just gaze out the window on your next flight or train journey and imagine doubling what we have already done. That idyllic painting of Hampstead Heath couldn’t be replicated today. That ‘vale of health’ has buildings on it.

If the economics research sounds like bunkum, as it often can, social psychology research has demonstrated strong correlations between materialistic values and environmental degradation, as well as reduced well-being. Sustainable societies would require cultural shifts away from consumption-based status systems toward what psychologists call intrinsic values, typically of community, personal growth, and meaningful relationships. This aligns with anthropological research on past sustainable societies, which typically featured strong social institutions that limited individual accumulation and promoted resource sharing.

Our ancestors on the savanna did not eat cake.

All the serious research concludes that genuine sustainability requires system-level transformations that extend far beyond current policy approaches. Unfortunately, cake is not the foundation for a healthy diet.

So what is it precisely that we should sustain? Not knowing gives us the following premise…

Here is the contrary zinger.

Sustainability discourse avoids questions of power and distribution by framing the issue as a technical rather than a political problem. This approach, sometimes called post-political ecology, enables sustainability initiatives that address symptoms while preserving the economic and political structures that generate environmental problems in the first place.

Cake and eat it. Sorry, too much.

For example, sustainability communications often employ passive voice and abstract subjects, which can obscure agency and responsibility. Phrases like "emissions must be reduced" and "resources need to be managed sustainably" avoid specifying who should take which actions, effectively shielding existing power structures from scrutiny. This linguistic pattern appears consistently across corporate, governmental, and NGO sustainability communications. The blame game is a short step from this refusal to take responsibility.

There is also a status quo bias. Research on nature-based solutions has found that conservation initiatives routinely prioritise approaches that create new markets (such as carbon trading, ecosystem services, and sustainable finance) over approaches that would constrain market activities (such as resource caps, extraction moratoria, and consumption limits). More evidence for not confronting fundamental tensions between conservation and economic growth. I know this first hand as I pimped out my ecology skills to the carbon markets for a while.

We are very good at this obfuscation and have been for a long time. Agricultural sustainability efforts in the 1930s Dust Bowl in the U.S. failed specifically because they avoided confronting the underlying economic structures driving soil degradation. Similarly, an analysis of Pacific Northwest timber policies reveals that ‘sustainable forestry’ initiatives have consistently failed to address the financial incentives driving overharvesting. These historical patterns suggest that avoiding core questions about what we're trying to sustain and at whose expense has been a persistent limitation of sustainability approaches for a long time.

It can be political ecology, communication studies, conservation biology, environmental history or any subdiscipline of your choice; they all avoid core questions about priorities and power structures that systematically limit the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives.

We are using sustainability to avoid sustainability.

This is cute and, for some, clever, but if the definition ‘meets current needs without sacrificing the capacity of future generations to meet theirs’ has any chance at all, then we need the final premise to hold…

Fortunately, there are alternatives to cake.

One alternative sustainability framework, the doughnut economics model (delicious irony), developed by Kate Raworth, provides concrete metrics that balance ecological limits with social foundations. Versions have been implemented in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and initial assessments by Oxford's Environmental Change Institute suggest measurable environmental improvements compared to cities using conventional sustainability frameworks. This is largely because the doughnut model requires explicit confrontation with resource limits and social equity.

Precision and clarity in sustainability metrics can also produce better outcomes than aspirational frameworks. A study by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis compared the effectiveness of different sustainability measurement approaches across 150 cities globally. Cities using biophysical indicators (land use per capita, material footprint, carbon budgets) showed significantly greater environmental improvements than cities using composite indicators that combined environmental, economic, and social factors without clear prioritisation.

Precision applies to companies as well. MIT's Sloan School studies of corporate sustainability implementation found that companies using science-based targets (specific emissions reductions aligned with climate science) achieved substantially greater environmental improvements than companies using voluntary sustainability commitments. The conclusion was that science-based targets created external standards that enabled stakeholder evaluation, while aspirational commitments remained effectively unverifiable.

This can be happening to you right now. For example, hotel guests responded more strongly to specific requests ("reuse your towels to save 25 gallons of water") than to general sustainability appeals ("help us protect the environment"). Precise, honest frameworks not only enable better measurement but also motivate more effective action.

Do not eat that vanilla slice.

Research across multiple domains suggests that precise and honest sustainability frameworks yield better environmental outcomes than aspirational approaches, although the transition to such frameworks faces significant institutional and psychological obstacles.

We could do a lot better.

Sustainability isn’t.

It has become simultaneously ubiquitous and meaningless in public discourse. What we say about sustainability may not only be ineffective but also actively counterproductive, but it does provide psychological comfort that reduces motivation for necessary yet difficult changes. We like how it sounds as we continue to make more of everything.

All seven premises presented here hold when examined against empirical research, though, admittedly, with varying degrees of strength. The convergence of evidence across disciplines from cognitive psychology to biophysical sciences to political ecology suggests that being critical of how we use the term sustainability is not merely academic but identifies a fundamental obstacle to environmental progress.

The most compelling evidence stems from the disconnect between the psychological functions of sustainability rhetoric (anxiety reduction, moral licensing, symbolic adoption) and the radical changes that biophysical research indicates are necessary for genuine sustainability.

We are getting diabetes from all the cake.

Sustainability rhetoric is a sophisticated anxiety management system. The convergence of research from cognitive psychology, organisational behaviour, and environmental science suggests that this isn't accidental, but rather an emergent property of how humans handle overwhelming, systemic challenges.

The psychological research is particularly compelling. Moral licensing and terror management theory explain why vague sustainability language can feel so appealing, yet potentially be counterproductive. Our brains tend to overlook complexity, which is a standard lament of the mindful sceptic.

And yet, the biophysical evidence is stark. Planetary boundaries research leaves no wriggle room for incremental approaches. When Rockström calculates 50-90% reductions in high-income country consumption, he's not being dramatic; he's doing the math. We have several mindful sceptic guides that explore these biophysical limits.

The evidence also suggests that more precise and honest frameworks are both possible and more effective, although implementing them faces significant institutional and psychological obstacles.

The emergence of precise alternatives gives me hope. The Amsterdam doughnut economics implementation and science-based targets research suggest that when we get specific about what we're sustaining and at what cost, we make progress. We can return to a definition of sustainability that is closer to its original meaning, which is something that persists.

And in thermodynamic terms, to persist is to manage entropy through feedback, redundancy, and structures that channel energy wisely rather than wastefully.

However, all this suggests that we need intellectual honesty to reshape our approach to environmental challenges.

We have to be truthful. Mostly with ourselves.

When we define sustainability as something that persists, it forces us to confront energy, complexity, and feedback. It becomes less a virtue and more a function of thermodynamic discipline. The Second Law doesn’t negotiate. If our strategies require infinite substitution or behavioural stasis, they’re not strategies. They’re stalling tactics.

Entropy will collect the debt.

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We do not act on climate because we don’t trust each other. Environmentalism has become tribal theatre with each side signalling virtue, none willing to cede moral ground. Facts do not matter when identity is at stake. The uncomfortably intelligent will realise that consensus is a fantasy. Eight billion primates will not unite under a single flag, no matter how green. But tribes can still adapt. Let them. Design climate systems that reward performance, not agreement. Compete on outcomes. Punish failure. Honour success. That is how evolution works. And it might be the only way we do.

As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of North London, I was mad keen on soccer. Every Saturday afternoon, rain or shine, I would play in the park with my mates from up the street and, when I got older, attend as many games as I could at White Hart Lane, Stamford Bridge, or Highbury to watch my team. I was the crazy kid wearing the Leeds United scarf.

To understand just how crazy, I need to tell you that I lived in Palmers Green, a short walk from Tottenham Hotspur territory. My tribe should have been Spurs fans, or at a push Arsenal supporters, but not northerners from 300km up the M1. It turns out I had never even been to Leeds, but I supported their soccer team because‌ they were the best, having won the league in the 1973-74 season, when I was 12 years old. My allegiance was from a perception of excellence and, perhaps, an early desire to be contrary.

No surprise that later I enrolled in a university with the motto "Do Different" and joined another tribe.

All humans are tribal. We evolved to cling to the group, suspicious of outsiders, because survival demanded it. This tribal orientation is a crucial aspect of human cognition rather than a flaw or aberration. We identify with our tribe, show fierce loyalty, and, as in my young soccer supporter days, it does not even matter if you are not physically with other members; you still cheer for the tribe.

These loyalties, while inspiring many noble behaviours, can also mean that we can sacrifice sound reasoning and good judgment for group belonging and commitment. Tribes can sometimes do things their members might not. And when different tribes interact, they rarely agree thanks to underlying value differences and associated communication barriers that factual information alone cannot overcome. Native American communities prioritise values around careful listening, moderation in speech, and observation, which present a stark contrast to the communication patterns of mainstream Western society. Tribes misunderstand each other. That is what they are built to do.

In Western democracies, we also have tribal politics with very specific interpretations of how to use nature.

To the left, environmental degradation is the spawn of industrial capitalism. Corporate greed is dressed up as growth and inequality disguised as opportunity. Left-leaning movements advocate for regulation, public investment, and international agreements to mitigate environmental harm and transition to more sustainable systems. In practice, this becomes renewable energy, carbon pricing, biodiversity conservation, and frameworks like the Green New Deal. Environmental justice, which links ecological health with social equity, is also a key concern of the left, especially among progressive factions.

The political right approaches environmental issues through the lens of individual liberty, free markets, and national interests through economic growth, energy independence, and reduced regulatory burden. This tribe will argue that innovation and market mechanisms can address environmental challenges more efficiently than government mandates. This translates into scepticism toward climate science or resistance to international agreements perceived as infringing on national sovereignty or imposing economic costs. However, segments of the right, especially local or traditional conservatives, still advocate for conservation, stewardship, and protection of land and heritage.

These positions are not fixed, and there are notable exceptions. Green conservatism, eco-libertarianism, and bipartisan conservation efforts suggest the potential for overlap. Nevertheless‌ the environment has become a partisan flash point in many liberal democracies, with left and right framing both the causes of and solutions to ecological problems in ‌different terms.

But we should pause for a moment to remember some hard truths.

All tribes live in a shared reality. A finite planet, plundered for its resources, that is straining to cope with 8 billion voracious humans and their tribal tendencies. That shared reality is constrained by thermodynamics. The Earth is an open system that dissipates energy to maintain local order, but the rate at which humans accelerate entropy now exceeds what ecosystems can reabsorb. Complexity collapses when energy is stripped faster than it can be cycled.

But there are tribes nonetheless, so this essay explores how political polarisation functions as a barrier to collective environmental action. And not just because we disagree, but through a deeper psychological mechanism that binds belief to belonging. Drawing on insights from social psychology, cultural cognition, and communication studies, we will explore how tribal thinking influences perception, filters evidence, and reinforces in-group solidarity, in spite of a shared reality.

So, to the first premise…

Political polarisation means that agreement on facts, priorities, and policy solutions becomes increasingly rare. Once considered a shared concern, environmental issues have become politicised and subsumed into broader ideological battles. As a result, attitudes toward climate change, conservation, and sustainability align more closely with partisan identity than with scientific consensus or local environmental realities. This makes it difficult to generate bipartisan support for climate action or ecological reform, even in the face of clear evidence or local impact.

In the U.S., climate change denial is more common among conservatives, not necessarily because of scepticism about the science, but because acceptance of climate change is associated with liberal or progressive identity. This dynamic reinforces echo chambers, discourages compromise, and turns ecological responsibility into a battleground for asserting loyalty to one’s in-group. And I profess my tribal loyalty before anything else.

Policymakers face pressure to conform to party lines rather than seek practical solutions, while activists risk alienating potential allies by framing ecological issues in ways that trigger partisan resistance. Even scientifically sound, economically viable, or locally beneficial environmental initiatives are easily dismissed out of hand. This deeply polarised environment makes long-term, systemic ecological reform increasingly difficult, precisely when it is most urgently needed. But entropy does not wait for agreement. It proceeds regardless of belief, dissolving structure wherever maintenance fails. The longer we stall, the steeper the energy debt we accumulate.

The U.S. Green New Deal, proposed in 2019, exemplifies how climate policy has become a partisan flashpoint. Although it aimed to address climate change while promoting economic justice, Republicans widely rejected it as an example of radical leftist overreach, framing it as an attack on capitalism and American values. Rather than fostering cross-party collaboration, it hardened ideological divides, with climate denial and the negative kind of scepticism increasingly serving as a cultural identifier for conservative voters. No small irony that it was still a neo-liberal growth paradigm. Maybe it was the colour that conservatives objected to.

Similarly, climate and energy policy in Australia has been a volatile issue across multiple governments. The carbon pricing scheme introduced by the Labour government in 2012 was repealed just two years later by the Liberal-National coalition, who framed it as a “carbon tax” damaging families and businesses. Public perception became deeply polarised, with climate policy seen not as a response to ecological risk, but as a left-wing agenda item, stalling meaningful action even as Australia faced worsening droughts, bushfires, and coral bleaching. A decade later, and policy still had not settled.

While the EU broadly supports climate action, internal divisions reveal identity-driven tensions. The European Green Deal has met resistance in some Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, where nationalist governments argue that aggressive decarbonisation threatens their sovereignty and economic development. In these contexts, environmental goals are portrayed as elitist Western impositions, deepening East-West political rifts and complicating unified EU climate strategies.

My tribe needs resources and deserves them more than any other tribe, especially yours.

The next premise is that these tendencies have taken hold and moved us away from evidence…

A 2023 Pew survey found that only 21% of conservative Republicans accepted the evidence compared with over 85% of liberal Democrats. In Australia, Lowy Institute polling shows that climate risk is recognised by 83% of Labour voters but only 36% of Coalition voters. Scientific literacy barely shifts these numbers. Party lines, regional loyalty, and religious framing predict attitudes far more reliably than exposure to evidence. Climate change has become a cultural marker, where allegiance is measured by what you deny as much as by what you affirm.

MIT research on Facebook’s 2021 internal leaks showed that divisive content drove 60% more engagement than neutral reporting. Outlets on both sides of the spectrum now serve their tribal customers with customised myths. Depending on your tribe, you get solar panels as salvation or the ‘carbon tax’ as tyranny. These badges of belonging are not arguments; they are uniforms. Once evidence is recast as a cultural emblem, it ceases to make any attempt to persuade.

When environmental issues are filtered through identity politics, empirical data loses persuasive power outside the bounds of like-minded groups. This makes consensus-driven policy difficult, even when the scientific basis is strong and the ecological consequences are clear. The reframing of environmentalism as a cultural stance rather than a response to measurable risk undermines efforts to treat ecological threats as common, cross-cutting concerns. In such a context, building broad-based support for sustainability requires not just presenting better evidence but understanding the identity narratives that now shape environmental opinion.

Every tribe thinks it deserves more, especially yours.

Arguably, evidence has little to no power in this new system of communication and tribal affiliation. Which prompts the next premise…

The business model of media is conflict. It used to be ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ and now ‘rage on the page’ because outrage pays better than accuracy, and nothing feeds the beast like a loyal, angry tribe. The media sells tribal stories with framing that discourages nuanced discussion and reinforces group identity by portraying environmental positions as us-versus-them choices rather than complex policy challenges with potential for consensus.

Social media intensifies this dynamic. The companies know that algorithms surfacing content that provokes outrage or validates users’ existing beliefs keep people on their platform. In this environment, environmental discourse becomes highly stylised, with “green” or “anti-green” stances serving as cultural markers. Nuances such as conservative support for regenerative agriculture or progressive interest in market-based emissions trading receive far less visibility than more ideologically charged narratives. As a result, a pragmatic, evidence-based middle ground is drowned out by louder, more polarising voices.

Your tribe threatens mine by existing.

Yet research and polling consistently show that there is common ground. Many conservative-leaning constituencies support environmental stewardship rooted in values like localism, responsibility, and intergenerational duty. It is, after all, in the original value set of conservatism. Similarly, liberal audiences appreciate the economic and national security arguments for renewable energy and resource resilience. However, this shared terrain is rarely highlighted because it doesn’t drive clicks, ratings, or viral reactions in the way that conflict does. The result is a distorted public discourse that misrepresents both the nature of the divide and the possibilities for cooperation.

If the conflict is at least partially artificial, logic would have the following premise hold…

People process information through the lens of their existing values, identities, and worldviews. When new information conflicts with these mental frameworks, especially those tied to group belonging, it triggers defensive reasoning or outright dismissal. This phenomenon, known as motivated reasoning or identity-protective cognition, explains why fact-based corrections about climate science, biodiversity loss, or environmental policy fail to shift opinions, particularly when those facts appear to threaten an individual’s cultural or political identity.

This research insight has profound implications for environmental communication. Presenting more graphs, reports, or expert testimony is unlikely to persuade those who perceive the message as aligned with an opposing group. Instead, communicators must understand and engage with the moral and cultural values that guide different groups. Emphasising environmental stewardship as protecting God’s creation resonates with religious conservatives, while highlighting national security risks of climate instability might appeal to defence-minded centrists. In both cases, the message is more effective not because the facts change, but because the framing aligns with the audience’s identity and values.

Cross-tribal communication begins with values. People hear signals of belonging before they hear evidence. Scientific integrity still matters, but raw evidence has to be translated into moral language that the tribe already trusts. We are talking about God’s creation for evangelicals, national security for defence hawks, intergenerational duty for conservatives, and economic resilience for progressives. Confrontation hardens identity walls, so the task is to find some resonance. If we ignore what matters to the tribe, evidence dies on arrival.

Evidence that fact correction cannot overcome bias and dissonance comes from research on how humans process information that conflicts with their existing beliefs. Cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes, creates a psychological drive to resolve this uncomfortable state by changing one of the conflicting elements.

The Interactive Acculturation Model reminds us that communication is never one-way. Tribes change each other in contact. The point is not to transfer facts from one side to another, but to create a space where values are recognised and shared. It sounds obvious until you notice how rarely it happens.

Shared values are the bridge. Recognise them, and you open the conditions for trust. Ignore them, and even accurate evidence gets discarded. People hear belonging before they hear data. Indigenous traditions understand this well. In such cultures, sincerity counts more than speech, while dominance corrodes trust. Social identity theory tells the same story because every tribe carries its own code of meaning, symbols, and expectations. The task is not to bulldoze those codes with facts but to translate them. Make the unfamiliar recognisable to expand the circle without demanding anyone abandon their tribe.

The evidence largely supports the premise. As our societies become increasingly diverse and polarised, the ability to communicate effectively across tribal boundaries becomes ever more crucial. By recognising the fundamental role that values play in shaping perception and identity, we can develop more sophisticated and effective approaches to intergroup communication that respect differences while building common ground.

So, there are mechanisms that offer some hope, which in turn prompts the next premise…

Deliberative democracy is a political concept built around discussion, reasoned debate, and consensus-building in the decision-making process. Unlike traditional forms of democracy that focus on voting and the aggregation of individual preferences, deliberative democracy holds that the legitimacy of a political decision comes from the quality of the public discourse that precedes it. This means inclusive, informed, and respectful dialogue among citizens to address complex public issues. It is an appealing antidote to polarisation, especially on environmental challenges that require collective action. Models like citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, and deliberative polling have shown that when diverse groups engage in structured, evidence-based dialogue, they find common ground and can arrive at thoughtful, pragmatic solutions.

Ireland showed what happens when ordinary citizens are trusted with the climate brief. Its Citizens’ Assembly produced recommendations so ambitious that they were written straight into national policy. Legitimacy came not from party lines or lobby groups, but from a hundred people drawn by lottery who had to look one another in the eye before making their case.

France went further. In the wake of the Yellow Vest protests, President Macron convened 150 citizens to design climate solutions ‘without filter’. They proposed 149 measures, including criminalising ecocide, rewriting the constitution, and taxing high-emission industries. Many of these made it to the Élysée Palace intact, proof that citizens’ assemblies can cut through vested interests and put hard options on the table.

Scotland gave deliberation legal teeth. Its Climate Assembly, created under the Climate Change Act, gathered over a hundred citizens between 2020 and 2022. Their mandate was to recommend fair and effective climate action. What emerged was not consensus-by-compromise but ordinary people insisting on a just transition, binding government to its own targets.

In South Australia, the question was nuclear waste. A 350-person citizens’ jury sifted evidence, interrogated assumptions and voted no. The risks were too great, the trust too thin. Despite the government’s interest, the project was buried. Consent proved more powerful than policy.

Despite their promise, such deliberative mechanisms face steep barriers to widespread adoption. First, they require political will and institutional redesign, which many elected officials resist, especially in adversarial systems where power hinges on short-term partisan victories. Second, deliberative processes are resource-intensive, time-consuming, and perceived as technocratic or disconnected from everyday political urgency. Finally, public trust in democratic processes is eroding in many countries, and low civic literacy or engagement that limits both participation and effectiveness. The very polarisation deliberation seeks to remedy, also undercuts its legitimacy in the eyes of the sceptical public or partisan media.

Deliberative models also challenge entrenched media and political norms. They prioritise slow, reflective reasoning over rapid, emotional reaction, which sits uneasily within the fast-paced, conflict-driven environment of contemporary politics and media. While pilot programs and local successes abound, scaling these initiatives to the level needed for systemic transformation remains improbable under current conditions. While deliberative democracy could offer a way out of the environmental polarisation trap, the structures and incentives that dominate most political systems make it unlikely to be widely implemented in the near future.

Deliberation mimics the structure of complex adaptive systems with diverse nodes interacting, testing hypotheses, and evolving feedback. It’s messier than command, but more resilient. However, their influence depends heavily on the surrounding political culture, media framing, and institutional openness to reform.

We don’t want resources. We want to win.

When faced with information that contradicts deeply held beliefs, people choose to reject the new information rather than update their existing beliefs. This leads to what psychologists call belief perseverance, the maintenance of a belief despite new information that strongly contradicts it. This tendency explains why simply presenting people with correct information fails to change minds on emotionally charged or identity-linked issues.

The tension between tribal belonging and our shared ecological reality is one that we cannot simply resolve through more facts or better deliberation. Rather than attempting to transcend our tribal nature, which is an impossible task given our evolutionary history, we might instead cultivate a more mindful relationship with it.

The conclusion is that we may not transcend tribal thinking. Eradicating it is impossible, given that every human who has ever lived identified with one tribe or another.

We have been fighting human nature when we should have been harnessing it. After watching countless environmental campaigns struggle against tribal psychology, I have started to wonder. Are we approaching this backwards? Instead of trying to transcend tribal thinking, what if we deliberately designed environmental movements as genuine tribes?

Think about it.

The most successful environmental initiatives succeed precisely because they create a strong in-group identity. Surfers protecting their breaks. Hunters are conserving wildlife habitat. Local communities are defending their watersheds. These are the voices of people in tribes with clear territorial interests and proud cultural identities.

The uncomfortable insight is that tribal competition might be more effective than universal cooperation. Make environmentalism tribally competitive. "We're better stewards than those wasteful people over there." This isn't about creating hatred, but about channelling our evolutionary drive for group status toward ecological outcomes. The Amish didn't become low-carbon because they studied climate science; they became low-carbon because simple living defines their tribal identity.

The practical implication challenges everything we assume about environmental communication. Instead of seeking universal agreement, we might focus on building stronger environmental tribes that take pride in their ecological performance relative to others.

We could extend this further.

Suppose the entire premise that we need broad agreement on environmental issues reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how change happens. My experience in policy consulting taught me that waiting for consensus means waiting forever. There is always a polemic that attracts people to one side or the other.

Perhaps different tribes should pursue completely different environmental strategies based on their values, and we should let results determine effectiveness rather than seeking impossible agreement. This would be recognition that forcing ideological uniformity might be less effective than allowing genuine diversity of approaches.

Consider how this might work practically.

Conservative communities could embrace environmental stewardship through property rights, traditional conservation, and technological innovation. Progressive communities could pursue degrowth, regulation, and collective action. Indigenous communities could expand traditional ecological management. Rather than arguing over which approach is "correct," we'd have multiple experiments running simultaneously.

The beauty of this approach lies in its acceptance of human diversity while maintaining accountability through outcomes. If one tribe's environmental strategy produces better ecological results, others might voluntarily adopt elements of it, not because they were persuaded by argument, but because they witnessed success.

This challenges our democratic assumption that major issues require majority consensus. Sometimes, allowing principled disagreement creates more innovation than forcing artificial unity.

This will easily extend to geography.

What if we acknowledged the reality that different regions will adopt radically different environmental approaches based on their unique tribal values, and stopped trying to impose global uniformity? My travels across diverse political and cultural landscapes suggest that this might not just be inevitable but also beneficial.

Let Texas pursue technological solutions and carbon capture. Let California embrace regulation and degrowth. Let Europe experiment with circular economies. Let developing nations prioritise lifting people out of poverty while building clean infrastructure. Rather than fighting over whose approach is "correct," we'd have multiple large-scale experiments running simultaneously.

Tribal divergence is already shaping climate policy. Regions respond to what their cultures will tolerate, not what science demands. Uniformity isn’t just unrealistic—it’s counterproductive.

Variation is strength. Different tribes face different ecological conditions. Their values, resources, and risks differ, too. Some experiments will fail, and some will flourish. Those that adapt best will attract capital, people, and legitimacy. In thermodynamic terms, distributed variation slows systemic collapse. It allows energy dissipation to be spread across adaptive pathways rather than being bottlenecked through a brittle monoculture.

This is evolution under pressure. Environmental collapse will not wait for consensus. Instead, it will punish unfit ideas. Let that be the sorting mechanism.

The great delusion of climate politics is the belief that unity precedes action. In truth, the fixation on agreement paralyses movement. While we hold hands in diplomatic circles, the biosphere burns.

We don’t need planetary harmony. We need a design that channels tribal loyalty toward functional outcomes. Let the tribes compete on environmental performance. That might just be our best chance.

Let the tribes compete on environmental outcomes. Let results, not rhetoric, determine which approaches deserve to spread. Ultimately, the atmosphere doesn't care about our political sensibilities—it only responds to what works. And what works might look nothing like the environmental movement we've been trying to build.

And Leeds United? Well, their glory years passed, and my support for them waned. My tribal allegiance was fluid.

And that is a thought to take away.

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Sustainability storytelling has become climate denial with better manners. This essay argues that the dominant narratives we use—whether apocalyptic, technocratic, or regenerative—often soothe, distract, or defer. Stories that once mobilised action, like the moonshot, now mask inaction. They reinforce cultural myths of agency, progress, and innovation while sidestepping biophysical limits. Instead of confronting the unspeakable—degrowth, triage, restraint—we build narrative scaffolds to avoid it. The result is optimistic procrastination. Stories may help humans cope, but in a world of planetary overshoot, they have become our cleverest excuse for doing nothing. Sometimes, a story is the most dangerous technology of all.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in which he famously committed the nation to achieving the ambitious goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the decade. This announcement marked the formal beginning of the Apollo program. It was also a strategic move during the Cold War to assert American technological and ideological leadership, particularly in response to the Soviet Union’s early successes in space exploration.

At Rice University in 1962, Kennedy called the moonshot a national mission—not because it was easy, but because it would summon the best of us. By casting space as the “New Frontier,” he tapped the pioneer myth and turned a Cold War weapons program into a moral crusade. It worked. The mobilisation that followed showed how stories do not just shape what we think is possible; they tell us what must be done.

A few months later, in October 1962, an American reconnaissance flight over Cuba revealed Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction just 90 miles from the U.S. coastline. A shocked Kennedy administration initiated a tense diplomatic confrontation with the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev. President Kennedy opted for a naval blockade to prevent further Soviet shipments of military equipment to Cuba, while demanding the removal of the missiles already in place.

For nearly two weeks, the world watched as the two superpowers exchanged threats and attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Behind closed doors, both sides engaged in intense backchannel communication. The crisis reached its peak when a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba. It was tense, but diplomacy prevailed when Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites in exchange for a public U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

The Cuban Missile Crisis marked a pivotal moment in the Cold War. It exposed the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship and spurred efforts toward arms control.

And so far, so good.

However, today, we face environmental challenges that dwarf even the audacity of the moonshot or the risk in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Climate, biodiversity, soil health, food security, overdependence on fossil energy, geopolitical instability… take your pick.

Yet our response remains fractured, halting, and insufficient. The contrast is instructive. While the Space Race narrative successfully linked technological capabilities with deep-seated cultural values, current environmental discourse struggles to do the same. The modern polycrisis extends not just to our physical systems but also to the stories we tell ourselves about limits, progress, and our relationship with the natural world.

Just as Kennedy's frontier metaphor created meaning that mobilised collective action, our environmental future hinges on developing narratives that can translate abstract planetary boundaries into meaningful frameworks for shared purpose.

The uncomfortable truth is that we're succeeding brilliantly at solving the wrong problems because our stories define what counts as a problem. Every sustainability report, every ESG framework, every climate target exists within narrative boundaries that predetermine which solutions are even imaginable. When we frame climate change as a "carbon problem," we get carbon markets. When we frame biodiversity loss as a "conservation problem," we end up with nature reserves. These are not solutions. Instead, they are more like rituals designed to signal commitment while preserving structural continuity. Each ritual defers reckoning, consuming energy to preserve coherence in a system drifting toward entropy. But planetary boundaries are connected. Breaching them represents system design failures that our professional vocabularies systematically obscure.

Neither the apocalyptic framing of ’planetary boundaries’, the techno-optimistic language of ‘sustainable innovation’, nor the unrealistic and marginal ‘saving the whale’ comes close.

We all need to win and to believe in the story. So what might that story be?

Let’s begin with this premise, which states the importance of narrative…

Planetary boundaries are science’s attempt to draw chalk lines around chaos. Step over them and the system buckles. The question is not whether they exist, but whether civilisation can live inside them.

For instance, a society that views nature as a resource to be dominated is likely to frame environmental degradation differently than one that sees humans as stewards within a living system.

Cultural narratives determine which planetary boundaries are prioritised. Climate change, for example, dominates global environmental discourse, in part because it aligns with existing beliefs in technological progress, risk management, and economic growth. In contrast, boundaries like biodiversity loss or soil health receive less attention because they do not easily fit into the dominant policy or economic storyline, except as a catastrophe or tragedy. In this way, the visibility and urgency of environmental issues are not determined solely by biophysical reality, but by how well they resonate.

Cultural identity, historical memory, and moral imagination are more important to how we think and respond to an issue. In some cultures, degrowth or ecological limits may be seen as threats to prosperity or autonomy; in others, they resonate with deeper traditions of moderation or reciprocity. Culture not only affects understanding but also collective action, or lack of it. Recognising this helps explain why responses to environmental challenges vary so widely across regions and why scientific communication is so often sidelined.

Here are some broad-brush examples.

In the West, progress is still measured by mastery and growth. The Enlightenment myth of human superiority over nature survives in the language of sustainability, where science and technology are cast as management tools. Carbon capture, geoengineering, renewable transitions—these are the rituals. They acknowledge planetary limits only to insist they can be overcome. Adaptation is heresy; domination remains the creed.

Innovation has become a moral duty, a secular salvation narrative. Proposals that suggest restraint—less growth, lower consumption, behavioural limits—are treated as eccentric, or worse, dangerous. Civilisation is addicted to acceleration and disguises it as progress. Take the enthusiasm for carbon capture. It is packaged as the silver bullet that lets fossil fuels continue. Money and policy flood into the idea despite its technical fragility. Belief in salvation tomorrow proves more powerful than change today.

The same faith sustains the renewable boom. Solar and wind expand not to cut energy demand but to meet ever more of it. They are built as add-ons, not transitions. Consumption continues to rise, material footprints continue to widen, and sustainability becomes a substitution rather than a transformation. The system insists on continuity, so growth is not questioned, only powered differently. And so the pursuit loops endlessly, burning energy to preserve the illusion of progress.

But not everyone thinks this way.

Many Indigenous cultures see humans as one part of an interdependent web of life. In these worldviews, such as those of Australian Aboriginal peoples, the Andean Buen Vivir philosophy, or North American Anishinabe traditions, planetary boundaries are not external scientific limits but embedded in cultural laws, oral histories, and practices of reciprocity and restraint. These cultures often have long-standing governance systems based on observation of ecological thresholds and provide models for living within limits. In rural Botswana, a man can still cut a mopane tree for his rondavel, leave it where it fell to cure and come back months later to retrieve it. However, these perspectives are frequently marginalised in global policy settings, despite their relevance to sustainability.

In much of the Global South, the story is about scarcity rather than limits and a lot about justice. For example, India, Brazil, and South Africa are nations still clawing their way out of poverty. People in these countries typically see planetary boundaries through the lens of history. The North burned the carbon while the South carries the debt. Environmental responsibility is reframed as inequality, not ecology. Growth is defended as a right, poverty reduction as non-negotiable making any talk of restraint look like colonialism in new clothes. Climate justice, technology transfer, and tailored development pathways become bargaining chips in a negotiation that treats limits less as physics than as politics.

Philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists have dissected these categories into specifics, but there is little doubt that the premise remains valid. Perception and response to limits imposed by a finite biophysical planet are culturally confined, and not often in a good way.

This leads to the second premise…

When people are presented with messages of impending doom without corresponding pathways for action, they often respond with denial, avoidance, or rationalisation to protect themselves from anxiety. Classic cognitive dissonance. When crisis stories contradict core beliefs, people retreat.

Research from Cambridge University's Social Decision-Making Lab found that apocalyptic climate messaging increased psychological distance from the issue. Participants exposed to ‘catastrophic’ framing showed 23% higher levels of disengagement compared to those receiving ‘local impact’ messaging. Similarly, Yale's Cultural Cognition Project documented how environmental information processing follows ‘identity-protective cognition’ patterns, where increased scientific literacy increased polarisation on climate issues rather than creating consensus. Both contradict the assumption that more information leads to better environmental decisions. Renee Lertzman's research on environmental melancholia from a longitudinal study of 847 environmental professionals, gives us what she called ‘optimism fatigue’. Many reported psychological exhaustion from maintaining positivity when it contradicted their held private pessimism about outcomes.

Exhaustion is the expression of cognitive dissonance, the conflict between values and actions that was first identified in the 1950s. It is the mental discomfort that arises when a person behaves in ways that contradict their beliefs, prompting rationalisation, denial, or change.

Apocalyptic and crisis-laden narratives trigger these defensive psychological responses when they overwhelm an individual's sense of agency or belonging. As a result, alarmist framing can backfire even when people accept the facts because it activates emotional defences that block engagement. I see it in people I talk to about the crisis, even when they ask me about it. After a minute, less sometimes, they glaze over, shuffle in their seat, and abruptly change the subject.

Note the term defence. Dissonance is beneficial for the individual as it helps the mind reduce psychological stress by altering one of the conflicting cognitions. Here, it's easier to change the belief about the severity of the threat or one's responsibility than to live with the anxiety of impending doom and helplessness.

I wrote a Mindful Sceptic Guide entitled Escaping the Malthusian Trap, which the preface says is about

…more than providing straightforward answers to whether we escaped. Instead, it's about equipping you with the knowledge and analytical tools to navigate one of the most pressing issues of our time—population.

And that was a huge mistake.

The ‘P-word’ is taboo for an audience from Western liberal democracies. Their narrative simply cannot cope with the implications of exponential population growth for personal or collective action.

And yet, constant exposure to messages of collapse can foster a sense of fatalism and learned helplessness. People believe the situation is already beyond repair or that their actions are meaningless in the face of global-scale problems. This kind of existential overwhelm is now widely recognised in phenomena such as climate anxiety or eco-paralysis, especially among youngsters. Instead of mobilising action, repeated crisis narratives lead to burnout, apathy, or nihilism. This can be especially acute when the story fails to connect with local realities, collective agency, or alternative visions of the future.

What we know is that the framing matters.

Messages are more effective when they combine realism about threats with narratives of resilience, solidarity, and transformation. Stories that offer meaning, connection, and possibilities for action can reduce resistance and foster more sustained engagement. The antidote to apocalyptic framing is not optimism, but empowering narratives that integrate truth with purpose and community. Like stable ecosystems, enduring engagement arises from feedback-rich, self-organising meaning systems.

Matthew Hornsey's meta-analysis of 165 environmental communication studies found that messages combining "threat + efficacy + identity alignment" were 3.2 times more effective than threat-only messaging. Professional audiences showed the most substantial resistance to emotional appeals and the highest responsiveness to methodological frameworks. Most of my work crashes into this problem. I try to tell stories that explain the situation, but they often fail to offer solutions. Realising this was why minsdful sceptic was coined. If you are curious, think critically and have some healthy awareness, solutions will appear to you as if by magic.

Reality is more pragmatic. Climate Outreach research, which tracked 12,000 participants across six countries and measured their responses to identical climate data presented through different narrative frames. The ‘technological optimism’ frame generated 67% more engagement among university-educated professionals than ‘crisis’ framing, despite containing identical scientific information. Crisis narratives triggered what the researchers termed a ‘finite pool of worry’ response, where acknowledging one existential threat requires psychological resources that reduce capacity for others.

This is a critical insight. Optimism is seen as overreach and unrealistic to many who have taken the time to understand the evidence for the crisis.

So what should the frame look like?

There are plenty of suggestions. Here are three more popular options to reduce psychological resistance and promote engagement when people need a softer frame for the global crisis.

The Regeneration Narrative, where ‘We can restore what we've damaged’ shifts the focus from doom to renewal by emphasising nature's resilience and humanity's capacity for repair. Rather than viewing ecological limits as endpoints, it invites participation in a shared project of regeneration to restore degraded landscapes, revitalise local food systems, and rebuild relationships between people and planet. It draws from Indigenous knowledge, agroecology, and permaculture, and frames environmental action as a hopeful, hands-on endeavour. Regenerative narratives are particularly effective in reducing feelings of helplessness because they present concrete, place-based actions that individuals and communities can take.

The Transition Narrative, where ‘We’re already on the way to a better future’ highlights the idea that a global transition is already underway. It is happening from fossil fuels to renewables, from extraction to circularity, from consumerism to sufficiency. It draws on real-world case studies and local successes to demonstrate momentum, helping people feel part of a larger movement. This narrative offers a sense of historical direction and shared purpose, countering the paralysis of collapse stories with an evolutionary mindset that says change is inevitable, and we can shape its trajectory. When combined with justice and inclusivity, it becomes a powerful driver for engagement.

The Deep Adaptation Narrative, where ‘We can face what’s coming with courage and care’ acknowledges that some degree of ecological and social disruption is now inevitable, but reframes the response not as futile panic or retreat, but as an opportunity for values-driven adaptation. Sure there is risk but that always comes with opportunity. It invites reflection on what to preserve, how to support each other, and how to reimagine meaningful lives within changing conditions. Rather than denying the depth of the crisis, it provides emotional and ethical scaffolding for responding wisely. By foregrounding human dignity, compassion, and local resilience, this narrative reduces the fear of collapse and replaces it with a sense of shared responsibility and moral clarity.

Regeneration comforts the hopeful. Transition suits the pragmatic. Deep Adaptation unsettles everyone, but it is the only one that assumes collapse is not optional. I am a believer in adaptation because I think it is inevitable. It is what will happen after a collapse but it is also a way to prepare. But it would appear I am in a tiny minority. Adaptation is not the narrative they make films about.

So, to gain a deeper understanding of why adaptation is often overlooked, consider the following premise, which uses climate change as an example…

Climate science is rooted in data, models, and probabilistic projections, often conveyed through abstract terms like radiative forcing, carbon budget, or 2°C pathway.

While this language is precise and essential for scientific dialogue and policy design, it is emotionally detached from everyday life. It tends to speak in trends, averages, and numbers rather than people’s values, fears, and experiences. As a result, it often fails to evoke the kind of moral urgency and personal relevance that move people to action.

For example, a single story of a family displaced by flooding or a community preserving a forest, even the rescue of koalas from a bushfire, can generate far more empathy and moral reflection than a technical explanation of sea-level rise or carbon sequestration. Did you know there is more carbon in the soil than the atmosphere? No, and so what? Without a connection to lived reality, even that soil carbon is essential to food production, climate communication can seem distant, or even manipulative, especially when delivered through institutional channels that already lack public trust.

Ezra Markowitz's research at the University of Massachusetts tested comprehension and emotional response to identical climate information presented in technical versus narrative formats. Technical presentations scored highest on perceived ‘scientific credibility’ but lowest on ‘personal relevance’ and ‘motivation to act’. A follow-up study found that audiences exposed to technical framing were more likely to delegate responsibility to ‘experts’ rather than engage personally. Just establishing scientific authority inadvertently reduced public agency, the opposite of intended outcomes.

When I was giving university lectures on ecology and biodiversity, I confess that all I was concerned about was the scientific credibility. I wanted to be objective and as accurate as my knowledge allowed. I also assumed that students would apply the knowledge and critical thinking skills that came with it as they wished. It would help them to act, rather than motivate them to do so. I had no idea that my framing had limited personal relevance to the youngsters in the lecture theatre and that their values, which I knew little about, would lead them.

People interpret climate messages from what they know and experience. How do I feel in the smog? Will my house flood, and what happens if I lose my job and can’t afford to run the air conditioner? Technical language rarely bridges these domains. Stories rooted in local experience, cultural meaning, and ethical responsibility are more likely to activate a more profound sense of care and agency. This kind of engagement does not replace science, but complements it by speaking to the whole rational, emotional, and moral human being.

This is all true. We prefer stories that resonate with our lives rather than scientific abstractions framed for their effects on everyone, but there is a much deeper problem. It is best understood by asking why the Deep Adaptation narrative is barely told.

Adaptation asks people to accept that significant ecological and societal disruptions are no longer preventable. They will have to give up technological optimism to accept moral and emotional readiness. This is confronting. It easily triggers resistance, denial, or fatalism, particularly in audiences not emotionally prepared to engage with the implications. Unlike the Regeneration or Transition narratives, which offer agency, action, and a future-oriented hope, Deep Adaptation begins with a premise of loss and limits, which can be interpreted as defeatist or paralysing unless carefully framed.

Adaptation implies that what is to come is bad (it will be) and challenges dominant narratives of progress and growth. It requires that people change from continuous making more that our savanna brains implore us to do. Adaptation undermines the belief that technology, policy, or markets can solve our ecological crises. It is politically inconvenient as it invites uncomfortable conversations about triage, retreat, and rethinking systems of power and economy, topics that are hard to frame as ‘positive’ or ‘marketable.’

Numerous people involved in climate and environmental work prefer to focus on solutions, momentum, and transformation. Deep Adaptation can feel like it asks you to grieve, let go of certain hopes, and shift from focusing on systemic change to developing psychological and communal resilience. Its unflinching honesty has profound value, but that very honesty narrows its appeal, especially in a culture accustomed to either denial or the power of solutions.

Up to this point in the discussion, we are stuck in the Global North, where the typical worldview is of a growth economy and consumerism. But there are another 7 billion people in the world, and not all of them follow such cultural traditions.

What do they say about understanding limits?

Here is the following premise…

While dominant global discourse on planetary limits often stems from scientific and economic reasoning about carrying capacity, tipping points, or sustainable development, many cultures have long incorporated the concept of limits through narrative, custom, and cosmology.

Many traditions see people as part of a relational system of balance. Limits in these contexts become moral and spiritual boundaries that guide behaviour, identity, and governance. For instance, in many Indigenous cultures, including those of the Yolŋu in Australia, the Haudenosaunee in North America, or the Māori of New Zealand, limits are encoded in ancestral stories, totemic responsibilities, and seasonal protocols. These stories offer a deep sense of reciprocity where humans take only what is needed and give back to the land, maintaining a sacred trust with other species and future generations. Similarly, Buddhist, Taoist, and Jain traditions offer philosophical framings that stress moderation, non-harm, and humility, suggesting that true well-being lies in restraint, simplicity, and inner balance rather than material expansion.

Such alternative narratives challenge the dominant linear models of progress and growth that underpin much of contemporary environmental degradation. They offer pluralistic and place-based ways of understanding limits, not as constraints to overcome, but as guides to living well within a shared world. However, recognising and engaging with these diverse frameworks is tough when your worldview comes from Netflix and Instagram.

In many Indigenous and philosophical traditions, cultural stories function as foundational myths or deep narratives that shape collective behaviour over generations. They embody archetypal themes of balance, humility, and cyclical time, in contrast to the linear-progressive arc of modern industrial storytelling that valorises conquest, growth, and mastery over nature. For example, in Haudenosaunee storytelling, the Seventh Generation principle anchors decision-making in the long view of intergenerational ethics. Similarly, Yolŋu songlines map ecological knowledge into moral geographies, ensuring each being and place has a role and limit within a larger web of reciprocity.

In this context, authentic storytelling is not about appropriation or synthesis but about listening, honouring, and learning how to live well within limits through diverse, relational lenses.

And it's not just the content. The emotional tone and structure of environmental stories influence how people respond. Solutions that resonate with values of stewardship, resilience, or intergenerational care are more likely to gain traction. This underscores the importance of storytelling not as an accessory to science and policy, but as a foundational force determining which futures we can collectively imagine and strive to realise.

It also explains why a neo-liberal narrative of growth, despite finite resources, is so damaging and brings us to the last premise…

Without compelling stories, even the most advanced technologies can be resisted, misused, or confined to elite enclaves. For example, electric vehicles or carbon capture may be technically feasible, but public support, regulatory frameworks, and behavioural shifts to travel less depend on shared visions of a better, more just future. These visions are carried by narrative, not engineering.

Narratives also help to define what counts as a solution in the first place.

A dominant techno-optimist narrative might frame climate change as a challenge to be solved by innovation and efficiency, privileging high-tech solutions like geoengineering or AI-driven resource management. In contrast, an ecological justice narrative might call for low-tech, community-based, or regenerative practices that promote equity and sufficiency over growth. The problem of climate is solved by restraint. Each narrative influences funding priorities, policy choices, and public engagement, often more powerfully than data alone. In this way, the social meaning of a technology is co-produced by the stories surrounding it.

What we know is that stories help people make sense of uncertainty, connect personal experience to systemic change, and imagine alternative futures. Writers, artists, educators, and community leaders play as crucial a role as engineers and scientists.

And we have known this for a long time.

When Norman Borlaug bred his disease-resistant wheat in Mexican test fields during the 1940s, the Green Revolution that followed wasn't solely propelled by its scientific breakthroughs in hybridised crops, synthetic fertilisers, and irrigation systems. Rather, it gained its tremendous momentum from a compelling story. Humanity's moral imperative to feed the world and vanquish hunger through scientific progress. This was a heroic quest. It positioned scientists and policymakers as saviours wielding technology to rescue humanity from a Malthusian catastrophe.

The power of this narrative can't be overstated.

The Green Revolution succeeded not because it was sustainable, but because its narrative perfectly aligned with post-war techno-optimism. It transcended technical journals and research stations to capture the imagination of governments, foundations, and international development agencies. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and later the World Bank didn't just fund agricultural inputs. They invested in a story of modernisation and humanitarian triumph. This narrative framed traditional farming practices as backward and inadequate while positioning Western agricultural science as the enlightened path forward. The language of miracle seeds and agricultural revolution created a compelling moral framework that justified sweeping changes to farming systems across continents.

And it worked.

Between 1960 and 2000, global grain production more than doubled. India transformed from food dependency to self-sufficiency. Millions who might have starved didn't. Yet the compelling narrative that drove global adoption also blinded us to significant unintended consequences.

By framing the problem exclusively as one of production volume rather than access, distribution, or resilience, the dominant story marginalised alternative approaches and obscured emerging problems.

What's particularly instructive about the Green Revolution is how its narrative silences were as significant as its proclamations. The story of feeding the world through higher yields focused attention on metrics of production while diverting attention from mounting ecological disruptions. Groundwater depletion, chemical runoff, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss are all consequences of agricultural intensification. The narrative's emphasis on technical expertise also sidelined concerns about who controlled the new technologies and who benefited most from them. Local knowledge systems, ecological farming practices, and questions of economic equity became footnotes to the triumphant main story.

Regions like Punjab, often celebrated as the Green Revolution's greatest success, now face the complex legacy of this narrative. The initial productivity gains were real and significant, but they came with depleted aquifers, resistant pests, indebted farmers, and contaminated watersheds. The technologies themselves weren't inherently flawed. Many innovations brought genuine benefits. But the narrative framework through which they were implemented shaped their application in ways that created long-term vulnerabilities alongside short-term gains.

Many sustainability narratives are failing for exactly the same reason. They try to sell system change using system maintenance language, promote "circular economy" to people embedded in linear extraction systems, or advocate for "regenerative agriculture" using industrial efficiency metrics. We market "sustainable development" through economic growth frameworks. It's like trying to explain quantum physics using Newtonian vocabulary—the conceptual infrastructure can't support the load.

The same applies to the more recent digital revolution.

Information wants to be free became the rallying cry of a digital revolution promising to break down barriers between people and knowledge, democratise communication, and create a more egalitarian world. When the early internet pioneers gathered in Silicon Valley garages and university computer labs, they built network protocols and software architecture. But they also crafted a powerful mythology that would reshape our relationship with knowledge itself. The nascent internet wasn't evangelised through technical specifications but through an intoxicating narrative of information liberation.

This narrative did what technical blueprints alone never could. It mobilised diverse communities around a shared vision, from libertarian-leaning venture capitalists to countercultural cyberpunks, from open-source developers to digital rights activists. The story transcended technical feasibility to address deeper human yearnings for connection, fairness, and self-determination. It wasn't merely that we could build digital networks. The narrative insisted that we should build them as a moral imperative bound up with human liberation.

What's particularly instructive about the internet's founding narrative was its ability to bridge technical innovation with broader social aspirations. It created a framework where coding decisions became ethical choices and where building digital infrastructure became an act of creating a more just world. This storytelling prowess helped secure funding, recruit talent, drive adoption, and overcome institutional resistance in ways that technical specifications alone could never have achieved.

Today, as we face the mature internet's monopolistic platforms, algorithmic manipulation, and privacy concerns, the irony is crushing. We are living through the limitations of the original narrative. The same story that fueled remarkable innovation also blinded us to emerging vulnerabilities and power imbalances. The technologies weren't inherently flawed, but the stories we told about them shaped their development trajectory in ways that created blind spots.

This pattern offers profound insight for our current environmental challenges. As we develop renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, and circular economic models, the narratives we construct around these technologies will prove as influential as their technical specifications. Without compelling stories that connect innovation to our deepest values and aspirations, even the most brilliant green technologies risk remaining niche or being implemented in ways that perpetuate existing problems.

We all love a good story.

And we all know intuitively that narratives shape our relationship with planetary boundaries, and the stories we tell about environmental limits are as consequential as the limits themselves. Throughout human history, from Indigenous knowledge systems to modern scientific frameworks, how we conceptualise constraints fundamentally determines what solutions we can imagine and implement.

Apocalyptic framing, technical language, and cultural narratives reveal that environmental communication enables or constrains collective action. What we say to each other matters. The stories we tell determine what is possible and what is not.

Narratives don't just describe technologies; they're foundational. They determine which technologies get developed, how they're designed, who benefits from them, and what safeguards are built in from the start. We adopted various development paradigms through this method, but we did not anticipate many of the consequences. The AI revolution is just the latest in a long list. Today’s climate dashboards, impact metrics, and AI-led governance tools risk repeating this. They narrate control while deepening dependence. Today’s climate dashboards, impact metrics, and AI-led governance tools risk repeating this. They narrate control while deepening dependence.

Understanding how we use narrative frames could help us. For example, instead of seeing planetary boundaries as barriers we shouldn’t cross, perhaps we could use them as guides to living well. And if we can do this, the most powerful innovation may not be a technology but a story. A story or three that connect abstract ecological limits to our deepest cultural values and sense of shared purpose.

When Kennedy spoke of reaching the moon, he tapped into America's foundational mythology, transforming a technical challenge into a moral imperative and collective identity. Our environmental future demands similar narrative craftsmanship—stories powerful enough to make widespread adoption of sustainable practices feel not just necessary but deeply meaningful.

But here is the thing.

What if the stories about the environment are sophisticated forms of denial that prevent us from confronting biophysical reality? What if the stories are the problem?

I would argue that the most sophisticated climate denial isn't coming from fossil fuel companies anymore, it's coming from sustainability professionals who've perfected the art of what we might call optimistic procrastination. They tell stories so compelling about future solutions that they justify present inaction. Every "net zero by 2050" target, every "breakthrough technology" investment, every "nature-based solution" pilot project functions as a narrative permission slip to avoid the immediate, unglamorous work of using less energy, growing less food more carefully, and building fewer things more thoughtfully.

The moon shot narrative worked because it was achievable; environmental limits aren't but narrative solutions are how educated elites avoid admitting powerlessness and focusing on better communication lets us pretend we have agency when we don't.

A story is nice, cuddly, and warm by the fire. It can smooth over cracks, soften blows and make unbearable truths bearable. The story becomes a substitute for action.

And, of course, telling stories is a form of entertainment, and procrastination as a way to avoid confronting that no story can make degrowth emotionally acceptable to growth-dependent humans.

There is no doubting the sophistication of the storylines that align with cultural values of progress, innovation, and human agency. For example, promoting circular economies or decarbonisation through technology sounds proactive and achievable, but easily masks continued material throughput and dependence on non-renewable resources. This doesn’t mean that all environmental narratives are wrong or misleading, but it does mean that many fail to make thermodynamic constraints, trophic limits, or system-wide feedbacks explicit. In this sense, the denial is not always conscious or malicious. Instead, it is embedded in the language, incentives, and institutions that shape discourse.

However, it would be overly reductionist to claim all environmental narratives are denials. Some, like ecological economics, degrowth, planetary boundaries, or deep adaptation, explicitly confront biophysical reality and try to reorient politics and policy accordingly.

The real challenge is discerning which narratives genuinely reckon with entropy, energy constraints, and biospheric thresholds, and which ones offer symbolic reassurance while enabling delay, distraction, or further extraction.

These could be quite interesting, dissonance-busting stories.

And the most ethical story we can tell now that it’s too late for comfort, but not too late for courage. Every day we delay the reckoning, we write another chapter of professional deceit. Refuse the story. Take the action.

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Humans evolved to outwit lions, not atmospheres. Our brains prioritise immediacy, emotion, and tribal cues. This was a boon on the savanna, disastrous for slow-moving catastrophes. Climate change, institutional decay, and soil collapse don’t trigger fight-or-flight; they whisper us into paralysis. Rational persuasion, the favourite tool of professionals, fails because it flatters our self-image and ignores our cognitive limits. The uncomfortable fix isn’t more evidence or logical argument with a side of persuasion. The fix needs better manipulation of our existing wiring through stories that feel, institutions that think ahead, and psychological scaffolding that bypasses bias. If reason can’t move us, perhaps it’s time we stole the playbook from Coca-Cola.

I am not religious at all. Deities and the various creation mythologies that believers follow have never interested me. I am the cliche son of a minister of religion who became secular in a heartbeat, probably my first.

Perhaps it was the church upbringing that drew me toward science, or maybe it was innate, but I became a scientist. I am the softer kind, who has solid logical circuits but can’t read mathematics, yet can see an inference from a hundred yards away.

My field of science is ecology, and the Bible I chose was published in 1976.

Richard Dawkins upended my understanding of evolution. For me, it was like wiping a foggy lens. By shifting the focus of attention from organisms or species to genes as the primary units of natural selection, The Selfish Gene didn’t just tweak evolutionary theory; it detonated the cosy idea that species or individuals were the vehicles. Nope, genes were. Relentless, self-serving little replicators, hijacking bodies as vehicles. Kin selection, altruism, and even apparent cooperation were just clever accounting tricks for genetic persistence. This was reductionism I could use, and it was the cleanest framework I’d seen for explaining ecology, and by extension, us.

The Selfish Gene was both groundbreaking and controversial. While it does not deny the role of cooperation and complexity in evolution, it insists that these must be explained through the lens of gene-level selection. Critics argue that this perspective may oversimplify or overlook the roles of organisms, ecosystems, and multilevel selection processes. Nonetheless, Dawkins’ work profoundly influenced modern evolutionary biology and public understanding of natural selection, and it remains a foundational text in discussions of genetics, behaviour, and evolution.

I was so smitten and for so long that I even offered my father, in his retirement, The God Delusion, a later book by Dawkins, published in 2006. Oh, my, I shouldn't have done that. In his polemical critique of religion, Dawkins argues that belief in God is both unnecessary and detrimental, and that science, particularly evolutionary biology, provides more compelling explanations for the complexity and wonder of life.

In that, I still agree. The selfish gene, which I have taken to be the mechanism for Darwin’s natural selection, still explains it all for me. There is no need for the existence of God to explain nature, but we may need one or more to maintain our morality.

My father, not so much.

Now that I had a reliable evolutionary framework that was logical, likely and agreeable to Friar William of Ockham, it was easy to accept what my ecological studies were showing me. It also allowed me to believe where humans came from and that the following description was a reasonable inference.

Our lineage didn’t appear overnight. We were hammered into shape over millions of years of upright apes in Africa, splitting and re-splitting, until something recognisably us walked the savanna. Fossils tell the story of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, cousins who carried fragments of what we would become. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had arrived with bigger brains and the peculiar trick of symbolic thought. What mattered wasn’t just survival, but storytelling through language, tools, and culture that let us spread far faster than biology alone could manage.

We lingered in Africa for most of our evolutionary history, then sprinted across the globe in a geological heartbeat. That speed left us little time to evolve by selecting genes, so we had to improvise instead. Fire for the cold, stories for cohesion, memory for where the snakes lived. Archaeology and genetics confirm the pattern, but the lesson is the simple one that we survived not by foresight, but by vigilance.

Anthropologists will mention key developments, including the ability to walk upright on two legs, which freed the hands for tool use, and then be lyrical about brain expansion, which enabled complex thought, language, and social coordination. They will point to the living in groups, shared knowledge, and division of labour, and these are true and explainable by the selfish gene theory. But before a gene can be greedy, it must persist.

All the fireside chats and stories might be uniquely human, but that was only possible because early humans were vigilant. They focused on immediate threats, and for millennia, on the savanna, there were plenty of them.

I had the privilege of living in Africa for a decade from the mid-1980s. On one of my many expeditions into the bush, I came face to face with a pair of young lions. Not on purpose, but I was walking down a sand road in Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe, and they were there, partially hidden behind some dense bauhinia bushes.

A local by-law reversed the more sensible rule of ‘not getting out of your vehicle in a national park’ because Mana Pools was originally a fishing camp. It is hard to tackle Tiger fish in the Zambezi River from your truck, so walking was allowed. My assumption that it was safe enough to go for an early evening stroll revealed what a greenhorn I was and that I had a considerable amount of arrogance stemming from the biblical dominion I was told humans possess.

Fortunately, I was with friends, and the lions were more startled than I was. They snarled, crouched down with their ears back, did a quick calculation, and retreated from the mad humans.

I confess that this had all happened before I even realised it. My Western upbringing had eroded my instincts for vigilance. If the lions had realised, these words might not have appeared on the screen. I had forgotten that my cognition and perception are profoundly shaped by evolutionary pressures that favour survival in environments where acute, immediate dangers from predators, sudden changes in weather, or threats from other humans require fast, decisive action.

I had forgotten it through nurture, but my nature was still there.

And so, to the initial premise in this journey through our Stone Age Wiring…

My ancestors were able to detect and react to threats quickly. I know this because some of them made it; I am here.

In Darwinian terms, they had a higher chance of survival and reproduction than their less vigilant fellows. As a result, modern humans are neurologically wired to be alert to sudden, novel, or emotionally intense stimuli, with brain structures such as the amygdala playing a central role in threat detection and the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response.

As Daniel Kahneman put it, we are good at thinking fast.

In contrast, gradual or abstract threats, such as climate change, creeping authoritarianism, or long-term health risks, typically trigger strong emotional responses or behavioural urgency. These slow-moving challenges lack immediacy in our minds and the feedback mechanisms that reinforce action. It’s also energetically expensive to think about them unless the threat is imminent, so we tend not to bother.

For example, a slight year-on-year temperature rise or the incremental erosion of civil liberties will not feel threatening on a visceral level, even if the cumulative effects are severe. This mismatch between evolved psychological responses and the nature of modern global risks is sometimes referred to as the evolutionary lag.

Evolution works on the timescale of millennia, not election cycles. Natural selection hones slowly, but we’ve accelerated change beyond its reach. That’s why Stone Age bodies now sit in office chairs, metabolically tuned for scarcity but surrounded by plenty. Obesity, anxiety, and social isolation are symptoms of a mismatch, not moral failure. As E.O. Wilson reminded us, we are running Pleistocene firmware on twenty-first-century hardware, and the system keeps glitching.

Our brains are a little different, though. Brains bought us time. Unlike bones or teeth, they rewire within a single lifetime. Neuroplasticity enables us to adapt to new languages, norms, and technologies. This behavioural plasticity is highly adaptive, which is one reason Homo sapiens has thrived in such a wide range of habitats and social structures. It also means we can develop technologies, languages, institutions, and coping mechanisms that help buffer the effects of evolutionary lag at a psychological level.

However, many deeply ingrained evolutionary traits, such as our preference for high-calorie foods, tribal loyalty, or immediate rewards, are not easily overridden. They persist even when they lead to addiction, anxiety in overstimulating digital contexts, or susceptibility to misinformation. Even with useful brain plasticity, there is still a lag between our evolved cognitive biases and modern conditions, which can generate what some psychologists term evolutionary mismatches, where behaviours that once enhanced survival now undermine wellbeing or societal cohesion.

And while individuals can adapt quickly through learning and socialisation, societies and institutions are less nimble. Cultural evolution, admittedly faster than genetic evolution, is constrained by tradition, ideology, and inertia. While our psychological flexibility allows us to recognise and sometimes work around evolutionary lags, it doesn’t eliminate them. Instead, we often live in a state of tension between inherited tendencies and the demands of a rapidly transforming world. This tension is a central feature of the modern human condition.

Evolutionary lag is particularly significant today because anthropogenic change outpaces the speed of natural selection. Urbanisation, synthetic chemicals, global warming, and even the pace of technological innovation are changing selective pressures faster than genetic adaptation can respond. The energy surges of modern civilisation from fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial agriculture all act like thermodynamic accelerants, amplifying entropy across ecosystems faster than they can recover or re-equilibrate. On evolutionary timescales, our actions have been a disturbance to the force. This has implications for conservation biology, public health, and the future trajectory of many species, which I go on at length about here…

We are in a pickle of our own making, and we have busted the limits of our evolutionary responsiveness. But we still think in the immediate.

Climate change proves the wiring problem. We’ve known about CO₂ rising, ice melting, and seas creeping higher for decades. Yet consensus barely moves us because the threat is abstract, distant, invisible. Our brains light up for hurricanes and wildfires, but not for parts per million. We treat disasters as freak events, not symptoms of a chronic condition. We react to the roar, not the rumble.

In the 1930s, many Germans and international observers failed to respond decisively to the creeping authoritarianism of Adolf Hitler’s regime. Each new step, from the Reichstag Fire Decree to the suppression of political opponents, the expansion of state propaganda, and a host of other measures, was rationalised or minimised as an aberration or temporary measure. Only when the threat became overt and violent, such as during Kristallnacht or the invasion of Poland, did a broader alarm set in. By then, the gradual erosion of democratic institutions had already solidified into a dictatorship. This exemplifies how incremental changes often escape strong resistance until it is too late—Americans take note.

In the mid-20th century, smoking was widespread, even as evidence mounted that it caused long-term health problems like lung cancer and heart disease. Because these effects were delayed, often taking decades to manifest, they failed to trigger behavioural change in individuals or policy-makers. Tobacco companies capitalised on this delay to cast doubt and maintain profitability. It took decades of concerted public health campaigns, graphic warning labels, and regulatory action to overcome the public’s inertia. Again, the slow nature of the harm meant it didn’t elicit the same urgency as a more immediate threat.

The evolutionary inheritance that once ensured our survival now complicates our capacity to respond effectively to the most pressing threats of the 21st century. The premise that humans evolved to respond to immediate threats, not gradual changes, holds because the heuristics and biases of thinking fast, once evolutionarily advantageous, now serve as psychological distortions when applied to the slow, complex challenges of modern life. Our inherited tendency to discount future consequences, ignore incremental change, and overreact to immediate stimuli creates a blind spot. We struggle to address risks that unfold gradually or require sustained, coordinated effort.

This baggage promotes the second premise…

A casual glance at the billion or so people living in liberal democracies of the Global North reveals that we are more comfortable in the present than in the past or the future. We'd like to have our cake and eat it, as long as we can enjoy it now. What happened today we expect will happen again tomorrow, mainly because the recent past seems so familiar. We settle into this present bias, relax, and reach for the remote.

Psychologists have mapped the mental shortcuts that skew our sense of risk, but knowing their names doesn’t immunise us. Hyperbolic discounting makes us impulsive economists who’ll trade a distant safeguard for a sugar hit today, undermining everything from retirement planning to climate policy. The availability heuristic adds drama bias to the mix, convincing us that plane crashes matter more than vanishing topsoil, simply because the former makes better television. And then there’s normalcy bias, the comforting lie that tomorrow will mirror today, lulling us into paralysis even as institutions erode or ecosystems unravel. Together, these biases cloud judgment and shape a distorted map of danger, calibrated for a world that no longer exists.

In essence, our evolved mental shortcuts are poorly calibrated for an era in which many existential threats do not announce themselves with immediacy. It’s the evolutionary lag. There is a mismatch between what we instinctively do and the perception of long-term, abstract risks, which creates significant challenges for governance, communication, and collective action. A sudden cyberattack or pandemic surge prompts swift global responses, while more pressing distant risks, such as antibiotic resistance or freshwater depletion, struggle for political and public attention. When was the last time you heard a politician campaign for soil health?

The result is a systematic underestimation of slow-burning threats, compounded by short election cycles, media attention spans, and human impatience.

Overcoming these distortions requires intentional cognitive scaffolding. We have to think more slowly with tools like long-term scenario planning, nudging, institutional foresight, and public narratives that make the future feel emotionally real. Without such interventions, our biological inheritance risks becoming a liability in the face of civilisation-scale challenges.

What made us nimble on the savanna, enabling us to be vigilant for lions and jump out of the way of a snake, also makes us sluggish to react when the risk is systemic and existential.

And our social norms exacerbate the problem, prompting the next premise…

My buddies saved me from the lions on that sunny afternoon in Africa. We chatted away, making a group noise, and luckily, nobody panicked and ran.

At the individual level, our sense of belonging to groups such as political parties, religions, or cultural communities profoundly shapes how we interpret complex or uncertain threats. Psychologists call this identity-protective cognition, where people accept or reject evidence based on whether it aligns with their group’s values. We have all seen it and done it.

In polarised societies, even factual consensus can become fragmented. Climate change becomes not just a scientific issue but a cultural battleground, with each side interpreting data through its ideological filters. This distorts risk perception and makes coordinated action more difficult. In other words, human cognition does not operate in a vacuum; it is embedded within social contexts where identity, group affiliation, and cultural norms heavily influence how we perceive and process information.

Research in social psychology and behavioural science tells us that individuals tend to align their beliefs about complex issues with the views of the groups they identify with. People use motivated reasoning to filter information, preserving group coherence and personal identity unconsciously. When complex risks become politicised or linked to identity markers (such as nationalism, religion, or political affiliation), individuals are more likely to adopt the interpretations endorsed by their in-group, even in the face of contrary evidence.

This tendency is reinforced by social epistemology, the idea that we rely on others for knowledge. In-group trust can override individual evaluation of expertise, leading to echo chambers where misinformation or oversimplified narratives spread more readily. A striking example is how responses to COVID-19 public health measures varied not by individual risk assessment but by political affiliation, with mask-wearing or vaccine acceptance becoming symbolic acts of group loyalty. Similarly, debates about climate policy are often filtered through ideological worldviews rather than scientific consensus. As a result, cognitive biases are not only reinforced but also socially sanctioned, making it even harder to confront nuanced or long-term risks with clarity.

Institutions, rather than correcting for these biases, often amplify them through design and inertia. Short-term political cycles, profit-driven media, and bureaucratic silos foster reactive and superficial responses. Most modern political institutions reward populist simplifications or crisis exploitation rather than long-range planning, while media, especially algorithmically driven ones, favour emotionally charged content; they thrive on identity divisions.

Even well-intentioned scientific institutions can be slow-moving, fragmented, or overly specialised. They lumber along, affected by evolutionary lag as much as our selfish genes. Instead of acting as systems of cognitive correction, many institutions now serve as amplifiers of our worst tendencies toward simplification, denial, and tribal reasoning. When complexity is fragmented or overly siloed, it becomes brittle rather than adaptive, much like an over-engineered machine that fails under unanticipated stress, unable to reorganise in the face of disruption.

A mindful sceptic baulks at another challenge presented by identity-driven thinking. It limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. A stifled curiosity is a terminal symptom.

Adaptation to change requires cognitive flexibility, institutional learning, and cultural frameworks that enable reevaluation and transformation. Back on the savanna, we were good at all three. However, without reform at both the individual and systemic levels, we risk being cognitively and institutionally outpaced by the accelerating complexity of our world.

If fast-thinking responses are insufficient to cope with systemic risk, and the social system further amplifies this approach with the help of tribes, then we must assume the following premise holds…

The savanna brain metaphor captures the idea that our cognitive architecture was shaped in environments vastly different from today’s interconnected, technologically advanced, and highly abstract world.

Our ancestors evolved in small groups facing immediate, visible dangers, leading to a suite of cognitive biases favouring short-term, emotionally salient decision-making. Status quo bias, present bias, and threat detection were a boon back then. They were abilities tuned to local and immediate survival in ancestral environments, only they leave us poorly equipped for assessing and responding to modern threats like nuclear proliferation, ecological collapse, or AI risk. We are not well-equipped psychologically for probabilistic, slow-building, and often invisible threats.

But because these limitations are deeply embedded in our neural wiring, it is unlikely that rational argumentation alone can recalibrate our responses. What is required are psychological interventions, deliberate strategies and tools for more reflective, long-term thinking.

For example, mindfulness to expand present-moment awareness and reduce reactive thinking, cognitive training to build metacognition and emotional regulation, and structured debiasing techniques such as scenario planning or red-teaming. Additionally, reframing risks through narrative, metaphor, and emotionally resonant stories can help bridge the gap between abstract data and what we feel. In essence, these tools extend our natural capabilities, much like literacy did for memory or maps did for navigation.

Importantly, these interventions cannot exist in a vacuum. They must be embedded within supportive cultural and institutional systems that reward foresight and restraint rather than reaction and simplification. Education, governance, media, and leadership structures all need redesign to reinforce slower, more deliberative forms of thinking.

The savanna brain is not a flaw to be eliminated, but a foundation that must be consciously upgraded if 8 billion humans are to survive and thrive.

Itemised lists are not how I usually do it, but here is a curated one of psychological interventions designed to help overcome the fast-thinking limitations of the savanna brain and enhance our capacity to address systemic and existential risks:

• Mindfulness and metacognition training help individuals observe their thought processes, recognise biases, and reduce impulsive reactions through practices like mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive-behavioural techniques. A practice of enhancing self-awareness and emotional regulation helps us come up with more deliberate responses to complex problems.
  
  

• Scenario thinking and future visualisation encourage long-range thinking by simulating alternative futures and imagining long-term consequences. Imagining the future makes abstract systemic risks feel more tangible and emotionally relevant. Counterfactual thinking is a good example.
  
  

• Debiasing techniques and decision aids identify and counter specific cognitive biases. Methods such as pre-mortem analysis, red-teaming, and decision checklists, can improve judgment under uncertainty.
  
  

• Narrative framing and moral expansion use emotionally resonant storytelling and identity-bridging language to shift values and expand empathy to future generations and distant others. Stories, especially those with morals, can help us bypass innate defensive or tribal reasoning.

And because it is challenging to do things alone, especially when attempting to rewire a brain that has had hundreds of thousands of years of success operating in a certain way, we will also need institutional changes. Here is a preliminary list…

• Long-term governance mechanisms that build institutional structures designed for foresight, continuity, and resilience. We will need innovations such as Future Generations Commissions and climate adaptation authorities to embed intergenerational thinking into law and policy.
  
  

• Deliberative democratic models that facilitate slow, informed decision-making through citizen assemblies, panels, and juries. We need to discuss divisive issues, such as nuclear policy and climate mitigation, more effectively.
  
  

• Reform of incentive structures to shift economic, political, and informational systems from short-termism to stewardship. Here, we need long-term compensation in business, non-renewable resource caps, and journalism that rewards depth over speed, aligning institutional behaviour with planetary boundaries and future-oriented values.
  
  

• Cognitive infrastructure in education that cultivates epistemic humility, systems thinking, and ethical foresight. We are going to need programs that teach complexity science, decision theory, and ecological literacy from early stages to build societal capacity for adaptive intelligence.

These interventions work best in combination, forming a distributed cognitive ecosystem that enhances our collective intelligence. Much like literacy and numeracy became foundational for industrial society, cognitive resilience and futures thinking may become essential for humanity to survive the next century. Like mycorrhizal networks in forests, such cognitive ecosystems thrive on redundancy and distributed processing, traits that allow them to absorb shocks and sustain function while dissipating informational and social entropy more evenly.

But as all mindful sceptics do, we pause. We don't want to jump at the evidence and let our enthusiasm carry us off into a total revamp of the social contract.

Not all researchers agree with the dominance of evolutionary psychology and its lag behind the times. Critics argue that the complexity of individual development and experience fails to fully explain the influence of genes on behaviour. It is easy to oversimplify complex behaviours by reducing them to simple evolutionary imperatives. The deterministic scientists also ask for definitive experimental evidence, which, of course, is impossible to obtain.

It is also not as simple as a 'biology vs. environment' or 'genes vs. culture' dichotomy might imply. Indeed, such a polemic might be false or at least misleading, partly because we know that biology and environment interact in complex ways to produce what we see.

While neurobiological research supports many of the assumptions of evolutionary psychologists that higher-level systems in the neocortex, responsible for complex functions, are massively modular, brain plasticity may be more significant than we acknowledge.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that the brain evolved as a collection of specialised modules designed to solve specific adaptive problems, such as language, face recognition, or threat detection. This view is supported by some neurobiological evidence showing that distinct areas of the neocortex are involved in different cognitive tasks, suggesting a form of functional modularity. However, contemporary neuroscience has increasingly emphasised the role of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to reorganise itself in response to learning, experience, or injury. This suggests that while the brain may initially have a modular structure, these modules are not fixed in place. Instead, they interact, adapt, and even repurpose themselves according to the context.

Despite evolved biases, human cognition may be capable of adapting to abstract, long-term, and statistically framed risks through cultural scaffolding, education, and reflective reasoning. While evolution has shaped our brains, it hasn’t locked them; adaptability remains one of our species’ most significant assets.

We might be able to bend our minds to the probabilistic risks.

So, what would you do if you walked into a pair of young lions minding their own business on the African savanna?

Most likely, your amygdala would fire, and you would shout your head off, screaming obscenities at the innocent creatures. Alternatively, you might back off and run. The third limbic option is to freeze, which may also be effective, given that young lions likely lack some life experience and the aggression of adults.

You wouldn't have time to consider your choice. You just react.

You can’t pause and ask what crazy decision put you out in the open in lion country? Should lions be managed for tourists or be confined to zoos? Is it time to revoke the bylaw? Whatever your musings, the long thought is an expensive luxury in the moment.

The thing is that the economic and social equivalent of bumping into lions is coming. Emergencies are no longer just lions on the path. They're the slow erosion of our climate stability, the quiet depletion of aquifers, the degradation of agricultural soil, the gradual rise of authoritarianism, and the incremental collapse of ecosystems—all happening at speeds our savanna brains register as business as usual until the sudden moment they're not.

Our greatest existential threats don't roar; they whisper.

What saved me from those lions wasn't my quick thinking, as I didn’t have any. What saved me was the group, the safety in numbers and a bunch of chit-chat that disturbed the lion’s siesta. Similarly, our salvation from slow emergencies won't come from individual vigilance alone, but from deliberately constructed cognitive ecosystems that expand our collective ability to perceive, understand, and respond to gradual change.

We need to build scaffolding around our evolution-shaped minds to enhance them for challenges they never evolved to face. And for that, we need each other, especially members of different tribes and groups.

I know, it sucks.

But here is the thing…

If our Stone Age wiring makes us immune to rational persuasion about long-term threats, perhaps we need to abandon the moral high ground of evidence-based discourse entirely.

The marketers figured this out decades ago. While environmental educators waste time perfecting infographics about carbon emissions, Coca-Cola triggers rapid threat detection with "Don't be left out," builds tribal loyalty through lifestyle branding, and creates immediate response through social proof. They understand that humans don't make decisions with the rational mind; something most of us intellectuals have been too proud to admit.

Consider the brutal effectiveness gap. Advertisers can make millions of us crave sugar water that destroys our health. Climate scientists, armed with overwhelming evidence of a planetary emergency, struggle to generate concern about atmospheric chemistry. The soil scientists, who are all aware that soil degradation is a pending catastrophe, have no voice at all. The difference can’t be the urgency of the message.

This suggests a deeply uncomfortable pivot for environmental action. Real sustainability might require fear-based messaging that bypasses analytical thinking, tribal identity formation around green behaviours, and emotional storytelling that makes climate action feel immediate and visceral. We'd need to become the very thing we criticise—manipulators of psychological triggers rather than educators appealing to reason.

The meta-irony is inescapable. This essay itself demonstrates the thesis. I didn't convince you with statistics about cognitive bias research. I used a personal story about lions, appealed to your intellectual identity, and created emotional resonance through narrative. Even arguing for rational limitations, I had to abandon a purely rational argument.

The evolutionary insight isn't how to transcend our cognitive architecture, but how to harness it. Are we willing to fight biological fire with biological fire? Because the alternative is watching our rational discourse fail while the planet burns.

That's the choice our Stone Age wiring has left us.

And time is running out for moral purity.

The systems meant to protect us from crisis are the crisis. Institutions built for episodic shocks now face permanent disintegration but continue to behave as if the emergency will end. Our psychology, wired for snakes, not systems, filters out the slow and abstract. The result is a civilisation accelerating into collapse with its eyes technically open but cognitively blind. This isn’t a failure of knowledge. It’s a failure of calibration. To survive The Long Emergency, we don’t need better plans. We need different minds.

Picture humanity as passengers on a chartered bus, everyone having paid their fare and settled in for what the brochure promised would be a pleasant day at the beach. The driver follows his navigation app with unwavering confidence, maintaining a cheerful conversation with the passengers in the front seats. These are the corporate executives, policymakers, and academic leaders who've paid for premium seating. The driver pretends to be interested in the discussions of quarterly projections, upcoming conferences, and the promising new technologies that will make the beaches even more enjoyable next season.

Meanwhile, the bus hurtles toward a cliff that some passengers thought they saw through the side windows, though most are absorbed in their devices, planning their beach activities, or debating the merits of different sunscreen brands.

From nowhere, a young woman in colourful clothes and braided hair stands up in the middle of the bus and yells at everyone that there is a cliff, right there, she screams at the driver to swerve, slam the brakes, or we are doomed. She waves her arms at the front window, where, sure enough, the rolling fields of corn suddenly give way to a fast approaching precipice.

However, the driver has programmed his route according to the most advanced GPS technology available. His institutional training instructs him to trust the system, maintain passenger confidence, and adhere to established protocols. Disturbed by the commotion behind them, one of the front-seat passengers glances up from her strategic planning documents, sees the cliff arriving at pace, then turns to the passengers behind to reassure everyone that the navigation technology has never failed them before.

This is humanity's predicament.

We are on the air-conditioned bus travelling fast along a road built for speed and efficiency with an excellent safety record, heading for the beach. And why not? Everyone needs a break, and it was a good choice for a quick getaway, a bargain we came across in a Facebook ad that received five-star reviews from everyone. The kids are super excited. Nobody has ever said anything about a cliff.

But there it is, close enough for even the latest technology air brakes to have trouble stopping the bus before it careers off the edge. Swerving might be an option, but no coach driver has ever been trained to initiate a powerslide to rotate a bus, even if physics allowed it to be done. So, through no fault of your own, here you are on a vehicle full of 8 billion humans heading toward a cliff of resource constraints, environmental degradation and an out-of-date social contract.

This predicament, which most passengers still haven’t noticed because they are absorbed in cat videos and their favourite TikTok influencers, is not because we lack intelligence or good intentions. We don’t see the hazard because we are calibrated for an entirely different kind of journey. Our institutions evolved to navigate familiar routes to predictable destinations. And before we were aware of holidays, our psychology developed to handle the immediate, the visible, and the controllable. Neither the driver nor the passengers are equipped to process the cliff ahead, which represents not a temporary detour, but evidence that the very concept of "getting to the beach" may no longer be possible.

The navigation system isn't broken; it's simply guiding us toward a destination that no longer exists. The map may function, but the terrain has eroded beneath our wheels. Entropy has done its work to dissipate energy, degrade structure, and left behind only a simulation of coherence.

Here is the thing.

We are going to have to confront the unsettlingly plausible reality that the ideas and the energy physics that got us into this mess won't get us out. We face unprecedented global challenges while clinging to obsolete frameworks, comfortable myths, and intellectual taboos that prevent the clear thinking our survival demands.

Consider the scale of our delusion.

We worship "sustainability" while burning through planetary resources at exponential rates. We treat technological innovation as salvation, while our most basic problems of feeding everyone, maintaining soil fertility, and preventing ecosystem collapse, are resisted or made worse by high-tech solutions. We refuse to discuss population growth despite adding 8,000 humans every hour to an already overstretched planet and instead claim that we need more babies in the West. We focus conservation efforts on cute pandas while overlooking the soil microorganisms that sustain us.

This systematic self-deception isn't accidental. It soothes our anxious minds as it serves powerful interests. But it's also profoundly dangerous when we are accelerating toward a reality of energy and resource constraints, whether we acknowledge it or not.

It is past time we performed intellectual surgery on these sacred cows. Not for the dopamine hit from contrarianism, but because questioning fundamental assumptions has become a civilizational necessity. When mainstream environmental thinking promotes oxymorons like "sustainable development" and "green growth," someone needs to point out the mathematical impossibilities. When economic theory ignores thermodynamics and ecological limits, intellectual honesty demands we call it for the fantasy that it is. The Second Law isn’t a metaphor. Every transaction leaks energy, every efficiency gain has a cost, and the dream of perpetual growth drips slowly into heat loss.

My decades as an academic ecologist and environmental consultant taught me that the gap between public discourse and biophysical reality grows wider each year. I've watched intelligent professionals nod along with sustainability rhetoric while privately acknowledging its impossibility. I've seen conservation campaigns exploit emotional manipulation rather than address root causes. I've observed how expert communities develop elaborate ways to avoid mentioning inconvenient truths about overpopulation, degrowth, and ecological overshoot.

So I am going to borrow from James Howard Kunstler and call the human experiment of a bus full of distracted people heading for a cliff, The Long Emergency, the precipice that everyone knows must be there but can’t acknowledge how close it might be. In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, Kunstler argues that "peak oil", which he defines as the depletion of cheap, abundant petroleum, will fundamentally disrupt industrial society as alternative energy sources prove insufficient to replace it. It is what we see happening today. Kunstler contends that declining oil availability will converge with climate change, economic instability, and other global challenges to create sustained crises. As transportation costs skyrocket, communities will be forced to develop localised, self-sufficient systems, particularly for food production, while large cities may face severe disruption. It’s a creeping emergency.

At its core, an emergency is defined by urgency, unpredictability, and the potential for significant harm if not addressed quickly. We use the term and its meaning in various contexts, including public health (e.g., a medical emergency), natural disasters (e.g., a flood or wildfire), and infrastructure failure (e.g., a power outage or structural collapse). Emergencies disrupt normal functioning and demand immediate decision-making, often with incomplete information and under conditions of stress. The primary aim in an emergency is containment, mitigation, or rapid resolution.

Emergencies differ from chronic crises or long-term risks in that they are framed as temporally bounded events. This justifies the use of emergency powers, rapid funding, or suspension of routine protocols by pretending they are temporary. Our current global predicament is an emergency in this sense. It is with us now, it is a massive threat to normal functioning and demands collective action, potentially draconian.

However, emergency also implies a return to a pre-crisis baseline once the emergency is resolved, reinforcing a "response and recovery" paradigm. This conventional understanding becomes problematic in the context of The Long Emergency, where threats unfold gradually, but with compounding effects, and defy short-term resolution. They blur the line between crisis and condition, demanding not just reaction but deep adaptation. In this sense, The Long Emergency is an oxymoron because it uses the language of immediate disruption to describe a structural transformation.

The bus taking folk to the beach for the day is an analogy for the inadequacy of our conventional emergency frameworks in grappling with persistent, non-linear collapse. It’s sensors and the driver at the wheel don’t see the cliff appearing on the highway. After all, it has never happened before.

This essay, an introduction to a series on Uncomfortable Intelligence, examines how The Long Emergency idea operates simultaneously across environmental, institutional, and psychological dimensions, creating a triple bind that explains why conventional responses consistently fail. While institutions remain trapped in crisis management paradigms designed for temporary disruptions, human psychology compounds these failures through cognitive biases that make us systematically underestimate slow-moving threats and overestimate our control over complex systems.

It’s why evidence-based policy recommendations are ignored, why rational arguments fail to motivate action, and why even well-designed institutions struggle to address polycrisis challenges. These things exceed human cognitive architecture. We simply don’t have the wiring for them.

The problem is that when multiple interconnected systems are simultaneously failing, we can't afford intellectual comfort food. We need frameworks that work in harmony with reality, rather than against it. We need the courage to examine whether our political systems can handle resource constraints, whether our economic models make thermodynamic sense, and whether our conservation priorities conserve anything meaningful. We have to find the wires and reroute them.

The sacred cows are blocking clear thinking and actively preventing the breakthroughs we desperately need. However, pointing this out is optimistic because real optimism requires an honest assessment of our predicament followed by an adaptive response. Intellectual contrarianism becomes a survival skill when conventional wisdom leads toward collapse.

The Long Emergency will be navigated successfully or not based largely on our collective ability to think clearly about what's happening. That requires intellectual courage to question everything, especially the ideas we most want to believe. Sometimes, tearing down sacred cows is the most constructive thing you can do.

So let’s begin with the current approach to crisis management and those passengers still scrolling their phones with this first premise…

Most institutions were built for shocks, not drifts. Their crisis protocols of budget buffers, emergency plans, task forces and the like work best when a flood hits, a market crashes, or a border ignites. These mechanisms presume recovery is possible because the system itself remains intact. This presumption made sense in an era defined by industrial expansion and governance by control. Threats were considered as occasional, if unpredictable, outside anomalies, not signs of more profound instability. But today’s disruptions no longer behave episodically. They accumulate and entangle. They resist resolution by systems still calibrated for bounce-back rather than breakdown.

The presumption of return to normalcy blinds institutions to the reality of The Long Emergency, which is not a transient event but a permanent state of overlapping, escalating disruptions. Climate change, for example, is a structural reordering of planetary and social systems because the weather is not going back to pre-1990 no matter how hard we wish it. Yet institutions still behave as if sandbagging after a flood or issuing a one-off emissions report constitutes an adequate response. In this way, institutional logic itself becomes part of the problem.

Most environmental planning still hinges on a return to normal. But climate volatility, ecological decline, and resource erosion don’t unfold on policy timelines or within jurisdictional boundaries. Yet the institutional mindset remains fixated on containment and recovery. It is as if we are in a pause, not a transformation.

When intensive agriculture drains soil carbon and destroys microbial life, the aftermath isn’t a return to baseline. Degraded soils don’t self-repair unless you have hundreds of years to sit by and wait. What’s left in degraded soils is not absence readily replaced, but a new condition.

Most worrying is that this myopia is not just bureaucratic. It’s cognitive. Human perception evolved to prioritise near-term, emotionally vivid threats like snakes, fire, or betrayal. We had no idea about atmospheric carbon or aquifer depletion. Our decision-making machinery still runs on Stone Age firmware that is primed for immediacy, inattentive to abstraction. Systemic threats are diffuse, cumulative, and lack the sensory triggers that mobilise action. Even when people intellectually grasp slow crises, they rarely feel them. Cognitive shortcuts like normalcy bias and availability heuristics mute the signal. We see enough to worry, not enough to act.

I bet you recognise the feeling.

Research consistently shows that government, corporate, and academic institutions default to discrete crisis protocols rather than systemic planning. A McKinsey history of U.S. crisis management traces decades of post‑9/11 institutional reform focused on episodic shocks, not long‑term systemic transitions. A RAND review critiques how overlapping, fragmented emergency frameworks reduce effectiveness even for conventional crises, let alone paradigm‑level structural shifts. The COVID‑19 UK Inquiry highlighted planning systems that resembled “a bowl of spaghetti,” underscoring how institutional complexity hindered a coordinated systemic response.

Psychological scholarship reveals that a tendency to downplay risks and cling to the status quo, known as normalcy bias, operates even in disasters, and over 80% of people exhibit this bias when warnings emerge. McRaney’s normalcy bias framework emphasises how people linger in denial or deliberation instead of acting decisively. Commentary on climate inertia applies this bias to phenomena like gradual temperature rise and groundwater decline, showing why abstract systemic crises struggle to mobilise behavioural change. The available signal is intellectually grasped, but lacks the sensory or emotional trigger that evolved minds require to convert knowledge into institutional or personal action.

We face a layered blind spot of institutions unable to adapt beyond crisis-response logics, and individuals whose minds resist perceiving the true nature of the crisis. This dual failure explains why so many rational policy prescriptions and scientific warnings go unheeded. The messenger (institution) and the recipient (public or decision-maker) are working within frameworks mismatched to the scale and character of the threat.

The premise is intellectually robust and explains observed patterns better than alternatives. The mismatch between our evolutionary and institutional architecture and Long Emergency challenges prevents us from seeing, let alone acting on, what’s truly unfolding.

So let’s explore a little further with the following premise…

When individuals are confronted with overwhelming, complex, or existential threats, they often respond with defence. An easy one is denial that can manifest in various forms, from outright rejection of evidence to subtler avoidance of emotionally distressing implications. If that fails, displacement will redirect anxiety into less threatening or more manageable issues, such as obsessing over individual recycling habits while ignoring broader structural drivers. Then there is magical thinking, which allows people to believe that technology, market forces, or political leaders will somehow solve the problem without requiring disruptive changes to their own lives or systems.

And if these don’t work, then blame the neighbour.

None of the defences are irrational in an evolutionary sense. They are helpful because they maintain psychological stability in the face of cognitive dissonance and existential dread. However, in the context of The Long Emergency, they work less well. The psychological splitting between intellectual awareness and emotional engagement leads to what sociologist Kari Norgaard termed “socially organised denial”. In her book, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (2011), she observed how people in a Norwegian community, despite intellectually acknowledging the reality and severity of climate change, simultaneously engaged in social practices and emotional strategies to avoid fully confronting or acting upon that knowledge. This leads to the "psychological splitting between intellectual awareness and emotional engagement", a state where people acknowledge climate change or ecological collapse in the abstract, yet continue to act in ways that reinforce the status quo. This pattern is not limited to individuals. Institutions also exhibit defensive inertia, clinging to habitual practices and symbolic gestures even while officially recognising the scale of the crisis.

This systematic disconnect helps explain the chronic underperformance of environmental policy, corporate sustainability efforts, and public engagement campaigns. Even when evidence is accepted, the underlying emotional and cultural defences remain intact, leading to shallow or performative responses.

Understanding this psychological architecture is critical for designing interventions that do more than inform. They must also disarm the emotional mechanisms that enable inaction or continue to fall short, no matter how compelling the data or urgent the rhetoric.

This premise accurately describes one of the most robust findings in environmental psychology. There is a systematic disconnect between intellectual understanding and behavioural response, mediated by predictable psychological defence mechanisms that operate at both individual and institutional levels.

It brings on the following premise about why we are so keen on the short-term fix…

Institutions, by design, favour predictability, accountability, and incremental progress. They need to be around for the long haul and provide stability that people crave. The anchoring traits designed into them are reinforced by performance metrics, electoral cycles, quarterly reporting, and risk-averse cultures, all of which reward short-term success and penalise ambiguity or failure. However, structural incentives alone do not fully explain the persistence of linear thinking in the face of increasingly complex, interdependent challenges.

Neuroscience and cognitive psychology research suggests that the human brain evolved to prioritise immediate, solvable problems with transparent causal chains. This tendency toward cognitive closure, pattern simplification, and certainty-seeking reflects a deep-seated need to reduce psychological discomfort, avoid decision paralysis, and maintain a coherent sense of agency in the face of threat.

When a boomslang (Dispholidus typus), a type of poisonous tree snake, fell out of a Kigelia tree I was sitting under on the banks of the Chobe River in Botswana, I was grateful for the instinct to get out of its way so fast that I fell out of my chair. We all did; it was comical.

But we don’t live in a linear “avoid all snakes” cause-and-effect world. Humans reside in complex systems that are constantly in transition. Decarbonising economies, reconfiguring food systems, or adapting to ecological collapse are characterised by nonlinear feedbacks, time lags, emergent properties, and irreducible uncertainty. These dynamics are not only complex to model but also psychologically painful, as they violate our preference for causality, control, and closure. Consequently, decision-makers often default to reductive problem framings (e.g., "more innovation," "better regulation," "market incentives") that provide an illusion of control while bypassing the uncomfortable truth that many aspects of the polycrisis are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and without precedent.

The result is a kind of institutionalised cognitive bias. This is not simply a failure of leadership or will, but a neuropsychological mismatch between the challenges we face and the minds tasked with addressing them.

Even when individuals within institutions are aware of systemic risks, the collective logic of action pushes toward the familiar, the manageable, and the measurable. I have often advocated for this myself as a science advisor, when, more than once, I insisted that monitoring and evaluation of environmental actions is essential to understand what has happened. “Thank you, Dr Dangerfield, we’ll take that on notice”.

So here is the key insight. Overcoming institutional inertia will require a redesign of how they are governed and strategies that allow human cognition to better engage with complexity, ambiguity, and long-term horizons.

This is not easy.

Not least because other psychological barriers lead to the following premise…

Institutions are composed of people whose professional identities and sense of competence are tied to the stability and efficacy of the systems they serve. A paycheck can’t be the only reason for getting up at dawn to travel on crowded public transport or congested roads for hours to reach a city office. People feel a sense of purpose even in menial work. Any admission of institutional inadequacy is experienced as a personal threat.

When professionals confront evidence that their work, frameworks, or institutions are failing to meet the scale of systemic challenges such as climate change or ecological collapse, they are caught in a conflict between intellectual acknowledgement and emotional, social, or reputational risk. Imagine the emotional disconnect as you board a long-haul flight to another COP meeting, where scientists will present evidence that carbon emissions are still rising. Not even a Stoic can avoid that one.

I frequently observed this when advising government agencies. Being seen to be performing was almost as important as the performance itself, and significantly more important than the outcome, especially if it occurred in paddocks or nature reserves hundreds of kilometres away from the city offices. Sometimes, bureaucracies were purposely dispersed into rural areas, with staff spread far and wide, only to have to come together again for meetings, typically in the city, to regain that performance high.

Social psychology identifies this conflict between logic and emotion as a classic case of cognitive dissonance. Recognising a system is failing while also believing in its integrity or your role within it brings on mental discomfort caused by holding contradictory beliefs or values.

Group dynamics further amplify this reluctance to change. Within institutions, group cohesion and internal credibility often depend on shared beliefs about legitimacy, purpose, and progress. As a result, deviating from the dominant narrative can lead to marginalisation or reputational damage. or even raising uncomfortable questions. Studies in organisational behaviour show that institutions frequently engage in defensive routines to avoid confronting foundational contradictions. This includes dismissing critical evidence, reframing systemic problems as isolated issues, or doubling down on legacy strategies despite declining effectiveness. In such environments, institutional loyalty and the preservation of internal harmony take precedence over adaptive learning.

Moreover, professional identity is often rooted in the mastery of specific frameworks, tools, or protocols. When systemic change necessitates a paradigm shift, it implicitly renders existing skill sets and assumptions obsolete. This can provoke identity threat among experts, managers, and administrators, who may unconsciously resist transformation not out of ill will, but because it destabilises the foundations of their credibility and purpose. This is an acute consequence of AI, especially the rise of agents and specialised LLMs that can repeat tasks faster, more efficiently and with far greater resolution than a human who is easily distracted by office gossip around the cooler. If you are on the lower end of the legal system, you will need to climb the ladder fast. In this context, maintaining cognitive dissonance, where we know something is broken but act as if it’sn’t, is a psychologically safer path than acknowledging the need for radical institutional change.

The premise is so well-supported that we don’t even need to test it. Institutional actors are embedded in social, psychological, and professional contexts that make adaptation costly. These dynamics help explain why, even when faced with overwhelming evidence, many institutions choose symbolic gestures, incremental tweaks, or strategic ambiguity over the more profound transformations that The Long Emergency demands.

Rather than tackle the assumptions from first principles and plan for change, doubling down is preferable, which brings up the following premise…

The combination of human psychological defences and institutional incentives encourages justification and symbolic action that sociologists refer to as organised irresponsibility. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), net-zero pledges, and techno-futurist narratives often serve this function. While not inherently flawed, these frameworks frequently become instruments of deferral and displacement. They enable organisations to recognise crisis conditions stemming from climate change, biodiversity loss, or social collapse without significantly altering their trajectory. In other words, they preserve institutional legitimacy and psychological coherence while postponing transformative action.

This phenomenon is evident in the widespread adoption of net-zero targets, which rely heavily on speculative technologies such as carbon capture or sequestration, many of which are not yet scalable or proven. Here, have an offset for those emissions. These pledges allow governments and corporations to appear proactive, but they often delay real emissions cuts and externalise responsibility to future administrations or technological breakthroughs.

Likewise, sustainable development goals offer a broad moral consensus for their intent is laudable, but their vagueness and non-binding nature make them easy to endorse without implementing meaningful structural change. The psychological comfort comes from framing the action as happening, the crisis is under control, and progress is measurable, while all the time, the measurements are selectively defined or disconnected from planetary limits.

From a behavioural perspective, these rationalisation systems work because they satisfy both cognitive dissonance and institutional inertia. Individuals can retain a sense of ethical consistency ("my organisation is doing its part"), and institutions can protect their operational logic ("we’re aligned with global frameworks") without confronting the reality that meeting ecological thresholds may require profound structural change, not incremental reform.

As a result, symbolic action becomes a form of collective self-soothing, reinforcing the very dynamics that maintain business-as-usual while giving the impression of transformative effort.

So here is a challenge.

Go across to LinkedIn, the social platform where professionals hang out, and do a quick scroll. See how many of the posts, and especially the comments, help promote either cognitive dissonance or institutional inertia. The conversation will sound good, even fuel a little dopamine, but the chatter is a caricature of elaborate rationalisation systems.

This premise of rationalisation is accurate and well-grounded in critical environmental sociology, climate psychology, and organisational theory. And they exist because they serve both psychological and institutional needs. They function less as pathways to transformation and more as mechanisms of avoidance, cloaked in the language of progress. Understanding and naming this dynamic is essential if we are to have genuine systemic change.

And before we move on, let me name it more precisely and rub it in with the following premise…

Professional communities are built on shared norms and assumptions that define what counts as legitimate knowledge and practice within the field. You probably do not know about density-dependence, Lotka-Volterra equations, life tables or mark-release-recapture unless you are a population ecologist. And if you are a population ecologist, then you probably don’t know about a Giffen good, Pigouvian tax or deadweight loss that an economist bangs on about. These paradigms and their associated jargon create cognitive and institutional boundaries that foster technical depth but often at the expense of systemic integration. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, normal science operates within paradigms until accumulating anomalies force a paradigm shift. Until then, dissonant information tends to be ignored, reframed, or discredited.

In contemporary contexts such as climate science, economics, public health, and engineering, this dynamic manifests as epistemic silos. Professionals gain access to and then live in a bubble. So, economists model growth independently of ecological limits; engineers optimise infrastructure without accounting for long-term energy constraints; climate scientists produce risk models while deferring questions of political feasibility. These blind spots are not the result of incompetence or bad faith, but instead of institutionalised cognitive partitioning, where each profession stays within its zone of control. By staying in the silo, they don’t even know what is going on outside, and so must overlook the foundational assumptions of the system they are in.

The psychological premise of the streaming drama The Silo, based on Hugh Howey's Wool series, is described as being about control, information, and the human response to an oppressive, isolated environment. These are indeed the central themes of the narrative, where all is well until it isn’t. Drama ensues as a compelling exploration of how individuals and communities react when their entire reality is built upon a foundation of lies and control, and the decisive psychological struggle to uncover and accept a potentially devastating truth. But the institutionalised cognitive partitioning is enough to create emotional silos equivalent to the physical ones in the sci-fi.

Essentially, we surround ourselves with a subtle form of collective self-deception. Technical performance ensures legitimacy. In contrast, individuals and their collective effort remain blind to the system-level implications of their work. Then another layer of deception is added because most professional identities are built around narratives of progress, control, and institutional reliability. Entertaining the possibility that growth is ecologically constrained, that control is illusory in complex systems, or that institutions may be structurally incapable of addressing the polycrisis risks professional marginalisation.

For a time, I acted as a science advisor to a government agency in Australia responsible for supporting farmers who managed approximately 40 million hectares of agricultural holdings, over half the land area of the state. I could discuss soil, the importance of soil carbon, the practicalities of reducing fertiliser dependencies, the value of monitoring and evaluation, and even the benefits of predictive modelling with staff and senior managers. However, I would be given blank stares and then asked if 70,000 ha was an appropriate trigger value to review a regulation. Once I got so frustrated, I presented the hockey stick graph of human population growth for some shock and awe to a meeting of all the staff. Silence ensued, and my point about the importance of sustained food production was lost to the silo.

What we have created is a form of motivated ignorance, where inconvenient truths are not denied outright but are excluded from the domain of "relevant expertise." Even when such insights are acknowledged by the interdisciplinary panels or advisory reports that are occasionally commissioned, they are often compartmentalised and fail to reshape core professional practices. I have a small library of reviews and reports I prepared myself that gather digital dust.

The reality is that professional communities can and often do maintain high competence within specialised domains while engaging in systemic blind spots that preserve institutional legitimacy and personal identity. The result is a sophisticated form of collective self-deception that delays or dilutes the integration of knowledge necessary for responding to any emergency, let alone a long one.

And rather than propose a revolution or a tearing down of the silo so that occupants can emerge into a toxic atmosphere and certain death, the final premise of this introductory essay is as follows…

Traditional policy approaches often assume that individuals and institutions will act rationally when presented with clear evidence and logical incentives. However, decades of research show that, as we have seen, bounded rationality, emotional reasoning, and various cognitive biases continually shape real-world decision-making. As Herbert Simon and later Daniel Kahneman have shown, humans are not perfectly rational agents but satisficers. We are cognitive organisms seeking good-enough outcomes under conditions of uncertainty and limited attention.

Policy tools have adapted. Nudge theory, modular governance, and default options work not because they enlighten, but because they reduce friction. Adaptive systems succeed when they demand less from cognition, not more.

But the triple bind has a fourth thread.

These same vulnerabilities—distraction, inertia, and bias—are fertile ground for manipulation. Power doesn’t need to censor when it can confuse. Strategic ambiguity, delayed reform, and techno-optimism keep extractive systems intact without appearing hostile. The more institutions stumble, the more plausible it becomes to blame the voter or celebrate the innovator.

Living with the triple bind of environmental pressure, institutional inertia, and psychological constraints is both conceptually sound and practically actionable. It offers a more honest foundation for designing adaptive, resilient systems based on what people and institutions are capable of under stress. Of course, this triple bind is also easily leveraged for advantage. It is highly desirable for those who would gain from harmony in the silos and their persistence.

There is substantial evidence that the very vulnerabilities created by environmental crisis, institutional inertia, and cognitive limitations are actively exploited by powerful actors to maintain control, delay transformation, and manipulate public perception. Adding a fourth bind—the opportunistic manipulation of these vulnerabilities by powerful actors—captures a critical, often under-acknowledged dynamic in the persistence of the Long Emergency.

When populations are overwhelmed, institutions are sluggish, and cognition is biased toward short-term comfort, conditions are ripe for misinformation, distraction, and manufactured consent. In this context, actors with concentrated political, financial, or media power can actively shape narratives, suppress dissent, and sustain extractive systems that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

This manipulation for power and profit is not always overt. It often appears as strategic ambiguity, policy delay, technological utopianism, or the framing of systemic issues as matters of personal responsibility. Fossil fuel companies funded denial and sold personal change. Leaders repackaged climate action as cultural threat. These tactics persist not because they’re brilliant, but because they exploit minds already exhausted and institutions already mistrusted.

It is not enough to design systems that are psychologically intuitive and institutionally flexible. They must also be resistant to capture by actors whose interests run counter to planetary and collective well-being. This means embedding transparency, accountability, and democratic participation into any adaptive architecture. It also means recognising that working with human limitations is also a defence against bad-faith manipulation.

Adding this fourth bind—manipulation—makes the model politically adult. If systems aren’t designed to resist capture, they become tools for those who benefit from delay. Psychological realism must be matched with political realism. Designing for human minds is not just ergonomic. It is defensive architecture against bad-faith actors.

Any serious approach to the Long Emergency must work with what we are, account for who has power, and expect resistance from those who profit from collapse.

No true mindful sceptic is naive, at least not on purpose. The world is a complex place where the biophysical realities imposed by 8 billion people and their livestock, pulsed by fossil energy, are changing everything. There was the pre-agriculture ecology of the planet, then the post-agriculture one that was different but held on to a few key attributes it had honed for billions of years, and now there is the post-industrial revolution ecology that is operating under a brand new set of conditions.

Just one statistic is enough to show how different. Here it is…

96% of the mammal biomass on Earth today is humans and their livestock.

Paleoecological reconstructions, fossil data, and population modelling suggest that around 15,000 years ago, before the Neolithic Revolution, human populations were small, mobile hunter-gatherer groups that likely numbered fewer than 10 million globally. In contrast, the Earth still supported abundant populations of large wild mammals across all continents (except Antarctica), including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, aurochs, and other now-extinct megafauna, alongside still-extant species such as deer, wolves, and elephants.

Researchers have suggested that wild mammals may have represented close to 100% of mammalian biomass in this period, with humans making up around 0.01% to 0.1%. The domestication of animals had not yet occurred, so livestock biomass was zero. In effect, the ratio has inverted over the Holocene where wild mammals have shrunk by over 85–90%, and human/livestock biomass has exploded due to exponential human population growth and the expansion of agriculture.

You cannot unsee this number.

And I am not presenting it because I am fond of the koala or sad that, in 1988, I stood next to one of the last Black rhinoceroses in Zimbabwe as it was being translocated to a game ranch in South Africa… for its protection. I am telling you because you don’t know it. And I want you to understand why you don't. It is because the narratives you are told and the institutions that peddle them forget to mention the fact. They hold on to many a sacred cow. We could say that…

The very frameworks we use to understand and address challenges are themselves part of the problem.

Built on assumptions of linear causality, control, growth, and human exceptionalism, these frameworks often obscure more than they reveal. Rather than offering neutral tools for problem-solving, they shape what counts as a “problem,” who gets to define it, and which solutions are considered viable, frequently reinforcing the status quo they purport to critique.

Over time, these frameworks become self-reinforcing. People who spend time in institutions are often trained to prioritise risk management and efficiency over systemic transformation and ecological embeddedness. Academic disciplines segment knowledge into siloed domains, rendering cross-scale and cross-sectoral dynamics invisible. Economic models routinely externalise environmental degradation, treating planetary boundaries as abstract “externalities” rather than foundational constraints. Even the language of sustainability is often framed in terms of mitigation, adaptation, or resilience, which imply the preservation of existing structures, rather than questioning whether those structures are themselves the drivers of unsustainability.

This means that many of our most earnest responses to crisis remain trapped within the logic of the systems that created the crisis in the first place. For genuine transformation to occur, we must be willing to interrogate and revise the cognitive, institutional, and epistemological frameworks we take for granted.

We have to apply some sacred cow surgery.

So much of the conventional wisdom needs a question, some contrary thinking or even an excision.

"We just need better policies, more funding, and stronger leadership to address environmental challenges" is fundamentally incompatible with Long Emergency challenges. Reform efforts are psychological comfort food that distract from the need for entirely different approaches.

"Evidence-based policy recommendations will eventually prevail as the data becomes undeniable" is never going to get very far because human cognitive architecture makes us systematically incapable of responding rationally to slow-moving, complex threats. Even brilliant analysts are evolved primates with Stone Age brains.

"Experts understand these challenges and provide solutions; the problem is implementation" is a huge blind spot that professional communities develop as sophisticated self-deceptions. Expertise can become a barrier to seeing system-level inadequacy.

"We need to scale up our crisis response capabilities to handle bigger challenges" but the Long Emergency isn't a bigger version of previous crises. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon that makes traditional crisis management counterproductive.

"Innovation and technology will solve environmental challenges as they have solved previous problems" is perhaps the strongest psychological defence mechanism that allows institutions to avoid confronting the need for fundamental transformation.

"If people were just more aware/educated/motivated, we could solve these problems”, only this isn't about individual moral failure but systematic misalignment between human psychology, institutional design, and environmental reality. And even if there was some personal responsibility to be regained ,it is unlikely to operate at the scale of 8 billion psychologies.

So here is the thing.

We live in an age of unprecedented professional expertise, yet our most pressing challenges seem to worsen despite decades of sophisticated analysis, well-funded initiatives, and earnest reform efforts. Across domains from environmental sustainability to public health, from economic development to conservation biology, highly trained professionals armed with advanced degrees and impressive institutional affiliations continue to apply frameworks that consistently fail to deliver transformative results.

This isn't a failure of intelligence or commitment by genuinely capable people working within systems that reward expertise and evidence-based thinking. Yet something fundamental appears to be missing from our collective professional toolkit.

The problem may lie not in the quality of our analysis, but in the assumptions embedded within our analytical frameworks themselves. When sustainability professionals promote "green growth" while planetary boundaries collapse, when conservation biologists focus on charismatic megafauna whilst ecosystem functions deteriorate, when policy analysts recommend scaling up approaches that have already proven inadequate at smaller scales, we're witnessing the intellectual equivalent of performing ever more sophisticated surgery on a patient whose underlying physiology we've misunderstood.

We might wield tools of risk assessment, stakeholder engagement, evidence-based policy, technological innovation and the like as precisely calibrated instruments, but they're often applied to problems they weren't designed to solve, within systems they weren't meant to transform.

It is time for some uncomfortable intelligence.

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Mark & Chris
Editors, Mindful Sceptics