Everywhere on Become a Mindful Sceptic you will see references to the recent surge in human numbers, activities and impact on nature. It is time to take a closer look at The Great Acceleration.
Humanity spent 290,000 years meandering along, then exploded in numbers, technology, and impact.
In just 70 years—less time than most of our readers have been alive—we've doubled our population twice, consumed most of Earth's ancient energy stores, and fundamentally altered the planet's systems. This unprecedented surge in human activity is often called the Great Acceleration.
But what happens when exponential growth meets a finite planet?
If this question grabs you, then this issue of Become a Mindful Sceptic will build intrigue as we…
Track humanity's journey from sparse tribes to eight billion souls
Uncover how fossil fuels supercharged our species
Examine why some celebrate while others warn of catastrophe
Question whether this acceleration can continue
Consider what comes next
Using mindful scepticism, we'll cut through doom-laden predictions and blind optimism to understand what this remarkable period means for our future. Whether studying environmental science or watching the world change, this exploration of humanity's great leap forward will challenge how you think about progress.
In 1900, the average family took 2 months to consume what we now use in a day. Consider your breakfast - coffee from Brazil, cereal from the Midwest, milk shipped in refrigerated trucks. Your morning routine alone demonstrates more energy use and global connectivity than your great-grandparents would see in a season. Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash
Bumbling along
Modern humans bumbled along for nearly 300,000 years, only meandering beyond Africa 70,000 years ago. For the longest time, there were very few Homo sapiens. However, our ancestors had phenomenal success in spreading far and wide on the back of our control of fire, communication and, eventually, technologies.
Initially, numbers did not surge. We were sparse, tribal and sometimes barely made it through. Research into the theory of Mitochondrial Eve, where all women alive now are descended from her in a direct, unbroken female line, includes nuclear DNA tests that show that, at times, the effective population number of early humans was a few thousand.
The bumbling continued for 290,000 years before agriculture was invented in a few places, and a handful of recognisable civilisations appeared, flourished, and fell away.
It was only in the last 200 years or so of modern human existence, roughly 0.07% of our time on the planet, that the bumbling stopped and the acceleration began.
The increase in numbers, activity, and impact was so rapid and ubiquitous—a hockey stick shape on a graph—that the change is described as great.
Human population growth since the invention of agriculture, the most famous of the hockey stick graphs.
The Great Acceleration
The Great Acceleration refers to the dramatic acceleration of population growth, economic development, resource consumption, and technological advancement since approximately 1950.
The term encapsulates the idea that human influence on the planet has intensified dramatically in a relatively short period. It's characterised by exponential growth across various socioeconomic indicators, including global population, GDP, energy use, water consumption, international tourism, and telecommunications. Simultaneously, it tracks corresponding changes in Earth system trends, such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, surface temperature rise, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss, and declining biodiversity.
In my lifetime, we've doubled the human population. We use more energy in a year than humanity's first 100,000 years. Today's teenagers send more digital information in a week than an entire country could transmit in 1950. Our impact is so profound that scientists can find traces of our activities everywhere—from plastic in Arctic snow to rising carbon dioxide levels that haven't been seen for millions of years.
The Great Acceleration has seen dramatic advancements in health, life expectancy, and material comfort. Most of us live longer, healthier lives than even the wealthiest medieval king could imagine. My grandmother grew up without electricity and bathed once a week in a tin tub in the living room, but before she died, she had travelled on planes and discovered video chats.
If we could offer a medieval farmer the life of today's agricultural worker—with their temperature-controlled tractor cab, satellite-guided planting, and connection to global markets—they'd think we were describing paradise. Ask if he would be a peasant farmer today, and you know what he would say. Back then, there was no prospect of education, a local clinic, or the dream of a motorbike to carry produce to a market, making a roaring trade. He would be delighted to jump into your time machine.
The Great Acceleration means more people than ever, and most use energy and resources to live better than their forebears.
A Great Acceleration benefit Two decades ago, mobile phones were primarily used for calls and text messages. Today, your smartphone is a powerful computer, connecting you to a vast global network of information and services. This rapid technological advancement has transformed how you communicate, work, shop, and entertain yourself. It's changed social norms, created new industries, and even altered brain function and attention spans. The device embodies the accelerated pace of technological change and its profound effects on Western society.
It's not all beer and skittles.
The rapid growth in human activities, most of which require energy and resources, has been mirrored by equally rapid alterations in Earth's natural systems. The planet is not as it was. I challenge you to find anywhere on the earth or in the oceans that human hands do not influence directly or indirectly.
A Great Acceleration Consequence Urbanisation has concentrated most Westerners in cities, distancing many from direct experiences with nature. Simultaneously, awareness of environmental issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution has skyrocketed. This paradox of increased separation yet heightened concern manifests in various ways, from "nature deficit disorder" in children to the rise of eco-tourism, urban gardening trends, and vocal environmental activism. Your relationship with nature is now mediated through a complex lens of scientific knowledge, global awareness, and often, a sense of urgency or loss—a distinctly modern perspective shaped by the rapid changes of the Great Acceleration.
People discuss the consequences of 8 billion people doing their thing as pressure on the Earth's resources and ecosystems and label the consequences as challenges—climate change, biodiversity loss, peak oil, plus any number of others—for humanity's future on Earth. At some innate level, we understand that such rapid and precipitous growth can’t continue forever. The activities that bring it about are not sustainable on a single planet with a once-only shot of fossil energy.
Before we go there, a mindful sceptic might ask how it happened.
What caused the Great Acceleration
The Great Acceleration is generated and sustained by powerful economic mechanisms, including globalisation, marketisation, and financialisation, which are based on the mainstream model of doing business and promoting economic growth.
Boda, Z., & Zsolnai, L. (2016). The failure of business ethics. Society and Business Review. 11, 93–104.
Conventional wisdom on the cause of the Great Acceleration centres around a complex interplay of factors that emerged and intensified in the post-World War II era.
At its core, this period's rapid economic expansion and technological advancements are seen as the primary drivers. The post-war economic boom, particularly in Western countries, set the stage for unprecedented growth in industrial output, energy consumption, and material prosperity.
Think about the United States in 1945. While much of the industrialised world lay in ruins, American factories had become almost supernatural in their productive capacity. During the war, a single shipyard could build a Liberty ship in just 42 days. A single factory in Michigan could churn out a B-24 bomber every hour. When these incredible manufacturing capabilities turned to civilian goods—refrigerators, cars, washing machines—it unleashed a tidal wave of material prosperity unlike anything in human history.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to attempt something extraordinary. Through the Marshall Plan, they weren't just rebuilding what bombs had destroyed but building the future. Every time they laid new railway tracks or installed power lines, they did it with the latest technology. It's as if someone had magically transported modern infrastructure into the past. Cities that had grown organically over centuries could now be redesigned for the age of automobiles and electricity.
What fascinates me as an ecologist is how American industrial might and European reconstruction created a kind of economic perpetual motion machine. The U.S. had the factories, Europe needed everything, and both had the technological knowledge gained from wartime innovation. When you look at the graphs of human development, you can see this moment. It's where every line—energy use, resource consumption, population growth—suddenly points skyward.
Aftermath of German bombing in central Coventry, UK, WW2.
This wasn't just growth; it was growth that knew how to create more growth.
American assembly lines taught European factories how to be more efficient. European reconstruction projects gave American companies new markets and investment opportunities. The whole system fed on itself, getting bigger and faster with each passing year. That's the real story of the Great Acceleration—it's what happens when humanity's productive capacity suddenly learns how to multiply itself.
This economic surge was closely tied to technological progress across various sectors, including manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and communication. These advancements not only boosted productivity but also reshaped societies and consumption patterns. Concurrently, global population growth accelerated mainly due to healthcare and food production improvements, creating a more extensive consumer base and workforce.
The rise of consumer culture, especially in developed nations, together with increased affluence and changing societal values, led to heightened demand for goods and services, fueling further economic growth and resource exploitation.
The local markets that supported trade for the peasant farmers of the Middle Ages became global, expanding into international trade and creating the six-continent supply chain. Soon, an intensely interconnected global economy facilitated the spread of industrial practices and consumption patterns worldwide. This global economic integration was accompanied by rapid urbanisation as cities grew and expanded, altering land use patterns and intensifying resource demands.
This is the standard story; even a sceptic would agree with almost everything. The evidence is hard to ignore. The device you use to read this newsletter is an exemplar.
Keep people alive, feed them well, and give them opportunities, and they will find a way to live better and become more people.
Lions would do it, too; wildebeests, woodlice, and microbes would do it all the time. Give an organism resources, space, and no predatory limitations; it will make more. Humans are really good at it, uniquely so.
But are economic expansion and technology the cause of the Great Acceleration?
Here, a mindful sceptic pauses.
What is going on here is the use and appropriation of energy. There are only so many lions because there must be plenty of herbivores to eat. Herbivores need plants, which are constrained by the energy from the sun and the nutrients from the soil or water. Ultimately, numbers are constrained by the amount and transfer of energy—the fuel an organism must have to defy entropy.
This fundamental thermodynamic law of nature has applied to humans for most of our evolutionary past. The cause of the Great Acceleration appears when humans learn to acquire extra energy—we get more fuel from outside ourselves. Exogenous energy, which comes from sources outside a system, is typically derived from external inputs like fossil fuels, solar radiation, or wind.
The invention of agriculture started it. Farming channels exogenous energy from nature more directly into human bodies than is possible simply by foraging and hunting.
But agriculture is not the cause of the acceleration. It did increase numbers, but only slowly. The hockey stick shape appears because of the one-time energy pulse from fossil fuels and what humans could do with it.
The cause of the Great Acceleration is our ingenuity with coal, oil and natural gas. That is where the energy comes from to grow more people.
Conventional wisdom is that consumerism was primarily powered by fossil fuels, which became the backbone of industrial expansion and modern lifestyles, albeit with significant environmental consequences.
Fossils were the fuel, but human ingenuity was the engine.
The unanswerable counterfactual is… Would the hockey sticks exist without the fossil energy pulse? Would humans have found another source of exogenous energy?
Unprecedented speed and scale, but for how long
We know that human development metrics, which can include population, economics, water usage, food production, transportation, technology, greenhouse gases, surface temperature, and natural resource usage, have all increased, often exponentially, since the late 1800s—the speed and size of this change cannot be understated.
The Great Acceleration is the rapid, continuous, and approximately synchronous spike in growth rate across a wide variety of human activity measurements that began in the mid-twentieth century and continues to this day.
How long can or will it last?
Just asking this question implies the crucial assumption that such speed and scale of growth cannot continue forever on a finite planet.
Ecological science tells us that nature does ‘exponential’ but only for a limited time. Sooner or later, there is a slowing or sometimes a crash.
In nature, populations or processes may initially show exponential growth when conditions are favourable—abundant resources, no competition, few predators—resulting in the hockey stick pattern of rapid increase. However, this exponential phase inevitably reaches its limits due to a single factor or combination of limited resources (food, water, space), accumulation of waste products, competition between organisms, predator-prey dynamics, or disease spread at high densities.
At or near this limit, the growth pattern typically shifts to an S-curve because growth gradually slows and levels off at the environment's carrying capacity, forming an "S" shape when graphed—the logistic curve.
Alternatively, the population overshoots its carrying capacity and crashes dramatically before potentially recovering and repeating the cycle.
Ecologists have documented both outcomes across many scales in nature, from bacterial colonies in a petri dish to animal populations in ecosystems to human civilisations' resource use.
Perhaps because of the unprecedented and, for many, desirable changes, much of the expansion phase of logistic growth—more people undertaking economic activity without slowing down—the debate is about how long the Great Acceleration will continue.
Environmental historian J. R. McNeill has suggested that the Great Acceleration is unique to our time and will come to an end soon; it has never happened before and will never happen again. However, others, including some climate change scientists and chemists, suggest there is insufficient evidence to validate or disprove such a notion.
But I bring you this graph that suggests it is a one-off pulse for fossil fuels.
In it, you can also see the hockey stick, the difference between exogenous energy from fire and early agriculture, and how much ancient power we have tapped.
The future of the Great Acceleration isn't a simple story of endless growth or inevitable decline because reality rarely follows such neat trajectories.
What we're seeing now is a fascinating mixed pattern where some aspects of our rapid expansion are clearly slowing while others continue to surge ahead. In mature economies, population growth has leveled off and some environmental indicators are improving. Yet developing nations are still racing through their own industrial transformations, and breakthrough technologies in AI, clean energy, and biotechnology keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
The most interesting question isn't whether the Great Acceleration will continue exactly as it has, but how it might transform. We're not necessarily approaching the end of acceleration, but rather a fundamental shift in its character from a path defined by fossil fuels and resource consumption to one potentially shaped by different kinds of growth we're just beginning to understand.
There is something more going on
We know we can influence the Great Acceleration as we've seen it happen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, global travel nearly stopped, consumption patterns shifted dramatically, and carbon emissions dropped.
In 2020, we saw the largest decline in global energy demand since World War II – a dramatic 4% drop compared to 2019. To put this in perspective, imagine the entire energy consumption of India simply vanishing for a year.
The transportation sector saw the most dramatic changes. With planes grounded and cars parked, global oil demand plunged by nearly 9% over the year. Air travel alone dropped by 60% in 2020. The morning rush hour—a reliable pattern in energy use for decades—virtually disappeared in many cities.
Yet almost immediately after restrictions lifted, most indicators bounced right back to their previous trajectories. This short but dramatic pause taught us that rapid, widespread change is possible, but also revealed how deeply embedded acceleration-driven behaviors are in our modern lives.
This raises uncomfortable questions about our relationship with growth. Those of us benefiting from the Great Acceleration—with access to education, healthcare, technology, and consumer goods—often struggle to imagine giving up these advantages. I see this tension in my own life. While I understand the environmental imperative to reduce consumption, I still appreciate my ability to travel, work remotely, and access global markets.
The complexity deepens when we consider that 3.3 billion people—42% of the global population—who still live on less than $10 per day. For them, the Great Acceleration represents not excess but opportunity. World Bank data shows that while extreme poverty is declining globally, progress remains strikingly uneven across regions. Someone living in poverty today isn't concerned about reducing consumption—they're focused on accessing the basic benefits that others take for granted.
This creates a fundamental challenge.
History and ecology tell us that exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite system. Yet billions of people still need and deserve access to the benefits this growth has provided. The key question becomes not whether to slow the Great Acceleration, but how to transform it to serve everyone while respecting planetary boundaries.
I am an ecologist who studied population ecology for my PhD. Not people but woodlice. In the Mindful Sceptic Guide to Escaping the Malthusian Trap, I summarised what I learned from these lowly creatures—nature slows down excess. It always does, sometimes brutally.
So how long do we have?
My best guess is that we are close to the end of the Great Acceleration and that change, as a consequence of slowdowns, is already happening—what Nate Hagens calls The Great Simplification.
We may have a decade or two of operating close to business as usual before The Great Deceleration happens.
A mindful sceptic take on the Great Acceleration
A mindful sceptic might begin by questioning the numbers.
Is it 8 billion people increasing at 8,000 per hour?
Are we really using 100 million barrels of oil, 11 billion cubic meters of gas and 21 million tons of coal per day?
Were there less than 1 billion people on earth until the start of the Industrial Revolution?
And the sceptic would find that the numbers for The Great Acceleration are robust regarding scientific evidence. The trends in indicators such as population growth, economic activity, resource consumption, and environmental degradation point upward.
The specifics are debatable, but the data sources' reliability, the methods used to compile them, and the more robust evidence review processes pass the pub test.
A mindful sceptic might quickly accept the trends as true for the important indicators and move on to the implications and interpretations of The Great Acceleration.
The challenge is the value proposition depends on what matters to you.
For some, not all aspects of this acceleration are negative, considering improvements in human health, life expectancy, and quality of life that have occurred alongside environmental pressures. A mindful sceptic already knows that humans construct their social contracts around agreed, and mostly shared values even as they argue and debate the specifics.
Given the tensions between the favourable economics of growth and the downside of resource depletion and externalities of energy use, a mindful sceptic would be curious about potential biases in how the data is presented and interpreted and whether alternative explanations or perspectives have been adequately considered.
Critical thinking kicks in hard around the complex interactions between different aspects of The Great Acceleration, recognising that superficial cause-and-effect relationships may only partially capture the nuances of global systems. No trend or consequence will be uniform across all regions and populations or if it primarily reflects patterns in industrialised nations.
A mindful sceptic also knows over 3 billion people live on less than $10 daily.
The future implications of The Great Acceleration bend the mind. A mindful sceptic would remain open to various scenarios, from continued acceleration to potential slowdowns or reversals in specific trends. They would be interested in examining proposed solutions and their possible consequences, always balancing the urgency suggested by the data and the need for thorough, evidence-based decision-making.
A mindful sceptic would view The Great Acceleration as a significant concept worthy of serious consideration. They would continue asking probing questions and seeking diverse perspectives to deepen their understanding of this complex phenomenon and its implications for our shared future.
The mechanisms of The Great Acceleration are nested in economics, but the cause is energy in excess.
If you need more, several of The Mindful Sceptic Guides explore the consequences and future of The Great Acceleration.
Key Points
The Great Acceleration represents unprecedented rapid growth in human activity and impact on the planet, primarily occurring since the mid-20th century. This phenomenon is characterised by exponential increases in population, economic development, resource consumption, technological advancement, and corresponding changes in Earth's systems, such as rising carbon dioxide levels and biodiversity loss.
While the Great Acceleration has significantly improved human health, life expectancy, and material comfort for many, it has also led to profound alterations in Earth's natural systems. The rapid pace of change raises questions about the sustainability of this growth on a finite planet.
Conventional wisdom attributes the Great Acceleration to post-World War II economic expansion and technological advancements. However, a deeper analysis suggests that the fundamental driver is humanity's ability to harness and utilise exogenous energy, particularly fossil fuels. This energy surplus has allowed for unprecedented growth and development.
The future trajectory of the Great Acceleration is uncertain. While some experts believe the current pace is unsustainable and will inevitably slow down, others point to ongoing technological advancements that could potentially prolong or shift the nature of this acceleration. The complex interplay of technological innovation, policy decisions, and environmental feedback loops makes it challenging to predict the exact course.
A mindful sceptic approach to the Great Acceleration involves questioning the data, considering various perspectives, and critically examining the implications of this phenomenon. It's crucial to recognise that while the benefits of this acceleration have been significant, they have not been evenly distributed, with a large portion of the global population still living in poverty.
Mindful Momentum
The Great Acceleration isn't just about numbers—it's about narratives. Pick one aspect of your daily life most affected by this rapid change. Spend a week documenting how it influences you, then try to trace its origins and impacts.
Share your mini-investigation in our community forum. Your insights could spark our next deep dive!"
And if you’d like more of a challenge, try this.
With your new understanding of the Great Acceleration, it's time to look forward. In 500 words or less, describe your vision of human progress for the next 50 years. Will we continue accelerating, or are we due for a Great Deceleration?
Submit your future scenario to our 'Mindful Futures' contest. The most thought-provoking entries will be featured in a future Become a Mindful Sceptic issue.
Why Your Newsfeed Makes You Anxious (And What To Do About It)
Ever notice how an hour of scrolling leaves you more overwhelmed and less informed than when you started? Next week, we'll explore how mindful scepticism can transform your relationship with information from passive consumption to purposeful engagement.
I'll share practical strategies I've developed over decades of research to help you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters.
