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End game: the economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change
... This has been expressed in various ways from the spiritual (nature-inspired meditation), the technical (direct interventions on climate processes), the attitudinal (pro-social motivation and esteem for nature), to the political (the creation of "people's assemblies" to influence policy). This author agrees that cultural change is necessary and attempts to look ahead in common with many other efforts (e.g., Adger et al. 2013;Bai et al., 2016;Rees, 2019;van Vugt et al., 2014). ...
In response to calls for a “cultural transformation” that aims to bring about a sustainable relationship with nature, this review considers the evolution of human cooperation and its implications for cultural change. The link between cooperation and culture has varied throughout human evolution. The hierarchical ranking of a primate ancestor changed in species of Homo when they adopted egalitarian social arrangements, a stage that persisted for hundreds of thousands of years before returning once more to hierarchy. With the maintenance of social status in contemporary societies seeming to depend heavily on patterns of consumption, it is argued that the ultimate success of a change toward sustainability will depend on new systems of economic management and social incentivization.
... Therefore, we continue our call for holistic and transformative change (e.g., Rees 2019, Ripple et al. 2020). Keys to curbing the ecological overshoot involve greatly reducing overconsumption and waste by the global middle class and especially the wealthy, stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population by providing education and rights for girls and women, and implementing a sustainable ecological economics that ensures social justice (Rees 2019). ...
... This minimal interaction between natural and social sciences (Rosa and Dietz, 1998) has led to neglecting the importance of ecosystems as unities with different socioeconomic, environmental, biological, chemical, and other characteristics (Liu et al., 2007) and to tackling concurring interlinked challenges in silos (Haberl et al., 2019). A systemic understanding of nature-human interactions, on the contrary, offers a more integrative view of the one and same system, where humanity and nature constantly interact by exchanging energy, information, and materials (Rees, 2019). Consequently, defining goals requires understanding of how processes that take place in one part of the system affect the status of the entire system. ...
... The economic crisis following from the pandemic has inspired calls for green deals capable of counteracting recession as well as addressing climate change (Lahcen et al. 2020). It has also brought radical calls for a "new normal" (Benjamin et al. 2020) and for a transition to a sustainable society beyond green growth rhetoric (Rees 2019a;Trainer 2020). An emerging theoretical approach of resilience stresses the need for societies to develop their capacity to "maintain [their] core functions" when hit by sudden changes (Kotilainen et al. 2015, 58; see also Döringer et al. 2020). ...
For parts of the sparsely populated areas, the trends of globalisation, urbanisation and deindustrialisation constitute difficult circumstances. Population decline, escalating dependency ratios, lack of human and financial resources, and diminishing commercial and public services form part of lived experience in many of these areas. This paper discusses what geographers can do for these territories. The paper suggests that geographers can aid in understanding and demonstrating (a) how resources have been distributed in space over time and (b) why patterns of resource distribution take the shape they do. Geographers can also illuminate (c) what it means to live, work, and operate in shrinking, rural territories. Geographers could also (d) make implicit geographical imaginations explicit, (e) elucidate how shrinkage is dealt with by various policy actors, and (f) point to alternative policy directions. The paper also suggests that geographers in the Nordic countries could enrich an international research field of studies of shrinkage by (g) providing case studies or comparative studies from a Nordic context.
... Eventually it may well be that reforming the mainstream is futile. A few heterodox economists (e.g., Rees, 2019;Norgaard, 2021;Spash and Guisan, 2021) imply that Socio-ecological Economics is far too important to be left to anyone with even a few toes remaining in the mainstream. Rees cogently i ha a effecie ga f degh i i bed eci died cce f eai. ...
Various heterodox economists envision some sort of Socio-ecological Economics (armed
with complex adaptive systems tools and concepts) as the vanguard of their displacement
of the crumbling cultural citadel of Mainstream Economics. This is especially relevant
given rapidly converging environmental catastrophes on a planetary scale. Unfortunately,
ecological reasoning remains institutionally imprisoned and policy impoverished. Its
development has been disrupted by its own disarray and by its subservient adherence to
rules and conventions that the mainstream itself regularly violates. In order to mount a
serious paradigmatic challenge, scholars and practitioners need be able to dismantle the institutional barricades erected in their path over decades. They also need to build a stronger policy orientation, and focus their efforts on financialization as the prime source of much of the social and natural systems disintegration.
... Therefore, we continue our call for holistic and transformative change (e.g., Rees 2019, Ripple et al. 2020). Keys to curbing the ecological overshoot involve greatly reducing overconsumption and waste by the global middle class and especially the wealthy, stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population by providing education and rights for girls and women, and implementing a sustainable ecological economics that ensures social justice (Rees 2019). ...
Reacting to the challenges presented by the evolving nexus of environmental change, defossilization, and diversified natural product bioprospecting is vitally important for advancing global healthcare and placing patient benefit as the most important consideration. This overview emphasizes the importance of natural and synthetic medicines security and proposes areas for global research action to enhance the quality, safety, and effectiveness of sustainable natural medicines. Following a discussion of some contemporary factors influencing natural products, a rethinking of the paradigms in natural products research is presented in the interwoven contexts of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions and based on the optimization of the valuable assets of Earth. Following COP28, bioprospecting is necessary to seek new classes of bioactive metabolites and enzymes for chemoenzymatic synthesis. Focus is placed on those performance and practice modifications which, in a sustainable manner, establish the patient, and the maintenance of their prophylactic and treatment needs, as the priority. Forty initiatives for natural products in healthcare are offered for the patient and the practitioner promoting global action to address issues of sustainability, environmental change, defossilization, quality control, product consistency, and neglected diseases to assure that quality natural medicinal agents will be accessible for future generations.
Graphical Abstract
For an ever-increasing number of scholars, the continued ecological degradation and intensified climate change are the result of the pursuit for economic growth. The degrowth discourse acknowledges that the growth imperative is due to capitalism’s need to accumulate. Businesses are forced to accumulate through continuous profit seeking in order to survive in the competition created and constantly facilitated by the capitalist economy. We argue that businesses can never become fully sustainable as they are the fundamental form of capitalist economic organisation. From a degrowth perspective, ‘true’ sustainability is inherently incompatible with capitalism, meaning businesses are thus similarly incompatible with degrowth. Utilising Gramsci’s terminology of hegemony, we argue that growth-based capitalism is society’s current hegemony whereas degrowth represents a sustainable counter-hegemony. Businesses therefore reproduce this unsustainable hegemony. This chapter argues there is a need for a research agenda on alternative forms of economic organisation in line with degrowth’s counter hegemony. This new research agenda must recognise degrowth’s incompatible with any capitalist economic manifestations on the microeconomic level. Hence, this research agenda means decidedly leaving behind any attempts to find a common ground between degrowth and capitalism, its structures and agents.
Like a pandemic, business schools have managed to spread to every corner of the world without changing much of their core. Business schools from here to Pyongyang and across different cultural and religious systems are structured according to the same ideological foundation and disciplines. In this chapter, we refer to this bedrock as business school capitalism, which consists of a peculiar mix of three main ideologies: neoliberalism, shareholderism, and managerialism. The purpose of the chapter is twofold: First, we aim to unmask the foregoing ideologies behind the business schools’ scientific façade. Second, we compare the three ideologies and develop a framework that brings them together in unpacking the fundamental premises of business school capitalism. Finally, we discuss the urgency to continue the ideological legitimacy work at business schools now that our society is facing the greatest sustainability challenge of our lifetime.
EJ movements and analyses play vital roles in building future energy systems that are more equitable, less destructive, and which support a just transition away from global dependency on fossil fuels. Contemporary energy debates are predominantly framed in terms of crises and transitions. Yet the meaning and purposes of transitions remain contested, as do questions concerning who controls, directs, and implements transitions. Movements already fighting for transformative social change show how different transitions projects redesign relations between energy systems, ecosystems, communities, and society as a whole. Insights from these multiple, global movements further underline the importance of creating transitions not just to different energy systems but to different ways of living and relating. Studying transitions therefore involves analyzing the socio-environmental relations that different energy choices support and reinforce or, by contrast, devalue and undermine. This section highlights the importance for transitions practice and analysis of four key concepts (pluralism, diversity, restoration, and degrowth), viewing transitions as more than a response to crisis. The result is a reframing of energy transitions as collaborative projects of justice; that is, as socio-political processes where collective action, centered on consent and reciprocity, is allowed to thrive.KeywordsEnergy transitionsPluralismDiversityRestorative environmental justiceDegrowthEnergy sovereignty
Fisheries transform marine ecosystems and compete with predators [1], but temporal trends in seabird-fishery competition had never been assessed on a worldwide scale. Using catch reconstructions [2] for all fisheries targeting taxa that are also seabird prey, we demonstrated that average annual fishery catch increased from 59 to 65 million metric tons between 1970-1989 and 1990-2010. For the same periods, we estimated that global annual seabird food consumption decreased from 70 to 57 million metric tons. Despite this decrease, we found sustained global seabird-fishery food competition between 1970-1989 and 1990-2010. Enhanced competition was identified in 48% of all areas, notably the Southern Ocean, Asian shelves, Mediterranean Sea, Norwegian Sea, and Californian coast. Fisheries generate severe constraints for seabird populations on a worldwide scale, and those need to be addressed urgently. Indeed, seabirds are the most threatened bird group, with a 70% community-level population decline across 1950-2010 [3].
Significance
Arthropods, invertebrates including insects that have external skeletons, are declining at an alarming rate. While the tropics harbor the majority of arthropod species, little is known about trends in their abundance. We compared arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest with data taken during the 1970s and found that biomass had fallen 10 to 60 times. Our analyses revealed synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods. Over the past 30 years, forest temperatures have risen 2.0 °C, and our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web. If supported by further research, the impact of climate change on tropical ecosystems may be much greater than currently anticipated.
We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a "Hothouse Earth" pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System-biosphere, climate, and societies-and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.
Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of this decline is based on the abundance of single species or taxo-nomic groups only, rather than changes in insect biomass which is more relevant for ecological functioning. Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and midsummer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.
Significance
One of the most concerning consequences of human-induced increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is the potential for rapid regional transitions in the climate system. Yet, despite much public awareness of how “tipping points” may be crossed, little information is available as to exactly what may be expected in the coming centuries. We assess all Earth System Models underpinning the recent 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and systematically search for evidence of abrupt changes. We do find abrupt changes in sea ice, oceanic flows, land ice, and terrestrial ecosystem response, although with little consistency among the models. A particularly large number is projected for warming levels below 2°. We discuss mechanisms and include methods to objectively classify abrupt climate change.
The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic and Earth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010. In the graphs of socio-economic trends, where the data permit, the activity of the wealthy (OECD) countries, those countries with emerging economies, and the rest of the world have now been differentiated. The dominant feature of the socio-economic trends is that the economic activity of the human enterprise continues to grow at a rapid rate. However, the differentiated graphs clearly show that strong equity issues are masked by considering global aggregates only. Most of the population growth since 1950 has been in the non-OECD world but the world’s economy (GDP), and hence consumption, is still strongly dominated by the OECD world. The Earth System indicators, in general, continued their long-term, post-industrial rise, although a few, such as atmospheric methane concentration and stratospheric ozone loss, showed a slowing or apparent stabilisation over the past decade. The post-1950 acceleration in the Earth System indicators remains clear. Only beyond the mid-20th century is there clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth System that are beyond the range of variability of the Holocene and driven by human activities. Thus, of all the candidates for a start date for the Anthropocene, the beginning of the Great Acceleration is by far the most convincing from an Earth System science perspective.
When it came to be my turn to speak on a solemn occasion to this gathering, attended by so many to whom I owe my scientific education, I was well aware how difficult was the honourable duty I had undertaken and only reluctantly began to shoulder it. Forgive me, therefore, if I feel I must devote some words of apology to the very choice of my subject. This choice is no doubt easier for the philosopher and historian who remain in constant touch with the general public. In natural science it used often to be the custom to discuss more general topics of so-called philosophic or metaphysical interest. If today I depart from this custom, I certainly do not wish to provoke the suspicion that these more general questions seem to me insignificant or unimportant as against the countless special problems raised by contemporary science. It is only the manner in which they have been treated to date, in some cases one almost feels tempted to say the fact that they are treated at all at this time, that seems to me mistaken.