 People look upon life with a certain inevitability. Each morning the sun comes up. We instinctively know this. The problem is in the modern world people sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between natural phenomena, like the sun rising, and the grandiose myths we tell ourselves, like the functioning of the economy. In this series I don't just want to look at big heavy books, I also want to review significant papers from academic journals. I've picked this paper as an example of an academic work that needs to be more widely read. Written by William E. Reese, one of the originators of the idea of ecological foot printing, it reviews how humanity has changed in the global environment. If you click the link to this paper you're immediately confronted by a paywall and asked for $40. Don't despair. Go to Google Scholar or if your service provider doesn't block it, Psyhub, and you can often access a copy of the paper for free. When people look at an academic paper they tend to read the abstract and perhaps not much else. That's a pity as the abstract rarely captures the important detail and certainly not the key statements in a paper which give it value. Well written review articles such as this are a really good way for the public to understand an issue. It lists the key facts, but more importantly it references all the best research on an issue that ideally you'll take the time to look up and read as well. Let's begin with the abstract. The human enterprise is in potentially disastrous overshoot. It's exploiting the ecosphere beyond the ecosystems with genitive capacity and finning natural waste sinks to overflowing. Economic behavior that was once rational has become maladaptive. This situation is a inevitable outcome if humanity's natural expansionist tendencies reinforced by ecologically vacuous growth-oriented neoliberal economic theory. What this paper is exploring is why humanity, but more importantly the people who really should know better, the economists, can't see the effects that we're having on the planet, or more formally why they might see them, but they disregard them because they don't give them adequate weight compared to other factors. Ecological economics has technically always been part of economics, right back to Adam Smith and William Stanley Jevons. It didn't really become a thing in its own right until the 1970s when mainstream economics was politicized and diversion observed reality to become the secular religion of growth and affluence. That's also when ecological economics became controversial because it departed from that politicized message of progress and consumption. As Rhys says on page 2, the economic paradigms that run our lives are made up of stories. Complex social constructs conceived in language are massaged into accepted theory through academic debate, social discourse and practical experience. However, just because some economic model has become received wisdom does not mean it accurately represents either actual human behavior or that of the ecological system with which the economy interacts in the real world. Quite simply, economists don't see the impact of their system because that issue doesn't have value in the stories they tell. The issue here is the mathematics of exponential growth. That is what politicians in the media idolize and we pay homage to in the financial bulletins of news broadcasts. The fact is, though, it's the material implications of human growth which, virus-like, are killing the earth as we consume it. There's a very eye-catching graph of that on page 4. The best explanation of that is in the text to the left. It is these parallel and ongoing increases in energy supply, population, resource consumption and waste production that's driving climate change and the precipitous degradation of the ecosphere. It is a quirk of exponential growth that half the fossil fuel energy ever used has been burned in the past 35 years. The same for many other industrially important minerals and metals and waste generation and pollution. The conclusion on page 7 states a clear need for change. De facto human behavior should become the foundation for economic policy in the 21st century. It is clear for the reasons explored above that the human enterprise already exceeds global carrying capacity and is dangerously into overshoot, 68% in 2016. The greater truth that this paper encapsulates, though, is stated on page 8. No doubt the political and economic mainstream and many ordinary citizens will see these principles and actions as impossibly radical. Again, however, they are consistent with basic theory and empirical evidence. On its current trajectory, the present system will crash. The corrective throughput reductions suggested above are in line with those of various other technical analyses. Over recent years, as more papers like this have circulated in prestigious academic journals, I've tried to discuss their contents with a section of the public who should be most concerned, environmentalists. The fact is, though, many environmentalists also consider papers such as this to be impossibly radical. Just as Reese outlines in relation to ecological economics, if environmentalism has failed to have any impact upon environmental destruction, it is because those involved have compromised on the issue of growth and consumption, despite all evidence to the contrary. They abandoned the truly radical nature of early environmentalism to become ineffectual green consumers. Necessarily provocative view papers such as this are intended to provoke debate. The problem is they are all too often silenced, ignored by the media, as well as the people who profess to represent the ideas they contain. William Reese's paper deserves a far wider readership and debate, and it is only by reading academic papers such as this that the public can circumvent that ideological block in the mainstream media, as well as overly conservative lobby groups, and discuss the knowledge they contain, hopefully to shift those intransigent blocks to change.