 Though overshoot is ostensibly a book about bar physical limits, the theme that runs through it is about the human intensity for denying obvious facts. Our ability to lie not simply to others, but more importantly, to ourselves. As with the first review in this four-part mini-series, Farewell to Growth, any book that posits the end of affluence will inevitably attract the Misenfrope and their arch-enemy, the Cornucopian. There's a lovely exchange from one of the more comical X-Files episodes that's very descriptive. I want to be abducted by aliens. Why? Whatever for? I just want to be taken away to some place where I don't have to worry about finding a job. Those who celebrate the book are as equally as interesting as those who hate it. Celebrating the end of society can be used as escapist as the cult-like belief that technology will save us. Yet, as Catton describes, both Misenfrope and Cornucopianism are means of denying the demonstrable trends unfolding before our eyes. Catton summarises the scope of the book in the preface. In a future that is unavoidable, as it will be unwelcome, survival and sanity may depend on our ability to cherish rather than to disparage the concept of human dignity. I have tried to show the real nature of humanity's predicament, not because understanding its name should enable us to escape it, but because if we do not understand it, we shall continue to act and react in ways that make it worse. That's why the book has as many haters as it does devotees. It attacks people's cult-like belief in the innovative power of technology, and disturbs the comfortable classes by reminding them of the impermanence of those comforts. As Catton says, The belief held that great technological breakthroughs would inevitably occur in the near future and would enable man to continue indefinitely expanding the world's human-carrying capacity. This was a mere faith in faith, like stock market speculation. It had no firmer basis than naive statistical extrapolation. Such a faith overlooked the fact that man's ostensible enlargement of the world's productivity in the past had mainly consisted of successive diversions of the world's life-supporting processes from use-by-ever species to use-by-man. It failed to see the progress must stop when all divertible resources have been diverted. As demonstrated by that quote, the book touches upon one of the most sensitive issues at the heart of the contemporary culture war. The idea that the power and greatness exhibited by Western society is based not upon the innate superiority of Western culture, but their historic expansion, takeover and expropriation of the resources of other cultures. That's made explicit where Catton says, Each enlargement of carrying capacity consisted essentially of diverting some fraction of the earth's life-supporting capacity to supporting our kind. As the expanding generations replaced each other, Iro sapiens took over more and more of the surface of this planet, essentially at the expense of its other inhabitants. At first those displaced were creatures of teeth and claws instead of tools, with scales or feathers or fur instead of clothes. The precise statistical basis for this argument was fairly sketchy in 1980. It's the way the book creates a mental framework to interpret humanity's dynamic relationships of the earth that's insightful and which spurred research to fill these knowledge gaps. The book introduces terms which define the boundaries of our development problem and our inability to accept and deal with those issues, takeover, carrying capacity, trade acreage, cosmeticism, energy slaves, drawdown, exceptionalism and many more. As Catton says, There's so much I'd love to review here, but that's not going to fit in to a five minute summary. To end, I believe that Catton is making a positive argument for change rather than a misanthropic framework to label our predicament. The paramount need of post-exuberant humanity is to remain human in the face of dehumanising pressures. To do this we must learn somehow to base exuberance of spirit upon something more lasting than the expansive living that sustained it in the recent past. But as if we were driving a car that has become stuck on a muddy road, we feel an urge to bear down harder than ever on the accelerator and to spin our wheels vigorously in an effort to power ourselves out of the quagmire. This reflex will only dig us deeper. We have arrived at a point in history where counter-intuitive thoughtways are essential. The value of overshoot is not simply as a warning for humanity's ecological fate, it provides a mental framework for how we define our relationship to the issue and map that to a practical basis for change. Thought ultimately defines the imperative for change more clearly than just the statistics for why change is necessary. After Thoughts on Overshoot Put simply, overshoot is a book on the sociology of economic collapse, of how scientists choose the deal, or not, with the overshoot of the human economy, and, as with any species that exceeds its carrying capacity, how collapse must be the inevitable result of ecological overshoot. However, whereas natural species do not have the where of all to control their population collapse, the ability of human society to anticipate, study and understand the nature of ecological collapse gives us a unique ability to change the outcome, if we collectively choose to do so. Therein lies the problem, which is what the book describes. Contrary to the popular dialogue, again the product of magical thinking which inherently plagues complex human systems, the Enlightenment did not end the role of mysticism or religious belief in the context of human affairs. Instead, the role of mystical thinking itself became reductive, technological, creating narratives that, while settling for human material satisfaction, could not be substantiated for objective method. For example, the laws of physics state that the environment is finite, and the entropy can only increase, yet at the same time, the basic principle at work in contemporary economics is that economic growth can, on average, continue forever. In general, this book is not well known enough to receive the ire of the cornucopia and lobby on a regular basis, certainly not to the level of bile directed towards silent spring or the limits to growth. From my reading of both supportive and critical comments, though, I think there's a disconnect between how people perceive Catton's presentation of the physical collapse of the human system, versus his observations of how humans comprehend and react to the knowledge of this imminent collapse. It's a subtle difference, but it's important in terms of Catton's greater body of work and the legacy he has created for us today. To understand overshoot, it's worth reading the paper Catton co-authored the year before which defined the principles of environmental sociology, or, as the Wikipedia page most helpfully summarises. Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasises the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define social issues, and societal responses to these problems. For me, this is the stumbling block I perceive many encounter when reading the book. It is not about the ecological process of overshoot and collapse specifically, it's about us, and how we collectively react to those issues. At a time when the world seems incapable of addressing itself to the issues of climate change, overshoot provides a valuable framework to understand our predicament. For example, simply swap consumption for emissions, tipping point for overshoot and climate breakdown for collapse, and the book's arguments easily map to the climate debate and verse how the world is, but practically is not, adapt into the objective ecological realities of climate breakdown. The difficulty is, if you do transpose overshoot onto the climate crisis, the results are not exhilarating. That's because, as a sociological work, you can see how the denial and deflection methods that overshoot outlines at length run throughout the climate change debate today. And more importantly, that addressing those obstacles has little to do with the technicalities of climate issues and everything to do with a self-delusion and short-term, magical thinking that plagues human reasoning. Perhaps more critically, the way overshoot addresses cargo-cultism, or the belief that technology can insulate the individual from radical systemic change, can equally be seen as critical of the environmental movement itself. Environmentalism arose as a deep ecological focus on the relationship of humans to their environment. Unfortunately, as the issue became adopted into mainstream society, that insightful focus was distorted by cultural forces into responses such as green consumerism or green technologies, which operate as cat and outlines in the book, as a very effective distraction from the deep systemic change which is actually required. For those who choose to read overshoot, I suggest that you keep this distinction in your mind between the phenomena of ecological collapse and the human interpretation of that phenomena. When the book is read as a description of how humans respond to existential threats, rather than how those threats evolve, Catton's work provides a really useful set of tests and tools to pick apart the environmental debate today. Finally, to bring this full circle, a key part of interpreting overshoot is to understand how individuals relate to such complex issues in general, in particular the seemingly unbridgeable gap between misanthropes and corny copians which are outlined at the beginning. In practice, the problem is best defined in terms of how we quantify people's responses across any issue, and whether we use a single or multiple indicators to measure that. For example, political beliefs are not simply a measurement of libertarianism versus authoritarianism. It's also strongly influenced by a person's view on state regulation versus market determinism or social conservatism versus social freedom. Likewise, people's response to ecological issues isn't simply a metric for whether they deeply identify with nature or with human progress. It's also mediated by the introvert versus extrovert nature or their desire to practically create their lifestyle versus a willingness to passively consume, framed inevitably by that complex political belief system noted above. How we solve the ecological crisis cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. It has to engage with humans as they are, rather than assuming that everyone will be willingly corralled into one strategy or another. In other words, we need a strategy for misanthropes, another for corny copians and a more general set for everyone else. The dominance of magical, economical, technocratic thinking restricts our options for change and provides a powerful basis for the rejection or denial of facts, which Catton describes at length. It may be to solve the many psycho-social obstacles Catton defines and overcome the deep denial exhibited by many that to achieve change quickly we need a parallel set of options. In reality though, whatever the approach, unless people can accept that their cherished normality is over, change will never be able to take place on a sufficiently prompt timeline to avoid the inevitable outcome of the ecological overshoot.