From overshoot to death wish

"Overshoot" by William Catton is the most disturbing book I've ever read. The author pulls no punches. He is a hardline "doomer" who believes that human civilization is headed towards inevitable collapse, and that the fate of the human species itself may hang in the balance. The book offers no solutions whatsoever to this predicament. Rather, it is written in past tense, as if the Age of Exuberance (the author's term for modernity) has already ended.

What follows is a quick summary of Catton's arguments.

Earth's maximum carrying capacity has been reached. Humanity essentially lives on borrowed time by stealing resources from the future, a phenomenon the author calls drawdown. Our industrial civilization is dependent on cheap oil, a limited and non-renewable resource. Even agriculture is indirectly dependent on oil, due to gasoline-driven pumps and vehicles or oil-based fertilizers. Nuclear power is oil-dependent, too, since gasoline is needed to power the trucks and machines necessary to build nuclear power plants. (The same is true of hydroelectric plants.) The only viable "alternatives" to oil would be gas and coal, two other equally limited resources.

Drawdown only works so far, and the crisis will be felt already after "only" half of the oil has been extracted, since that would be the easiest and cheapest half. After that, it's essentially downhill. This is the "overshoot" of the book's title, overshoot being growth beyond an area's carrying capacity. The end result is crash, a euphemism for a massive die-off. Catton compares the fate of humanity to bacteria that die of their own poison in a Petri dish. Another comparison is with lemmings in the Arctic. They experience a population crash after "good" years when the population exceeds the available resources.

But what about possible alternatives? Catton believes that solar power isn't a feasible solution. While it's true that 99.9 % of all solar energy that reaches Earth is untapped, this doesn't mean that the sun is some kind of unlimited energy source. If humanity would use "only" 0.1% of solar energy, it would be an amount equal to that used by *all* plants and other living organism all over the world, something that would surely disrupt the entire biosphere. Another "solution" attacked by the author is colonizing uninhabited planets. It would take 60,000 Apollo-type launchings *every day* just to export Earth's annual surplus population (70 million people) to the Moon. Where would we get the fuel, the metals and the supplies for such an undertaking? Catton isn't impressed by breeder reactors or fusion energy either. Uranium is also a limited resource, while controlled fusion is probably impossible.

One seemingly feasible alternative discussed by the author is to replace drawdown with "takeover": turn jungles or deserts into farmland, harvest renewable resources, and so on. Catton concedes that this might work temporarily but only at the prize of further overpopulation and overconsumption, eventually leading to a new cycle of drawdown, this time of previously renewable resources. Eventually, all of nature might be destroyed and then crash follows anyway. His conclusion: "We must learn to live within carrying capacity without trying to enlarge it. We must rely on renewable resources consumed no faster than at sustained yield rates. The last best hope for humanity is ecological modesty".

"Overshoot" isn't an easy read. The book is filled with scholarly jargon and various apparent neologisms coined by the author. Still, reading it was nevertheless rewarding. Catton says openly what many others in the Green movement only think: there is really no hope for humanity, no hope at all. This book is hardcore non-survivalism.

Misanthropic death wish or gospel truth? Read this book and decide...