Dealing with the natural world is daunting, such is its size and complexity. Getting a fix on humanity and its blizzard of activities and effects, is similarly daunting. It’s no wonder, then, that it is so hard to get any sort of perspective, any sort of proportion on our impact on the globe and its ability to deal with this impact.
To make matters worse, so many have an interest in denying ecological context, be it the despoilers of the environment or the trivialisers of the tabloid media and advertising industry, that they want to reduce everything to a simple story of ‘consumption = happiness’.
Thank goodness that into this ironbound world in 1992 came William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel from the University of British Columbia. They came up with the idea and process of the ‘Ecological Footprint’ to sum both humanity’s impacts on the globe, and to calculate the earth’s capacity to meet these impacts. This extremely clever idea gives us a chance to understand the totality of our actions and effects, and to determine priorities to address them, rather than be trapped in delusional confusion, applying a random shotgun approach to environmental actions whereby recycling a plastic bag is deemed the equivalent of moving the First World to a largely plant-based diet!
William Rees is a terrific speaker: clear, concise, honest. The following podcast is one of my all-time favourites because it so crisply dissects the environmental problems of the world and logically lays out the foundations and process of Ecological Footprint Analysis. It could have been placed almost anywhere in T10 (e.g. Section 5, ‘Population’, or 3 ‘Growth’, or 1.1, ‘Articles’), but I will put it here to focus on consumption and the development of the Footprint, and as such it introduces this vital concept that we will use often in T10. (And, I will repeat it in Section 5, ‘Population’, as well).
Player FM – Internet Radio Done Right 1
The interviewers are Dave Gardner and Nandita Bajaj and it runs for one hour, but you can ignore the first five or six minutes as they are devoted to ‘housekeeping’. I urge you to put an hour aside to listen to William Rees; you won’t regret it.
(New Zealand Ministry for the Environment)
1 Gardner, D., Bajaj, N. 2021. 65 – Earth Overshoot Day: Overdrafting the World’s Ecosystems. The Overpopulation Podcast, Population Balance, July 28th.
