re: “overshoot”

Bioregional worldview:

If you think the idea is esoteric, well, until the relatively recent rise of modern states and empires, just five thousand years ago, all people always lived bioregionally.

Bioregionalism characterized the natural, original, ecological human lifeways. A tribe was a cultural group in a particular place. Tribes inhabited territories based on watersheds or coastal plains or highland areas, etc. Their territories didn’t have rigid geopolitical borders like our states do. Aboriginal peoples identified with place; their culture arose from the characteristics of their place.

So, during 99% of our species history we lived bioregionally. The period of the last five thousand years has been an aberration during which we lost our grounding.

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After this presentation of the key ideas, people always ask: Why?

If the aboriginal ways were natural and sustainable, if people were perfectly content living that way for millions of years, what caused the relatively recent (and problematic) rupture?

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Our movement knows that the modern condition of overshoot is leading to cataclysm.

An early (1982) exposition:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p009884

For years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology. Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave — for we have already overshot the Earth’s capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that “the principles of ecology apply to all living things.” These principles tell us that, within a finite system growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.

Overshoot in our time. But perhaps it started millennia ago. Perhaps it explains the turn toward craziness (empires, wars, elites, slavery, wealth accumulation, Power run amok, economic growth, labor exploitation, oppressive institutions, obliteration of community).

The human race was successful and beyond predation, beyond having to pay attention to ecological limits and balances. The result was a species bloom and a trending toward ecological overshoot.

The bloom intensified after the last Ice Age ended (12,000 years ago). In one place after another population densities provoked a crisis. Solutions, to date, have just been techno-fixes, enabling us to kick the can down the road.

Now the crisis is extreme and we acknowledge the idea of “overshoot.” But I think the phenomenon actually has a history that goes very far back.