Is Humans a Plague?

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Bill McKibben: We are going through the one-off population boom bust cycle. And if it happens with mice as it often does or grasshoppers, we call it a plague. So yeah, it's not a stretch to say that humans have become a kind of a plague on planet earth," he says. "We've reached numbers that can't be sustained by the normal flow of energy and material from nature"

On this episode, Nate is joined by systems ecologist William E. Rees. Professor Rees outlines why most of the challenges facing humanity and the biosphere have a common origin - ecological overshoot. Bill also unpacks “the ecological footprint” - a concept that he co-created, that measures the actual resources used by a given population. Bill also describes his experience as a leading thinker in public policy and planning based on ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development, and the challenges he’s faced working in a system which (so far) rejects such premises. Is it possible for a different way of measuring the system to set different goals of what it means to be successful as a society?

About Bill Rees:

William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning in Vancouver, Canada. He researches the implications of global ecological trends for the longevity of civilization, with special foci on urban (un)sustainability and cultural/cognitive barriers to rational public policy. Prof Rees is best known as the originator and co-developer with Dr Mathis Wackernagel of ‘ecological footprint analysis’ (EFA), a quantitative tool that estimates human demands on ecosystems and the extent to which humanity is in ‘ecological overshoot.’ Dr Rees is a founding member and former President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a founding Director of the OneEarth Living Initiative; a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and an Associate Fellow of the Great Transition Initiative.

For Show Notes and More visit https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/53-william-rees To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/LQTuDttP2Yg