The human predicament of our time is the context of everything humans do.
The soul of the situation is that ‘human society is part of a global biotic community in which excessive human dominance is self-destructive” (William R. Catton).
The core spiritual principles of this time belong to what Catton calls “the ecological paradigm”:
- E1. Human beings are just one species among many species that are interdependently involved in biotic communities.
- E2. Human social life is shaped by intricate linkages of cause and effect (and feedback) in the web of nature, and because of these, purposive human actions have many unintended consequences.
- E3. The world we live in is finite, so there are potent physical and biological limits constraining economic growth, social progress, and other aspects of human living.
- E4. However much the inventiveness of Homo sapiens or the power of Homo colossus may seem for a while to transcend carrying capacity limits, nature has the last word.
Homo colossus is the embodiment of excessive human dominance. Some call it “the Superorganism” or “Moloch.” Its behavior is responsible for the ecological overshoot resulting from ignorance or denial of the above spiritual principles and excessive concentrations of socioeconomic power among the dominator minority. The results include devastation of the planetary life support system, accelerating extinction of life forms, and increasing misery for the dominated human majority. Yet this behavior appears to be beyond human control. On November 5, 2024, citizens of the “United States” elected a leader who promises to speed up the overshoot along with its social consequences.
William Catton wrote his book Overshoot in 1980 to show that “400 years of exuberance,” including colonial expansion, had already produced ecological overshoot with all its social fallout, especially in the U.S. The global human population at the time was around 4 billion. It has doubled in the 45 years since then, and human dominance of the Earth has grown exponentially, as witnessed by the data in Peter Victor’s Escape from Overshoot (2023).
Not only ecological principles but even the facts of the human predicament continue to be ignored or denied by Homo colossus. For instance, the corporations profiting from fossil fuel extraction knew 50 years ago that increasing use of their product would heat up the planet to the point of ecological collapse, but they have lied to the public about it ever since. Nearly all of the world’s political leaders have continued to preach the gospel of perpetual “progress” through economic “growth,” drowning out the voices of those who recognize the realities of ecological limits and collective human behavior. Now the American division of Homo colossus have elected the Liar-in-Chief to dominate them. The prospect of escaping from overshoot has never seemed so remote.
How does a human live honestly in this predicament? I’ll offer some suggestions in the next post.