William E. Rees: Ecological Overshoot is Driving Humanity Toward Collapse | Urgent Futures #21 

This important conversation received a few hundred visitors. I weep for the human species.

It's a pleasure to see you here, Jesse. Everyone must listen to and read William E. Rees to understand our present circumstances.

Wow. I like to think I am an apostle of Dr Bill Rees and have his books and watched most every interview/presentation. And still in this great interview I heard fresh thinking and crystal clear use of language to communicate the most essential ideas. Congratulations to you for facilitating this, listening so well, and asking just the right thoughtful questions to help Bill give us the gift of his thinking in plain language. Cheers

This is the most incisive and thoughtful presentation I've heard in a very long time. Bill's humility is nearly unique. I am grateful.

When Dr. Rees speaks I listen!

This guys the most important intellectual alive. Thanks for the interview. So grateful.

Mr Rees is just one of those men you can't help but love...

He's talking about the end of industrial civilization

Thank you so much for this podcast. Prof. Rees is one of my heroes and bought his book to learn more about overshoot.

Rees, like Catton, brings the truth of the human dilemma to us in a way that is both accessible and pungent.

We really need to stop all animal agriculture and reforest the land while that alone won't save us it's a major step. I am under no illusions that this will happen by the way. It's just important to emphasis solutions to our problems even it may never come to pass.

William Rees is awesome I am about the same age and was also raised on the family farm and he is totally right. Get a grip on it, people. Thank you William for your wisdom, I am having my dinner tonight with everything our farm produced. Good luck to all of you and many blessings. We may yet survive a few more decades. Cheers from Canada

Didn't we all know this 20 years ago 50 years ago? The difference now is that we're close to the event...

"Brute Force" = Human Exceptionalism. The exuberance of our contemporary techno-enthusiasm will be buried in whatever viable soil still remains. The hubris of the human species is our "Achilles heel".

"The Earth will recover, and In ten million years, the Earth might, once again, be a magnificent place to explore." I wasn't quite prepared for that zinger, by William Rees, after he expounded for over 2 hrs., on how fkd we are, but perhaps, he was discreetly referring to a future newly evolved, non human species, endowed with it's own uniquely complex brain. This was a great conversation, Jesse. Thank you.

This is one of the important conversations I have heard. Many thanks to Jesse and William

Thank you for attempting to sound the alarm!

It’s not just beginning We are toast

the human species is the only one that do not adapt to their environment but rather adapting it for its own sake

wicked good session, many thanks! this is an excellent intro for anyone who is interested in something like ecological footprints and overshoot and even the systemic and economic points of view of ecology, real nice.

We have been in "overshoot" since we left the migratory Hunter-Gatherer lifeway and entered the sedentary agriculture lifeway thousands of years ago for the vast majority of earth's population. We numbered 3,000 fewer of us then. What could go wrong? Everything?

Thanks for facilitating the spread of this work - I just saw him on a similarly themed channel and glad more ears are finding him. Its important to ask these questions and talk about this in bits and pieces in our personal and professional lives - incremental innoculation to what is really going on. While we don't have time, I try to remind myself of the common addage (usually in relation to food systems but in this case it is knowledge): "The best time to plant a nut or fruit tree was ten years ago, but the second best time is right now.." Thank you for continuing to plant the seeds of understanding. No question things are going down, but the severity with which we feel it and our capacity to adapt and put the brakes on the maladaptive is directly dependent on the sort of work you are doing and the content you provide. Thank You!.

He is a sentinel warning us for years.

Sid Smith would make a great guest to further discuss overshoot! Some other ideas for people of various popularity and expertise but great intellectual curiosity and insight would be: Daniel Schmachtenberger Peter Joseph Sam Vaknin Simon Michaux Guy McPherson Nate Hagens Gerald Pollack Bret Weinstein or his brother Eric The poet, In Q I would also suggest finding someone who is well versed in the benefits and ethics of veganism. This topic is incredibly important when it comes to the overshoot conversation, as it only requires a fraction of he resources and water, and only about 25% of the land. We could fix so much of this issue by changing our diets to vegan. Imagine immediately freeing up 75% of farm land to return to natural ecosystems. Also how much less oil we'd need to produce our food. We are special as a species in that we may be the only one capable of realizing we're in overshoot and potentially doing something to change that. But every day that we wait, the predicaments get worse. Anyone can become vegan this very moment and at least begin to reduce their own footprint in this equation, though it will take more than individuals. I'm new to this podcast but found the conversation quite enjoyable. I don't want to make this comment too long, but there are so many other things i could expand on here. I hope you look into some of those people (you won't be disappointed) and especially the ideas around veganism. I know it's hard to talk about food choices, but it's really one of the biggest changes we can make that would give us a fighting chance at making it through the century. Cheers! 🍻✌️

Wow!! This is truly an excellent interview - Thank you both - I have heard reference to Rees but have not heard him or read any of his work before. I'm impressed and inspired by his range of knowledge and his skill at communicating, in a grounded and coherant way, the most important and thorough understanding of our predicament!!!

Simply put : the quest for greed and power by those who already retain that capacity will ensure their ascendancey until it no longer can, and then chaos will ensue.

This was a great interview, thank you a lot for sharing this. Out of many people that I follow on this subject William Rees has influenced me the most and I do my best to share many of his ideas in the educational activities we do in Poland. So despite embarrassingly small number of viewers, I believe that among them there are many who share these ideas further.

It would be great if the spiritual marketplace and personal development industry would listen to Bill, en mass. They won’t, but, it would be cool. Happy if the collapse aware community can welcome more people who have a great relationship with earth, and reality.

Thank you for this interview/discussion. I agree with Bill Rees on the vast majority of his points. The biophysical understanding of life is more coherent than the current conventional 'economic' understanding which should more correctly be regarded as chrematistics rather than economics. I first discovered Bill's views a couple of years ago which surprised me cause I would regard myself as someone who held a similar understanding of our predicament for the last 25-30 years. I had a systems engineering training which was great at the time but as someone who also enjoyed general science and Nature, I wish I had taken a geography, physics or Earth science path instead. But all systems design training has a common root in cybernetics and control theory and there is a large body of mathematics behind it also which gives a deep appreciation for the importance of feedbacks, be they proportional, integral or differential. This in turn leads to complex or non-linear dynamical systems that fit directly with ecological throughput cyclical systems, or better known as living systems. I agree with Bill that human enterprise and activity on Earth increases entropy which can also be regarded as increasing disorder or information but when living systems are the source of increased entropy, they balance this by also creating order i.e. their own self-creation(autopoeisis) to maintain their own state of existence. So entropy is balanced by anti-entropy or negative entropy and the generation of information is the generation of order. Of course living systems have a life span and are replaced by the re-production process to maintain the entropy - anti-entropy balance within the Earth system. An increase in entropy and anti-entropy is achieved by increasing biodiversity that occupies the vast range of thermodynamic gradients available within the Earth system. From an economic perspective, production and consumption need to be balanced, or rather entwined, in the Earth system i.e. production cannot occur without consumption and vice versa. In the event that production exceeds consumption this can only be regarded as a novel emergence because something new is being produced with a possible delayed balancing consumption process. This is the expression of profit within the system. So economic growth in this context is in fact an increase in anti-entropy that is the product of creating more order in a system that was previously in a higher entropic state(increased biodiversity). This is contrary to the existing process of economic growth that is creating entropy without balancing it with a creative anti-entropy process. The wellbeing of life and any sub-component of life(for example a local community) could therefore be seen as wealth filtered or modulated by scalar factors derived from an ecological health index, EHI, ranging from 0-1, an anti-entropy production-consumption ratio n_ae >= 0 and a local trade-total trade ratio 0

Government should pick up the bill and support the older population breaking the chain of younger population needing to be replaced on such massive numbers. try to bring population numbers down gradually. I still think is to late pretty much doomed.

Maybe people watching this who are interested in tech and innovation being (or becoming) compatible with life on earth, as it’s always been, could check out Rev Micheal Dowd’s presentation entitled “Sustainability 101: Indigenuity is Not Optional” I used to be a freelance writer for the spiritual and personal development industry, and saw a lot of tech people attempting to merge their innovations, and themselves, with spiritual philosophies, and after that, learning from Rev Dowd was a deep cleanse. More than aya at a retreat ever could be.

Thank you both. A brilliant guest whom I could listen to all day.

We are currently 3,000 times more numerous than were the last ecologically balanced and self-sustaining ancestral clans/bands. What could go wrong? Everything? The reconstruction of reality around corporate values, as Powell advised, has been a huge success. Perhaps Mother Nature is pleased, as it has hurried the elimination of humans from Her planet.

“Question everything”. That right there is the problem in a nutshell . Bill nails it by saying no-one questions anything. It’s like we live in a zombie apocalypse. It won’t end well.

I just love Bill. He is one of our clearest and sternest thinkers and doers, and a great advisor to several of my global initiatives. Thank you Bill. And thank you Jesse! Great, important conversation.

There seems to be more discussions about 'the declining birth rate crisis' in the developed world, it would be great to hear William's comments / research/ findings on this.

Yeah we're toast

Thank you for addressing this most serious of subjects

Hope we can be human during the decent. 😬

Overshoot is just an ecological debt. The issue is that you can t negociate with the bank. Whereas economic debt is a simple agreement between humans. Favoring economy at the détriment of ecology is madness.

Great interview and discussion. There have been extinction event in the pass but has it ever been made by the life on the planet? Seems that this current event is worse than any other and the effects will be much longer lasting. We don't want to accept that we may have crashed this system beyond recovery. Life is rare no reason to think it will bounce back after every extinction.

Great vid thank you

Excellent interview. William Rees hits the nail home.... Not new news for some of us, but a welcome, susscinct promulgation of FACT nonetheless. Here is a humble human who is not clouded by anthropocentrism. One of those rare Dudes that you really want to meet and have several beers with.

Living underground in Arizona is looking pretty good at this point.

1:06:50 - Exactly William! Overshoot is the anthropocentric Woolly Mammoth in the room. If people lived as long as some trees or reptiles - they would get it.

#4G67 "Worked for the State Environmental and was firing up our firewood stove one cold morning, when there was an urgent knock on the door. "Yes?" "Your wood stove is _smoking!"_ the bearded young man yelled. "They do that starting up." He grew more angry. "I'm with NW Regional Air Authority _and I'm shutting it down!"_ he tried to push past me. "Well I'm with State Environmental, and if you take one more step inside, you'll leave in an ambulance." 😂🎉 Rabbinicals. What'r ya' gonna do.? Google 'CDP Materiality Assessment'. Your new 2025 'Renewables' tax. Wait...what!?😢😮

I came to terms with our future in the mid 80s after reading Gaia therory by james lovelock.... silent spring was followed by death by rubber duck .... just for any readers out there ❤

Technology IS the root problem, not part of the solution. You will always be destroying the environment to keep technology going.

Roundtable with Dr Shanna Swan on Medical Health Institute on YT. Endocrine Disruption is what is happening.

Well this certainly confirms my own bias.

Growth forever is the dominant narrative. Sustainable development? Rees should address its pluses and minuses.

Well said. The so-called population collapses in advanced nations may be our salvation. The sex drive may be victim of social media and the smart phone. Let's embrace it and try to salvage some joy in the possible ecological recovery.

"...a global Tower of Babel..." says it all! Ha, Ha, Ha! LMAO!

31:00 "Maggots in Earth's apple." or I like to say 8.12 Billion Locusts.

Check out Count Down By Prof Shanna Swan and Empty Planet Darrell Bricker

34:00 I'm glad Bill said this planet will survive. I agree. New species will speciate the planet.

We're fked.

Americans like to live large. Tell them to live small and they will have pity on you.

I consider space as the lifeboat, and that any destination will render us unforgiven to any mistake. Therefore it is the perfect medium in which to grow up in and then return from, back to earth. Its harsh environment will teach us the correct ways to live with advanced technology without leaving an impact. Also we should use the term advanced fro anything that doesnt fall apart in years. So ancient ruins that are still around and functional are more advanced then your house, which will be forest covered hole in 5-10yrs, not thousands if abandoned. Its also why a reduction in population wont mean more and cheeper resources.

There has been an upgrade in understanding and practice in agricultural production

Watch Soylent Green the movie 1973.

I have read that the U.S. has added 50 million new people from other countries and the number is growing according to a former border control officer. This is happening against a backdrop of what you are referring to as ecological overshoot. We have to stop giving people the incentive to increase and multiply. There has to be a balance with everything.

Everything is so logical, the human species is on average unfortunately not smart enough this simple logic, and we are a product of the average.

34:30 - Some of us might argue that humans are in fact tipping the balance way beyond the ability and capacity for the biosphere to continue to sustain life - IN GENERAL and that the current - and most rapid mass extinction event [MX - 6/7/8? ] in all of Deep Time, is on track to be the largest MX of all; even eclipsing that of MX3 - ''The Great Dying'' [P-Tr 252My] where around 96% of Earth's biota - fauna, marine and terrestrial were extirpated. Indeed, given current thinking - some also might argue that the current MX will be Earth's FINAL MX; or at the very least, revert evolution to pre-Cambrian status. (Talk about a game of 'Snakes and Ladders'...! } What is the premise of those arguments? Humans are the only species to have ever produced so much unnatural bi-products, the only species to synthesize complex molecules (polymers etc...) from hydrocarbons and other elementary sources; all of which have a deleterious effect on all things natural, affecting the trophic order [food/energy web] dramatically. Yet that isn't the main concern - Anthropogenic Global Warming [AGW] notwithstanding; humans are also the only species to have ever SPLIT THE ATOM.... And it is this atom-splitting nonsense that is going to KILL LIFE ON EARTH, pretty-much PERMANENTLY, or at least for a very, very, VERY LONG TIME. Here's why... Most humans recognise the dangers of irradiation from ionising radiation, particularly alpha, beta and gamma ray dispersal and how that can directly affect organic life; Humans understand 'bio-amplification' - the process whereby radio-active particles and/or toxins accumulate within the 'primary producers' of the trophic order and increase in accumulation - mostly in shells and skeletons - as each organism is predated upon by the ascending levels of the trophic order [food chain]; most humans naturally fear the prospect of nuclear confrontation; or the another nuclear disaster. These are the common fears amongst humans that show any concern over the use of nuclear fission. Yet even those factors, though genuine, would not necessarily cause the cessation or reversion of life on this beleaguered Earth... The most worrying concern is The vulnerability of the Earth's Ozone Shield [o3S], especially to large releases of ionising radio-nuclide aerosols direct to atmosphere, where they end up in the mid stratosphere - o3 regions - and through chemical process in combination with incoming solar radiation deplete the o3... NO OZONE SHIELD = GAME OVER FOR ALL TERRESTRIAL AND MARINE PELAGIC ORGANISMS - FAUNA or FLORA. The formation of th o3S has allowed living organisms to propagate and proliferate throughout the changing terrestrial land masses, the accumulation of o3 in the mid stratosphere became sufficient enough by around 600M years ago to filter-out the lethal effects of the sun's Ultra-Violet B/C - high frequency radiation hitting the Earth's atmosphere. Note: UV-B/C is used in industry to sterilise equipment, food, potable water etc... UV-B/C breaks down organic matter in sufficient doses. This is why there was no life on the early land-masses, not even the simplest of organisms for hundreds of millions of years until the o3S formed. These concerns are based upon recently released research findings undertaken during and subsequent to the Atomic Test Era ('Cold War') - whereby data was collated on each atomic detonation (around 2000 in total) between the mid 1940's and early 90's. This data indicated the detrimental relationship (for life) between ionising radioactive aerosols and the sparse regions of the entire o3S. The 'ozone layer' isn't exactly a complete - homogenous - 'layer'; located within the stratosphere - mostly in the mid to upper regions - the o3S is more like overlapping areas of o3 accumulation at varying altitudes - a patchwork quilt that happens to cover most of the Earth's surface and gets thinner and more sparse at the poles. The Nuclear 'Wild Card' - Be that nuclear conflagration or disaster, or.... SOCIETAL COLLAPSE. There are some 440+ civil nuclear projects operating around the globe. All located near large bodies of water in order to maintain the vital cooling for the reactor systems and spent fuel depositories. These facilities require a constant monitoring and maintenance-support infrastructure to maintain operation and basic SAFETY. The electrical grid infrastructure itself helps to maintain these facilities, but in the event of grid loss - support generators can be employed - except that didn't occur at either Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi... In the event of societal collapse; with subsequent loss of logistics and support infrastructure, these facilities become ticking-time bombs... Not their reactors, they would have been 'scrammed' as soon as necessary (as with Zaporizhzhia/Energodar during the Russian SMO in Ukraine). The concern are those spent fuel depositories that require ongoing power and COOLANT to maintain the safe temperature of the still fissile spent fuel rods. Lose maintenance and monitoring to those facilities and the spent fuel overheats and releases ionising radiation to atmosphere, leading to localised irradiation, but more worryingly being carried into the stratosphere where they can wreak havoc on the o3S. So - to recap - Stratospheric ozone [o3] - is vital to maintain a healthy, diverse and evolving biosphere. St o3 is thus as intrinsic to life on Earth, as water or oxygen. Contrary to fallacious arguments on atomic energy being the 'panacea' of 'climate change' (LMAO), popularised by the likes of Oliver Stone (stick to geo-politics Olly... ), most neo-liberal politicians and the ignorant plebeians sold on this 'hopiod' argument. AGW is in fact IRREVERSIBLE [UN-IPCC 2019] given the current technology and political will, but mostly because of the climate system 'inertia'. Neither transitioning to renewables or nuclear energy will make a blind-bit-of-difference to that dynamic. The Earth's biosphere is in the early stages of an apparent rapid shift to it's alternate state of homeostasis - 'Greenhouse Earth'... A climatic transition, very few extant organisms are likely to survive. And that is already factored in... Wrap-up all of the above and stick on the top of all that Bill Rees is saying and the prospect for life evolving beyond the next couple of centuries seems even less likely. We are living on 'Hospice Earth'. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anthropocentric Homo sapiens - '''sapiens''' - Either drunk on hubris, stoned on hopium, in a coma of denial, or a fug of faith and mostly oblivious to O B L I V I O N.

He talks of a time when there was much higher CO2 on earth. There was no permanent ice on the south and north poles at that time. Life flourished much more then.

One of the very last comments from him was a thigh-slapper 😂

Unfortunately the Earth will be a lifeless rock orbiting the sun, not even the tardegrades will survive the upcoming event.

How do you shrink voluntarily? Just rebuilding our housing stock to be more sustainable would require a huge _increase_ in production to accomplish, and who's going to pay for it? Are we going to revert 20th century building codes to allow it to be done cheaply? And then you have taxes and social programs; all those entitlement programs and government services are only possible because of the surpluses created by the rest of the economy. We already can't afford most of them, that's why we're bringing in insane numbers of immigrants just to try to keep the existing ponzi running for another generation. To be clear, I don't disagree that substantially reducing our level of consumption is necessary, I just can't imagine that we'll ever do it voluntarily, certainly not in western democracies.

Great interview! If the rapacious rich West stops buying and flying Chinese factory workers will go hungry. What's the solution?

Investors can't care.

How about nuclear?

evs are going to have solid state batterys soon

The rocks in the deep water seem like a ‘proto-coral’ to me. More research necessary.

Vertical farming? The guest seems to be a skeptic about ecological modernization.

A fan of Herman Daly? Why does neo-classical economics ignore ecological economics? Perhaps theyjust want to stay in their lane and continue publishing journal articles that only a tiny few will read.

Stuff I have been speaking about for years only to be laughed at and called the other N word.

1:35:10 "problem well stated, is a problem half solved". Seriously, that's your reaction to 90min of full throttle Rees!? Wow.

Sperm Count Drop 60% in kast 60 years.

SO many AGHs 😅

In my 2018 free e-book PDF, "Stress R Us", I coined the term "population density stress" which encompasses the negative feedbacks to overpopulation that Darwin promised to elaborate in the "Origin...", but never did. Key are the crowded animal researches described in my book, those of Calhoun, Southwick, and Christian, as well as polymath Jeffrey Gray, PhD, harkened back to Calhoun's and Selye's work defining the negative feedback loops limiting population growth, including Selye's "stress response". It's all in the book.

why are all the other interviews on your channel idiotic compared to this one? Try Guy McPherson next. Then try Paul Ehrlich. Keep it up. Natalia Shakhova. Jim Massa. You can do it. Raymond Pierrehumbert. Naomi Oreskes.

You are talking about the wrong thing.

I came for Dr Rees and stayed for DrRees and the handsomeness of Jess.