We’re treated to a rumination on how the world should be managed:
Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists
Or the paper itself:
In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot.
The argument becomes, effectively, that we need a new humanity.
True, they miss a significant point when they talk about trying to reduce population growth. That ship has already sailed, peak population is a decade or three away already. We’ve done that.
They are right that it’s population times consumption which is the global total, but this is absurd:
Meanwhile, the quarter of the global population who live below the USD $3.65 poverty line, and the almost half, 47%, who live below the USD $6.85 poverty aspire to achieve equivalent high-end lifestyles, encouraged, in part, by the constant barrage of advertising.
Advertising is what makes humans desire three squares, a roof over their heads and a change of clothes? We think they might be misunderstanding human beings there.
Their call becomes an insistence that we must propagandise everyone into a new mode of existence. Even, brainwash.
Which really isn’t going to work now, is it? New Soviet Man never did turn up to make socialism work despite many decades of actual totalitarianism. Systems which attempt to change humans don’t work, systems which direct human impulses to beneficial ends do.
We do think that there’s a useful point to this paper though. Systems which try to propagandise humans into particular patterns of behaviour are called “religions”. Given that the call here is to propagandise the species into a different pattern of behaviour we think it fair to now point out that this ecological regrowth idea is simply a religion.
And, of course, as impervious to factual evidence as any other such.