In short, the paper describes how our modern human behaviour means we consume too much and waste too much. That’s called overshoot and it’s not new. What is novel, is the paper’s proposition that it’s human behaviour that is the driver of poor ecological outcomes rather than technology, law, economic systems or even our values. And, just as our maladaptive behaviours got us here, so too can better behaviours get us out.
This Climate Business: Oh, behave! The real reason for overshoot – Joseph Merz (edited excerpts)
Listen to the full version here.
Vincent
“Is it surprising the report has been so popular?”
Joseph
When I was developing this behavioural crisis framing, we'd been working for quite some time on overshoot. Behaviour was at the core of everything – all of these different problems that we were looking at. But there was little explicit focus on it. I thought we needed to develop some sort of term for it. I knew it needed to have a solid academic foundation to build on. Originally people were saying you should just write an op-ed. But I knew that that would just end up in the bin after a couple of days. So, we thought why don't we actually just put something together that's based on the work that we've been doing and publish it and that can be the foundation. So, in a way, we kind of planned for it to do well, but there was a big dose of luck in there, as there always is with these things.
Vincent
Well, let's get to the nub of it then. Did I summarise it correctly? You are saying that human behaviour is not just a symptom of other deeper forces, but actually that is the thing that is driving overshoot?
Joseph
Yeah, I think there are some really key points in the paper that are helpful for people to understand. And one is that climate change is just one symptom of ecological overshoot. The Institute is focused on existential threats. Our primary focus is anthropogenic ecological overshoot. That has a whole range of symptoms, like ocean acidification, the rise in novel entities, whole ecosystem collapse, biodiversity loss, a whole raft of things. They all have this common denominator which is our behaviour. There are three levers of overshoot, which are population, consumption and waste. The point at which humans physically interact with the world around us, is our behaviour. That's it. It all comes down to our behaviour. Problems like these are behavioural issues, and at the pointiest possible end. So, it's really about understanding why are we behaving that way? What's contributing to that? How has that come about? And that is a very, very complex and fascinating thing to explore.
Vincent
Before they point to behaviour, there are some people who might point to a value system or the capitalist system that is at fault. And that's the thing that we need to change. Maybe just respond to those two things. I mean, there's technology as well. In many ways our behaviour is dictated by the technologies we inhabit.
Joseph
It is, and it's one of those situations where it's all of those things and then some. A core principle that we talk about is a thing called selection by consequences. You would have heard of natural selection but there's also behavioural selection and cultural selection. And that's essentially the same process. It's where behaviours that have positive immediate consequences will likely continue. You can have behaviour that has positive consequences, but also negative ones. But the negative ones are further down the line, which is really the situation we're in at the moment, which is that we have a whole lot of really reinforcing behaviours or consequences around us and the negative consequences are really far away. Humans do this thing called temporal discounting. We do temporal, spatial and social discounting, which means we discount in time. If something's far away, then we go, oh, well, that's not as important. If something's far away in space as well, so if it's in another country or something, it's less important to us. We discount socially too. If it's not our immediate social circles, it's less important to us. And these things have come about because they were adaptive for us over our evolution. Being that way has been useful. But we've got ourselves into this environment where it's really not anymore.
Vincent
It's worth investing the energy in changing some of those behaviours, because you can get a change in outcome. Seat belts, reproductive health, changes in attitudes towards LBGT communities. Those are all successful behaviour changes, right?
Joseph
Yeah and they'll all have common denominators which they will be reinforcing in the short term. Reinforcing consequences can be social as well. That can just be social approval or people saying, well done. The thing that I'm trying to highlight here is that these drivers of our behaviour are essentially evolutionary impulses. We have impulses, particularly in males to defend our territories, signal status, acquire and amass resources. These are things that you can see all around us. You can see them in the wars that are going on right now. You can see them in the commercial world. They are all around us. Throughout human history we’ve used artifacts to signal status. At the moment they are essentially expensive, shiny cars, big houses and things like that. But they all come back to these core evolutionary impulses. Our entire world has essentially been shaped by those impulses. It's very difficult to blame people for their behaviour on these sorts of things.
Vincent
Are you trying to change those behaviours, or are you trying to acknowledge them and saying what we need is a smarter response that does not contribute to overshoot?
Joseph
We don't stand a hope in hell of changing any of those impulses. They are very much the core of the biology and environmental mix of what drives our behaviour. It's really about recontextualising them in a way that's useful. And what's missing quite a lot at the moment is that broader evolutionary understanding. It’s about identifying adaptive and reinforcing ways of satisfying those impulses or essentially what we perceive as our needs in much smarter ways. The wonderful thing about this is that there's just so much diversity in our cultures and our behaviours. The sky is really the limit on what this could actually look like. It's just about then shaping our information environment to ensure that it goes in that direction.
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