The ego-drivers of our predicament and appropriate eco-wise responses.
For the past year (beginning 9/25/24), this blog has explored a variety of topics associated with exploring Our Human Story and Future Sustainability. Now, with this post (No. 53) I take a slight pause to reflect on and summarize what I’ve learned.
Of course, there’s so much I don’t know or understand, and there’s only a limited amount of time left. As the saying goes about assessing a horse’s age and health, I’m getting quite “long in the tooth”. Writing this blog has provided an outlet for exploring relevant topics of interest related to our human story, and I’ve enjoyed sharing what I’ve learned with readers.
A primary objective has been to identify the principal upstream drivers responsible for the emerging and accelerating series of socio-ecological crises the world is facing. Some well-qualified experts suggest that, collectively, these crises create an acute socio-ecological predicament that more recently has been termed a metacrisis.
The Components of Our Socio-Ecological Predicament
According to socio-ecological experts, the human predicament is a profound interconnected crisis stemming from an unprecedented and unsustainable expansion of the human superorganism over the globe. The core of the problem lies in the dissonance between human societies and the natural world, resulting from our pursuit of material growth, high consumption, and a failure to address the long-term consequences of our actions.
The predicament’s key components consist of: 1) Unsustainable expansion – overpopulation, overconsumption of natural materials, and escalating waste; 2) Ecological crises – climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction, resource depletion, and transgression of planetary boundaries; 3) Social dysfunctions – systemic instability between social and ecological systems; 4) Inequity and conflict. – wider gaps of inequalities within and between societies; and 5) “Tragedy of the commons” – individual self-interests prevail over the common good.
A significant part of our predicament relates to cognitive and psycho-emotional barriers that affect how we deal effectively with the scale and long-term implications of our actions. These include: 1) Denial and avoidance caused by stress and anxiety; 2) Cultural blindness, the result of misinformation and disinformation from educational and media sources, and non-critical thinking skills; and, 3) Short-term thinking, the result of evolutionary preferences for seeking immediate gratification and economic security.
The Timeline Origins of Our Socio-Ecological Predicament
To date, my quest to discover the fundamental driver of our socio-ecological predicament can be stated as follows:
Our growing socio-ecological predicament (metacrisis) is the composite experiential outcome of our expanding separation from the rest of Nature. Having lost our intimate contact with the rest of Nature’s animate beings and inanimate entities, we have become a species existing out of our evolutionary context. The acquired socio-cultural beliefs of patriarchy, hierarchy, and anthropocentrism may be considered as prime agents of influence.
This concept can be explained with a brief overview of human history. Around 12,000 years ago, near the end of the Paleolithic era, Nature provided a special opportunity for humans and other lifeforms. At that time, the Last Glacial Period ushered in the Holocene epoch, an era of ecological stability that enabled humans to explore more inhabitable landspaces.
Sadly, over time we have altered this period of tranquil stability with our profligate consumption of carbon-based fuels, in turn raising CO₂ emissions and destabilizing climatic conditions. Our overpowering ecological footprint on the planet increasingly threatens all life-sustaining ecosystems. Lifeforms that once flourished in a state of relative stability prior to the Industrial Revolution can no longer depend on having access to a healthy physical environment.
Prior to the late glacial period, around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, the primary human forms of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis competed for sustenance in a hunter-gatherer existence. DNA evidence suggests that the two forms also interbred. It’s important to note that some of the inherited genetic codes of current modern humans developed during this time span, including the desire for immediate gratification and short-term thinking.
To reiterate, our ancestors’ separation from Nature began during a period of global warming, around 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age and beginning of the Holocene epoch, when much of the northern hemisphere was covered with glaciers and largely uninhabitable. As more land spaces opened up to exploration and ecosystems flourished, our human ancestors spread out over the planet to inhabit more regions, including continents.
As nomadic hunter-gatherer groups began confronting other groups, shrinking access to food sources caused many to settle down in permanent communities, with many taking up simple farming to supplement hunting and gathering food sources. Anthropologists have termed this transitional era as the Neolithic Revolution, when the development of agriculture and husbandry created an increase in food production that resulted in food surpluses that could be stored for future use, including trade. The result was an expansion of human population from tribal villages to ever-larger urban centers (towns and cities) and culminating with empires and civilizations.
Inevitably, sedentary populations accumulated property, which led to social stratification and divisions of labor, with men and women assuming specialized roles and responsibilities. In time, large-scale sociocultural, economic, and political institutions were developed in societal structures featuring patriarchy and hierarchy. Thus, the seeds of humanity’s separation from Nature were sown. Instead of adapting to ecosystems, humans reshaped landscapes for crops and herds, plus storable surplus of food and goods.
Society’s increasing complexity in size, scope, and scale required sociocultural rules and regulations for controlling public behavior. Religions undertook this primary role and domain, beginning with the polytheistic and animistic religions throughout the Neolithic transition, and later, with the rise of monotheistic (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and nontheistic (Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism) religions during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE).
By 1500 CE human societies were interconnected through trade, conquest, and colonization. Resource extraction, slavery, and expansion were considered global in scope. But the scale of environmental impact remained limited when compared with the First Industrial Revolution (mid-18th century to early 19th century), when population and consumption of natural materials began escalating.
The advent of steam-powered machines, at first powered by wood, was accelerated with the discovery of coal and oil, fossil-based energies that increased multifold power output. Another boost in techno-industrialization began in the late 19th century with the Second Industrial Revolution, which generated extra power for the battles fought in WWI and WWII.
Following WWII, the Great Acceleration was underway, driven by the reconstruction of war-torn cities and countries. Unfortunately, harmful environmental impacts were also increased during the post-war 1950s up to the present. Virtually every indicator — population, energy sources, fertilizer, water consumption, urbanization, transportation, GDP, and CO₂ emissions — shows an exponential surge beginning around 1950.
World population quadrupled from 2 billion in 1927 to over 8 billion today, Fossil-carbon fuel consumption has multiplied many times over. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides have transformed agriculture but polluted rivers and oceans, along with plastics and chemicals, are present in every ecosystem, including the bodies of all lifeforms.
This sequence of world events and discoveries helps explain why modern civilization both dominates the biosphere and is vulnerable to systemic collapse. In sum, humankind has succeeded in building institutions and technologies that have outpaced the social, moral, and ecological frameworks that evolved under very different circumstances during our ancient ancestral origins.
Our Anthropocentrism and Principal Consequences
To sum-up succinctly what has been covered so far: Over the past 12,000 years we humans have been creating an Earthly life that has increasingly separated us from the living systems that have made our existence possible. What began as small, incremental changes — domesticating wheat, rearing a few animals, and working a patch of land through the seasons — over millennia became a sociocultural-economic-political system shaped by settlement, storable surplus, patriarchy, and hierarchy, a worldview that redefined our identity and how we relate to the rest of Nature.
Several centuries later, fossil fuels multiplied our power, which also increased our numbers and reinforced our domination over Nature. So now we’re facing a metacrisis, a series of converging crises characterized by ecological collapse, climate instability, social inequity, species extinction, and institutions designed for a very different past.
Consider these six principal socio-ecological related consequences: 1) A population explosion, from around 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion by 1900; 2) Rising emissions of carbon dioxide levels that were stable for millennia at around 280 ppm (parts per million), but since the Industrial Revolution have climbed sharply to over 440 ppm (Note: 350 ppm has been identified as the threshold goal for maintaining runaway global heating); 3) Accelerating inequality, largely attributable to the colonization and exploitation of natural materials worldwide by techno-industrial powers; 4) Climate-change impacts, including rising global temperatures to around 1.2°C (2.16°F) above pre-industrial levels; 5) Biodiversity losses that, in terms of extinction rates, are estimated to be 100–1,000 times the natural background rate; and 6) Freshwater and soil degradation, largely the result of damming and/or diverting large rivers, which causes fertile soil to erode faster than it can form.
Planetary Boundaries and the Metacrisis (2009–present)
In 2009, in concert with other scientists Johan Rockström proposed the planetary boundaries framework, which focuses on nine boundary thresholds that define a “safe operating space” for humanity, including: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biochemical flows (nitrogen/phosphorus cycles), ocean acidification, stratosphere ozone depletion, atmosphere aerosol loading, and introduction of novel entities.
By 2023, humanity had already exceeded six of the nine boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and the introduction of novel entities. Ocean acidification is approaching its boundary, while stratospheric ozone depletion and atmospheric aerosol loading remain outside the danger zone.
Crossing these thresholds risks destabilizing Earth’s systems in unpredictably cascading ways. These converging crises — climate disruption, ecological collapse, social inequality, institutional fragility— constitute a single metacrisis, a system in which all crises interact in various ways.
As I’ve tried to explain in this post, the roots of our growing socio-ecological predicament stretch back through millennia of human history, reflecting the choices and decisions that have progressively alienated us from our natural context in the Web of Life. Indeed, our hubristic anthropocentrism has inspired a new designation for our current epoch: the Anthropocene, an age in which human activity became the dominant force shaping Earth’s systems.
Wrap Up – Rejoining the Web of Life
Our human story is not only one of separation, but also one of awareness, remembrance, gratitude, and possibility. Indigenous cultures worldwide have demonstrated how to practice and preserve ways of living that honor harmonious reciprocity with Nature. And modern science increasingly confirms what those traditions long understood: that humans are embedded in ecosystems, not apart from them.
The challenge before us is not so much technological as it is cultural, moral, and ethical. We need to reimagine how our overly hallowed institutions, economies, and worldviews can be transformed to respect planetary limits. If, as E. O. Wilson explained, our Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies have brought us to this pervasive socio-ecological metacrisis, then our challenge is to seek wisdom, both ancient and new to guide us forward.
Although achieving a sustainable planet seems extremely daunting, taking positive action remains possible. Just as our ancestors once reshaped the world through agriculture and industry, we may now reshape it through wisdom based on a worldview that honors Truth (reality), Goodness (morality), and Beauty (quality),the three transcendental universal properties of being. This noble mission will require accurate knowledge, critical thinking, and practical skills for living a more sustainable existence. Also, it will require cultivating compassionate relationships with all existing lifeforms, and working to reduce, reuse, recycle natural materials, along with restoring and rejuvenating human-impaired bio-ecosystems.
Clif (with appreciation to Bettye Ware, reader/editor).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clifton Ware, D.M., emeritus professor (voice), professional singer and author of four published books and two unpublished works, retired in 2007 from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities School of Music, where he taught for 37 years. Since retiring, as a self-described socio-ecological philosopher he has spent 15 years focusing on sustainability issues, in the process of acquiring an evidence-based, big-picture understanding of all principal societal and ecological systems, including the symbiotic interconnections and role of humans as an integral part of Nature. In 2013 he founded Citizens for Sustainability in St. Anthony Village, MN, produced Sustainability News + Views (2014-2019), a weekly newsletter featuring a variety of articles and a commentary, co-composed 13 Eco Songs with his wife, Bettye, organized Sustainability Forums, and performed eco-oriented programs and presentations for several organizations.
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