The rapid expansion of human population numbers over the last two centuries is the direct result of an industrial revolution in food production. By replacing local farming practices with fossil fuel-powered agribusiness and global supply chains, the commercial economy unlocked a massive surplus of cheap calories. This abundance significantly reduced mortality and fueled massive urbanization, but it also initiated a dangerous self-reinforcing cycle. Rather than simply feeding existing people, the surge in food availability acted as a biological trigger for further population growth, creating a positive feedback loop that finally becomes unsustainable.
Central to this crisis is a pervasive and dangerous misunderstanding of cause and effect. Most modern leaders and institutions in the commercial economy believe that food production must continuously increase to meet the needs of an expanding population. This ideologically driven rationale treats food as a dependent variable that must react to the increasing human numbers. In reality, food is the independent variable. The determination to relentlessly increase the global food supply to meet the needs of a growing global population is the primary cause of the population explosion, not a required response to it. Absolute global human population numbers have increased from one billion to more than eight billion in the past 225 years, a staggering growth trajectory that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
Breaking this cycle is central to any sustainable future, but it cannot be achieved through simple prescriptions. It requires a fundamental re-configuring of our behaviors and systems around food. This entails individual and systemic change: reasonable policies that make sustainable sustenance the affordable default, not a premium choice; investments in circular supply chains to drastically reduce waste; and new models for the commercial economy that de-risk and reward regenerative farming over agribusiness expansion. These are profoundly interconnected challenges, demanding political will, innovation, hard work and equity. They represent a necessary recalibration of civilization’s very foundation.
All efforts to shift onto a sustainable path must therefore confront two monumental problems: the reorganization of both the real commercial economy and its financial system. The entire economy, like the human body, depends on circulatory processes to survive. This idea echoes Thomas Hobbes’s vision of a political economy and its distinctly human structure. Transforming finance of a commercial economy from a fuel for destruction into a driver of sustainability requires redefining the purpose of capital. If the economy is a body and finance its circulatory system, a system focused only on the volume and speed of flow, indifferent to destination, will eventually induce collapse in a finite world. Economic and ecological health demand that finance shift from short-term profits to the long-term nourishment of the economic and natural systems that sustain life. This begins by changing the metrics of success. True cost accounting must internalize environmental and social impacts, so that the price of an investment reflects its actual consequences. When the costs of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and solid waste are accounted for, capital will naturally flow away from plunder, extraction and agribusiness and toward healthful, regenerative principles and practices.
The financial structure of a commercial economy must also become more distributed, strengthening local investment platforms and micro-businesses as well as community banking systems to ensure resources reach the extremities of the real economy, fostering resilient and diverse solutions. Finance needs to function within planetary boundaries, managing resource flows to maintain the balance of ecological and economic health rather than fueling unbridled expansion. By realigning the circulation of money with the actual requirements of the living world, we can transform finance into a tool for equilibration, restoration and long-term survival.
The second organizational problem lies in the primary function of the real economy itself: the provision of food for human survival. The natural world is suffocating under the weight of the commercial economy that remains addicted to endless growth. To forestall if not avoid collapse, we must educate a new generation of leaders and an informed citizenry, as most current leaders and their followers in corporations and international institutions are invested in the status quo. Education must shift from neoclassical economic theories and demographic transition models of limitless possibility to understandings grounded in the hard realities of a relatively small, delimited biosphere that is also fragile.
Ecological literacy must become the bedrock of all policy and business education. Learners and trainees must first confront the laws of thermodynamics and the biological principles governing the web of life of earth, placing these constraints at the center of erudition. This replaces deluded cornucopian thought and the pursuit of endless economic expansion with a commitment to stewardship, ensuring the primary goal of leadership is maintaining life-support systems, not accumulating capital. A core component is systems thinking, which reveals the positive feedback loops driving our crises. For instance, simply increasing food supply without an understanding of human population dynamics and biophysical reality will drive further population growth and resource depletion. We must transition from an "empty world" mindset of unlimited production to a "full world" understanding defined by the earth’s carrying capacity. Every policy must then be weighed against its long-term impact on planetary habitability rather than its short-term gain from economic growth.
To solidify this, we must replace misleading metrics like gross domestic product (GDP) with indicators that reflect biophysical reality, showing clearly whether a commercial economy is thriving or liquidating its natural capital. When success is measured by climate stabilization, ecosystem protection, biodiversity conservation and human well-being, incentives will finally align with sustainability. This demands intellectual honesty, recognition of our wondrously human creatureness, moral courage and a rejection of the human exceptionalism myth, especially as it relates to human population dynamics.
Ultimately, we must cultivate leaders who see themselves as integral parts of the web of life of earth, not its masters. Grounded in the best available science, ethics and humility, these stewards will possess the clarity of vision and coherence of mind to step off the treadmill of endless economic expansion. By embracing the actual identity of Homo sapiens sapiens as undeniable biological creatures bound inextricably by the physical limitations of a frangible planet, we can transition from a model of endless plunder, extraction and growth to a path sensibly defined by circular economic systems and sustainable living conditions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A. is a retired practicing psychologist. In 2001 Steve founded the AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population to raise consciousness of the colossal threat that the unbridled, near exponential growth of absolute global human population numbers poses for life as it is known to us. His campaign has focused upon the best available science of human population dynamics and the topic of human overpopulation of earth in our time. He can be reached at sesalmony@aol.com.
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