One question that comes up often in conversation, panel discussions, Q&As, ‘the literature’—even dinner conversation—is perhaps worth taking a few minutes to tease apart. It comes in various forms, but the following version captures the basic idea:
How do we change or bypass the political and structural characteristics of modern techno-industrial (MTI) societies that result in humanity acting like a parasite on the environment?
Before attempting an answer, we should highlight three assumptions embedded in the question: first, that modern humanity is acting like a parasite on the ecosphere; second, that MTI society has characteristics that actually generate this relationship and; third, that these qualities can be changed or overcome.
First, what about that ‘humanity-as-parasite’ designation?
A parasite is an organism (e.g., H. sapiens) that lives and thrives by draining the vitality of its host organism or system (e.g., the ecosphere, aka ‘the environment’).
Is this unsavory descriptor valid for modern humanity or mere rhetorical flourish?
It should be obvious that people can ‘live and thrive’ only by exploiting the natural abundance of ‘the environment’. This in itself should signal the need for caution, if not reverence, in dealing with our ‘host’, but we generally exhibit neither. This is partially because modern humans completely misconstrue the nature of both the environment and the relationship.
Canadian ecologist, Stan Rowe, recognized that ‘environment’, as usually understood, is a dubious social construct, one that reflects and reinforces human exceptionalism, the notion that humans are uniquely not part of nature. He once wrote (quoting from memory): “Environment is its own pejorative, meekly setting itself aside from something more important at the centre”. To Rowe there really was no external ‘other’, no ‘environment’. The very term relegates the natural world to being an inconsequential backdrop to human affairs (the ‘more important’ something at the centre).[1] Other keen observers have similarly bemoaned MTI culture’s cognitive sleight of hand and its destructive consequences.
The reality is that humans are not separate from, but are integral components of, the ecosystems that sustain us—other living components (e.g, plants, other animals bacteria, fungi) supply the oxygen, food and fibre, other material resources, and waste recycling ‘services’ without which we could not exist let alone thrive. We reciprocate by emitting metabolic CO2 which is taken up in photosynthesis by plants, organic matter which is decomposed by bacteria and fungi (producing more CO2 and water), and trace nutrients that are also assimilated by green plants. Moreover, the ecosphere is characterized by numerous, mostly physical, life-support functions such as the hydrological cycle, the ozone UV shield, stable concentrations of atmospheric gases and a moderate climate to which humans and other species have adapted exquisitely in the course of evolution.
This is why we can confidently assert that the (pre-industrial) ‘environment’ of Earth as we know it is the best possible environment for life as we know it!
That we have conceptually ‘externalized’ (to use economists’ term) the ecosphere goes a long way toward explaining why contemporary humanity’s relationship with nature has become highly lopsided in our favour. The ecosphere generally suffers from the actions of inflated—and still growing—modern techno-industrial (MTI) society. While economists and eco-modernists fantasize that the human enterprise has virtually techno-decoupled from the ‘external’ world (exceptionalism again), real data show that we are long past the point where continuous economic and population growth depletes ecosystems and displaces wild nature. From a fraction of 1% in pre-agricultural times, humans and their domestic livestock have ballooned to comprise ~96% of mammalian biomass on Earth—the weight of people alone is ten times the weight of all other terrestrial mammals combined. And the competitive displacement of ‘others’ from their habitats and food sources continues unabated—surviving vertebrate populations have declined by 73% since 1970.
Meanwhile humans are undermining essential life-support functions, including by eroding the ozone layer, amplifying and shifting the hydrological cycle, polluting land, water, and air, changing atmospheric gas ratios and disrupting the benign climate in which we evolved and ‘civilizations’ developed. In fact, the data show that H. sapiens has become the single greatest ‘geological’ force changing the face of the planet.
Bottom line? If we accept the forgoing definition of a parasitic relationship (a dependent organism living the expense of a host organism), then eco-science validates the ‘humans-as-parasite’ simile. MTI culture acts very much like a malignant parasite on the ecosphere—global society is deeply into overshoot, depleting, polluting and dissipating the biophysical basis of its own existence.
In the circumstances, it seems reasonable to ask: “Do things always have to be this way?” Perhaps not, but there is one constant factor—as long as humans live on Earth we will remain dependent on the products and functions of a viable ecosphere.
Even accepting this constraint, many argue that humanity’s ingenuity, capacity for reason and adaptability should enable us to develop alternative, more benign ways of being on Earth. For example, couldn’t humans become positive contributors to ecological integrity and global systems resilience?
In effect, this would mean that people—whole human communities—would have to learn to co-exist as ‘mutualists’ within their supportive ecosystems. Systems level mutualism implies that both the human component and their supporting ecosystems would benefit in net terms from their entanglement.
Two-species mutualism is actually fairly common in natural ecosystems. Certain ant species treat aphids as domestic livestock—the ants benefit by feeding on the ‘honeydew’ secreted by the aphids and, in return, protect the aphids from would-be predators; on coral reefs, ‘cleaner shrimps’ and ‘cleaner wasses’ (small fish) get a free meal of sea lice, fungi, other parasites and food-scraps gleaned from the skin and inside the mouths and gills of large fish. The latter benefit, in turn, from being freed of parasites and potential infection.
Arguably, humans have similar micro-mutualistic relationships with our domestic animals and plants. However, when the sheer scale of the human enterprise exceeds measurable limits, these exclusive relationships become damaging to our wider host ecosystems. For example, factory farms and livestock feedlots (CAFOs or ‘concentrated animal feeding operations’) are major sources of air, soil and water pollutants, including nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, sediments, potential human pathogens, hormones, and antibiotics, and are often aesthetically repulsive.
Similarly, crop farming propagates selected plant species which, in turn, feed millions of humans. However, industrial monocrop agriculture is among the most ecologically damaging of human activities; habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, pesticide and fertilizer use, etc., diminish and pollute natural ecosystems, including soil micro-fauna and flora, all to feed a still-growing human population.
These relationships could hardly be further removed from the kind of macro-mutualism needed to correct for terminal overshoot.
If true mutualism—actually augmenting nature’s diversity and resilience—seems a bridge too far, shouldn’t we at least try to live in ways that do no harm? Surely, as self-proclaimed adaptives, we can develop locally-specific forms of ‘commensalism’ in which the human community thrives on, but does not deplete, its supportive ecosystems nor undermine essential life-support functions.
In fact, permaculture, agroecology and like practices provide examples of ‘working-with-nature’ in which sensitive management of water, soil and crop resources, perhaps including judicious use of organic fertilizer, boosts primary productivity. (Some such movements are pushing back hard against industrial practices.) Certainly, too, knowledgeable soil/landscape manipulation and a shared community philosophy of co-existence could theoretically contribute to agroecology maintaining, if not increasing, local biodiversity. Eco-forestry practices can similarly maintain forest structure and biodiversity while allowing for low-impact timber and fibre extraction.
Note that because such approaches draw on soil science, micro-biology, and systems ecology, they are arguably more technologically sophisticated than are high-input (i.e., ‘brute force’) commercial agriculture and industrial forestry.
More broadly, ecological , biophysical and steady-state economists have generated many theoretical and practical concepts essential to advancing a viable alternative to contemporary growth-bound, nature-alienating neoliberal economics. Based on ecological, thermodynamic and other physical principles, the new economy would recognize that, far from being separate and unfettered, the human enterprise is a wholly-contained, utterly dependent subsystem of the ecosphere.[2] This ‘radical’ reframing of the economic enterprise places real constraints on rates of resource extraction, waste production, and growth, i.e., on the overall scale of economic activity. In short, it could provide the economic foundation needed to support some form of stable human/ecosphere commensalism.
So, perhaps we already know WHAT we should do to move beyond our parasitic habits. The major steps seem logical enough and, on its face, the transition should not all that complicated.
As noted, our opening question assumes that global MTI culture has characteristic that promote humanity’s parasite-like relationship with the ecosphere and—more importantly—that we can overcome or change these characteristics.
In fact, both history and contemporary evidence show that the ‘characteristics-promoting-parasitism’ part is unquestionably true. Moreover, it is not just cultural factors that drive this relationship—humanity’s evolutionary heritage arguably plays an even larger role. In fact, the cultural elements arguably reflect, and build on, innate survival-oriented predispositions to consume and expand. This is rarely acknowledged—as good ‘exceptionalists,’ we moderns don’t think of ourselves as being under the sway of animal instincts and innate behavioural tendencies.
Of course, what we think doesn’t affect reality: humans are—by nature—large, warm-blooded social mammals with correspondingly large per capita energy and material demands. It follows that even hunter-gatherer bands would have a substantial impact on the physical structure and functional dynamics of their local ecosystems. For this reason, H. sapiens can be classified as an archetypal patch-disturbance species defined as any organism which, usually by central-place foraging, degrades a small ‘central place’ greatly and disturbs a much larger area away from the central core to a lesser extent.[3]
This process of forage-related habitat modification is as natural as it is inevitable but we clever apes have a leg-up over other species in the foraging/patch-making department. This is where nature (evolutionary heritage) and nurture (cultural factors) merge to ensure that humans win gold in the ‘Habitat and Resources Olympics’.
Creative intelligence and technology have enabled us to adapt to, and exploit, virtually every ecosystem/habitat type on Earth. (Or, more correctly, we adapt virtually every ecosystem to serve human purposes.) While survival instincts ensure that all species are entered in the competitive evolutionary games, technological prowess (cultural evolution) makes humans orders of magnitude better at acquiring the essential resources and scarce habitat needed for survival and growth than are comparable species.
Of course, resources and living space are finite, shrinking and hotly contested. As H. sapiens expands into all habitable landscapes, we competitively displace other species with similar ecological requirements. (That’s how people and livestock have come to represent ~34% and ~62% respectively of mammalian biomass.) We also now boast the widest geographic range of any terrestrial vertebrate species and our bloated population is 14,000 times greater that the arithmetic mean population of other mammals of similar body size. Humans have claimed the entire planet as their (now much degraded) ‘patch’ at the expense of almost everyone else.
Other bio-factors inhibit change; for example, the techno-human machine has no ‘Off’ switch. On the contrary, improving technology continuously redefines what constitutes an ‘available resource’ thus extending humanity’s instinctive extractive prowess. Today we economically mine and process mineral ores with such low concentrations of desirable metals/minerals that they were considered worthless rock just a few decades ago.
Similarly for fossil fuels. Until recently, even petroleum geologists described shale oil as the “fuel of the future and [it] always will be”. Not quite ‘always,’ as it turns out—by 2014 ‘fracked’ shale or ‘tight’ oil had become a major contributor to the world’s temporary bounty of petroleum, propelling the US past Saudi Arabia as the world’s top petroleum producer. By 2024 shale oil constituted 23% of global oil supply. Technological advances had enabled “the fuel of the future” to become the energy mainstay of the present, more than compensating for the decline in conventional oil extraction.
And remember, fossil fuels provide the means by which humans (over)exploit all other resources with the extensive landscape destruction, pollution and local social and health impacts that this implies. The increase in drilling, mining, refining, transportation and subsequent manufacturing, operation, systems maintenance, etc., adds to the erosion of impacted ecosystems at every stage of the economic process.
Meanwhile, CO2 emissions ascend to record levels and global heating wreaks havoc; the technology-aided human patch extends into the atmosphere destabilizing the climate system.
As usual, as GDP goes up, ecological integrity goes down.
For most species in nature, systems-level ‘feedbacks’ hold population growth and habitat degradation in check. Populations often fluctuate around the average carrying capacities of the habitat. Any population that truly ‘booms’ in response to unusually favourable conditions invariably ‘busts’ (be warned!). As densities increase, the onset of negative feedbacks (e.g., disease, predation, resource scarcity, competition for space, exposure to inclement weather) sends the death rate soaring. The population drops, often precipitously, falling temporarily below carrying capacity.
Things are a little more complicated with H. sapiens: cultural evolution has long outpaced bio-evolution. Especially over the past two or three centuries, improving public health, better shelter, fossil-fueled agriculture, etc., have enabled us, temporarily, to cancel many negative feedbacks that constrained the growth of the human enterprise. With positive feedbacks dominating, our population surged from one billion in ~1815 to eight billion in 2022. This unprecedented eight-fold population ‘boom’ was accompanied by a >100-fold increase in real gross world product, all on a finite non-growing planet.
The cultural drivers don’t end with technology alone. MTI society is also propelled by quasi-religious faith in the now-global, socially-constructed fantasy of unlimited economic and population growth enabled by improving techno-wizardry.[4] To suggest there are limits to growth is to commit the greatest of cultural heresies. So powerful is our dominant economic paradigm that worshippers at the alter of growth deny or reject contrary evidence.
This is regrettable. Given the ongoing desecration of the ecosphere, we should be celebrating the ‘peak population’ that is now rattling economists and politicians in a few wealthy countries, and implementing non-coercive (ethical) population reduction strategies everywhere. Instead, even discussing ‘the population problem’ remains taboo, and many nations are engaged in pro-natalist programs intended to increase birthrates and family size, mainly to ensure economic continuity and continued growth. Similarly, it breaks protocol to mention economic ‘degrowth’ or ‘planned contraction’ in mainstream polite company.
In short, humans are not really a rational species. The MTI cultural narrative overrides reason, foolishly amplifying H. sapiens’ natural expansionist tendencies and sending modern humans far into quasi-parasitic overshoot. The obvious misalignment between the way MTI humans think and biophysical reality is arguably the most pernicious cultural factor preventing the reconciliation of humankind with nature.
We have shown that: 1) the relationship of MTI societies to the ecosphere is analogous to that of malicious parasite to host and; 2) that this relationship is driven by innate survival imperatives positively reinforced by technology and a universal growth-oriented cultural myth that blinds its adherents to the consequences of excessive growth.
But what about the third assumption embodied in our opening question, namely that that the cultural drivers can be changed or overcome? On one level, this assumption seems to be a no-brainer. Humanity claims high intelligence and has proved to be both highly adaptive and behaviourally flexible. This should be all that is necessary to replace maladaptive social constructs with versions that promote human-to-ecosphere harmony.
Certainly, individuals not under the influence of distracting factors might choose moderation. We also know that pre-agricultural hunter gatherers—including the contemporary Hadza people of Tanzania—are very modest ‘patch-disturbers,’ with extremely small ecological footprints. Such societies develop profound knowledge of their ecosystems; they live ‘off the land’ in small social groups of <50 individuals that are, by necessity, cooperative and egalitarian. This is actually the formative life-style for H. sapiens and the social context in which our behavioural ‘algorithm’ evolved.
This suggests that it might just be possible, in a post-growth world, for small-scale local communities to develop and enforce shared sets of well-developed beliefs, values and assumptions that support humankind-nature harmony. In theory, small groups of contemporary humans could articulate, and live by, eco-compatible cultural narratives that counter-act rather that amplify innate expansionist tendencies. Any such futuristic communities will have achieved a true commensal relationship with their habitats.
Unfortunately, nothing of the kind seems possible for members of the present global community (or any large-scale society or ‘civilization’). The case can be made that large scale human societies suffer from human maladaptation syndrome (HMS). HMS argues that the innate human behavioural repertoire is inadequate—becomes positively dysfunctional—at larger social scales, particularly in mega-communities of many millions.
The cause is rooted at the most basic level: the human brain and innate behaviours evolved in, and are adapted to, simple, relatively unchanging social and biophysical environments. The resultant behavioural algorithm is therefore functionally obsolete, unable to cope with the destructive emergent properties of larger societies (collapse is the historically frequent norm).
Large scale favours the emergence or amplification of behaviours and social structures that are naturally suppressed in smaller societies. It enables the development of strict social hierarchies and egregious inequalities, societies in which dark triad personalities rise to the top and subsequently shape institutional behaviour. It unleashes our expansionist tendencies and amplifies competition among rival groups/societies for scarce resources and space. In fact, with ‘civilization’, violent expansion via the conquest of rivals and their territories became the standard pattern for intergroup behaviour.
Nothing much has changed in the 21st Century. All signs suggest that H. sapiens is far out of its cognitive league in today’s hyper-complex turbulent global environment. We actually seem to be regressing. The rise in ‘environmental consciousness’ characterizing the last half of the 20th Century is dissolving in a global backlash; nations regularly fail to meet commitments made in international environmental conventions and climate agreements; the unprecedented expansion of growth-oriented new tech, exemplified by AI and myriad associated massive energy-demanding data centres,[5] imposes ever-greater pressure on ecosystems and life-support functions; the United Nations is weak and ineffective in keeping global peace; nations break or disregard arms treaties and aid structures with equal abandon; the fractious, competitive, contemporary world is torn by regional wars and growing anxiety that geopolitical instability will lead to nuclear conflagration.
A major result of excessive scale and institutional failure is the resurgence of negative feedbacks on growth: rising levels of tribal conflict along with global heating, the increase in extreme climate events (droughts, floods, heatwaves, etc.), crop failures, spreading ocean dead zones, micro-plastic contamination, pollution of everything, falling mammalian sperm counts, etc., show that nature is beginning to compensate for humanity’s lack of self-control in managing the sheer size of the human enterprise. The human economic population and economic ‘boom’ is arguably on track to ‘bust’ in coming decades. Nature’s negative feedbacks will likely reduce the human population to less than potential long-term managed carrying capacity. The latter, while controversial, is probably less than 2.5 billion (considerably so, IMHO).
Which raises another problem for advocates of human-with-ecosphere commensalism. Before we can even discuss the form the latter might take, the world community must first implement a non-coercive population reduction strategy to lower the present population by ~70%. But despite all warning signs, most countries remain dedicated—addicted really—to the worn-out mythic construct of perpetual-growth-abetted-by-continuous technological-advances. No major nation advocates for economic degrowth let alone planned population contraction. It may be the height of unreason (insanity? stupidity?), but most governments remain pro-natalist, convinced that even greater populations are needed to maintain their nations’ competitive edges in a era of increasing energy and resource scarcity, climate chaos, geopolitical instability and ecological decay.
So, we have our answer to the third assumption of our opening question: There is no shred of evidence that modern techno-industrial (MTI) societies are capable of changing or bypassing the political and structural (or biological) factors that have shaped humanity’s parasite-like relationship to the ecosphere. We arguably know WHAT we should do, but not HOW to get it done.
H. sapiens is not primarily a rational species: when push comes to shove, instinct, emotion and irrational narratives trump reason.
References
[1] For example, MTI culture’s neoliberal economic theory represents the economy as separate from, and virtually independent of, ‘the environment’.
[2] This still puts humans in a parasite-like relationship, but there are such things as benign parasites. These are dependent organisms that have co-evolved so long with their hosts that their presence is asymptomatic, all but inconsequential. (Co-evolution ensures that a well-adapted parasite does not harm or kill its host.)
[3] In 1988 Bioscience published a special issue of the journal on ‘How Animals Shape Their Ecosystems’. Predictably, with the exception of a passing reference to modern humans as “primary agents of environmental change,” H. sapiens—that greatest of all patch-disturbers—was not included.
[4] Fantasy fabrication is only partially cultural. The tendency to socially-construct stories (tribal myths, philosophies, ideologies, academic theories, cultural narratives, etc. ) is actually an innate characteristic that shows up in all human groups. Only the contents of these narratives vary among cultures.
[5] AI has been called ‘the growth paradigm reborn’.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William E. Rees is a population ecologist and ecological economist. He is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning; a founding member and former President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a founding Director of the One Earth Initiative; and a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute. Professor Rees' research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the policy implications of global ecological trends. He is perhaps best known as the originator, and co-developer with his graduate students, of Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA). EFA shows that the human enterprise is already in ecological 'overshoot' and that we would need 4.4 Earth-like planets to support just the present world population at Canadian material standards. Such findings led to a special focus on cities as particularly vulnerable components of the human ecosystem and on psycho-cognitive barriers to ecologically rational behavior and policy. Professor Rees has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed and popular articles on these and related topics.
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