Overshoot and Its 7 Fundamental Drivers | Frankly 68
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2024
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Recorded July 23 2024)
Description
In this week's Frankly, (coincidentally released the day after Earth Overshoot Day), Nate breaks down seven factors contributing to humanity's increasing overshoot – which is defined as the point at which species' use of ecological resources and services exceeds what Earth can regenerate in a given time period – as well as some things that might engender a retreat from current overshoot levels.
For the first time in Earth's history, a species is able to access, extract, consume, and inject waste into the entire biosphere - testing the limits of our planet's stability and capacity to provide. The human system is based on the foundation of a huge energy surplus in the form of fossil fuels with the (inaccurate) worldview of limitless resources. As such, all of our institutions, lifestyles, and expectations require growth, even as we increasingly understand the damage it does to the planet.
How did humanity end up in the unique predicament of expanding its consumption beyond the limits of the most bountiful planet that we know of? Is it possible that the primary factors getting in the way of a more sustainable human future are rooted in our social and cultural structures, rather than our technologies? What opportunities still lie ahead of us to mitigate the damage we've already done and find a new ecological equilibrium?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. It is Sunday, July 28th. There's no way I would have predicted I was going to record |
| 0:07.2 | it frankly today because last night, Saturday night, I had 103 temperature. I thought I had |
| 0:13.9 | COVID but tested negative. And I think what happened is I went for a three-hour bike ride |
| 0:18.3 | yesterday. It was like in the early 80s, but really humid. |
| 0:23.4 | Early 80s, low 80s. Early 80s was Duran Duran. And I didn't drink anything. And I think I had like a miniature sunstroke. |
| 0:34.4 | I'm feeling much better now. But I toss and turn for 12 hours in bed. |
| 0:41.3 | And of course, this podcast and running this NGO aren't really a job anymore. |
| 0:48.3 | They're my life. |
| 0:49.3 | So I think about this stuff all the time. |
| 0:51.3 | And this popped into my head. So last week on the frankly on solutions, of course, |
| 1:01.3 | these are all riffs. I don't have scripts and I often forget 10 to 30% of what I intend on saying. |
| 1:08.0 | And I had two circles, socially acceptable solutions and effective solutions. |
| 1:14.6 | What I forgot to say was that the effective solutions, the size of the circle, |
| 1:19.6 | declines over time because we're losing the window to have interventions, |
| 1:25.6 | preparation, governance, different technological responses to what we face. |
| 1:33.3 | And so the role of this podcast, the role of my work writ large, is to expand the Overton window of what is socially acceptable, |
| 1:42.3 | so that it increasingly overlaps with this shrinking, |
| 1:46.5 | effective solutions. So with that in mind, I wanted to take a big step back on the Overton |
| 1:56.0 | window and talk about overshoot. And I've come up with seven fundamental drivers |
| 2:04.6 | of overshoot, which is the topic of today's, frankly. |
| 2:08.4 | So what is overshoot? |
| 2:10.9 | We don't hear about it that much, |
... |
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