by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Change the incentives, and the outcomes change.
Ecologist Howard Odum provided a profound insight into human expansion, stagnation and collapse. He argued that humans are wired to maximize power output (i.e., consumption) rather than maximize efficiency.
In other words, humans are wired to strip the tree of every ripe fruit and throw a party, have more children and use the surplus food to feed an army of conquest. Efficient use of resources is simply not part of what I term Wetware 1.0, the set of tools that was selected and optimized over the past 200,000 years for small hunter-gatherer tribes roaming an apparently near-infinite world.
We’ve squandered the surpluses enabled by hydrocarbons to maximize energy output (consumption) rather than achieve efficiency. That is finally coming around to haunt the entire “infinite growth on a finite planet” status quo.