The Disruptor: William Rees Knows How to Save the World

The epiphany came on a hot July day at a modest farm near the village of Iroquois, Ontario. This was the early 1950s, and 10-year-old Bill Rees had spent the morning milking cows, loading hay onto a wagon, fetching water from the pump house. He sat—dirty and sweaty—alongside uncles and cousins at his grandmother’s porch table, waiting to be fed his lunch. And when the plate finally arrived (stacked with carrots, chicken, potatoes) an odd sensation came over him. The ground seemed to drop away a little. The boy stared at the plate and thought, “I am involved in all of this.” Were he a little older, the epiphany might have been expressed this way: All human effort, our entire civilization, is just a sub-system of nature. No marvel of human ingenuity can move us beyond nature’s law.

A simple truth, perhaps. But one that most of us spend our lives denying.

William Rees has been exceptional in that he decided early on to never ignore that truth. In fact, he became obsessed over the problem of our bond with the natural world (what we take from it) and our ignorance of that bond (how we pretend to be free of natural constraints). Twenty years later, as a young professor at the University of British Columbia, Rees spoke with colleagues about the earth’s “carrying capacity.” They had little time for such Malthusian hand-wringing, though, and tried to explain to Rees that new inventions (and the “green revolution” of the 1970s, which amped up food production) would always allow humans to expand our civilization and grow. The arithmetic never quite made sense to Rees, though. How exactly could there be infinite growth on a finite planet?

Not until 1990 did he (and his graduate students) conceive a new way of thinking that explained his position. “Carrying capacity”—the question of how many animals a parcel of land can support—could be turned around, he realized. What if he flipped the equation and asked: How much land, how many resources, does each animal—in this case, each human—consume? Thus was born the “ecological footprint.”

Rees’s new term offered a fresh way to visualize humanity’s untenable situation. A typical Vancouverite, for example, may live in a small downtown condo while in fact consuming a portion of the earth’s  resources that is hundreds of times larger than the bachelor pad implies. Once we realize that humans collectively use the resources of 1.7 earths (while having only the one planet to work with), our situation is drawn into stark focus. Richer countries, of course, exacerbate the issue: if all people lived like Canadians, we would need more than eight planets to sustain us. This is the hard-nosed reckoning, the unforgiving math, that Rees learned to offer up. The world has, in the decades since, embraced the term “ecological footprint.” His childhood epiphany—the idea that human civilization is always part of nature, and not above it—is now baked into much of the environmentalist movement.

And yet we have still not entirely absorbed his lesson. We still haven’t quite felt what that 10-year-old boy felt when the earth dropped out from under him.

Hidden inside William Rees’s famous idea is a darker truth than any of us cares to confront. Now, at the age of 81, he is laying that truth out for anyone who is ready to listen.

“Come in, keep your shoes on!”  When I arrive at William Rees’s century-old house in Dunbar, I’m greeted by a surprisingly relaxed man. He’s avuncular, full of cheer in his fleece vest, with a neat grey beard and spectacles. Rees has hardly slowed down. While it’s been a while since he held a formal job, he authors as many papers as he did during his academic career, and his input is constantly sought—both by supporters who want his help and detractors who hope to tangle with him. He seems to take it all in stride, cooking with his wife Alison (“we’re gourmet chefs”) and cycling several kilometres daily. Motorcycle camping trips are still on the calendar, too. And yet there’s also something very serious about Rees’s presence: in conversation he wields a frightening array of facts (seemingly drawn from the air) and also an aura of something beyond mere recall—a time-won wisdom.

We chat in his living room, where Rees sits in a wooden rocking chair, a sheepskin laid over the back. Over our heads the ceiling is peeling. “Don’t worry.” He waves at the damage. “It won’t fall on our heads.” There is a surprising lightheartedness about him, despite the fact that Rees believes very plainly that even the environmental movement has got its priorities dramatically—disastrously—wrong.

Climate change dominates our attention and yet, Rees tells me, it’s only a (catastrophic) symptom of a much more fundamental problem with human behaviour. “The current focus on climate change,” he says, “is an unfortunate distraction.” The larger problem is a situation called ecological overshoot—where a life form grows so numerous and “successful” that it outstrips the environment’s ability to support it. The term can refer to smaller scenarios,  like a group of deer on an island without predators—the deer multiply, eat all their food and then suffer a huge drop in numbers. But Rees is interested in a planet-sized version of the same problem: the overshoot that humans are bringing about: “The global community is in a hell of a predicament.”

While much of the world is focused on technical solutions to humanity’s quagmire—solar panels, carbon capture, wind turbines—Rees says these are all ways of avoiding the real issue. Much of the environmentalist movement amounts to “business as usual,” he explains, and it ignores the cultural upheaval that’s necessary. “The only cure for overshoot is a massive reduction in economic throughput,” he says. When I ask him what such a massive reduction would look like, he tells me to imagine life in the 19th century.

We cannot, Rees insists, invent our way out of this problem. The creation of “green cars” and “green food” and “green flights to Hawaii” may promise that some version of our opulent lifestyles can continue if we’re just clever enough, but Rees shakes his head at that idea. The basic truth is this: such consumption has already outstripped the planet’s ability to regenerate, no matter how many EVs we drive or paper straws we suck. So, it’s not our lack of ingenuity but our dogged obsession with growth and consumption that will ultimately damn us.

But what does it really mean to call for a system-wide retreat to the 19th century? Does Rees expect humanity to wake up tomorrow and give up on growth? Cast aside our phones and same-day deliveries and Netflix?

In fact, he doesn’t. “I don’t think this is a solvable problem using conventional approaches,” he tells me. “I really don’t.”

But here’s the thing: if we do not solve the problem for ourselves, nature will go ahead and solve it for us.

A rough prognosis: the eight billion people on the planet (a blip of homo sapiens exuberance made possible by just a couple of centuries of fossil fuel exploitation) will collapse to two billion. This collapse will be the consequence of what Rees calls “negative feedback,” which includes the sort of population limiters that Thomas Malthus warned about: wars, disease, the degradation of the environment. There will also be less predictable influences,  like the collapse of sperm counts and disinterest in having babies.

That said, there is another kind of change. Humanity is not merely shaped by brutal external forces. We are also shaped by what Rees calls “cultural overrides.” These are things like the suppression of murder through laws, or tamping down polygamy through marriage. Our genetic dispositions are often countered by the pressures of an organized society. Could similar “overrides” perhaps save us from that primeval instinct to eat the world?

Rees says that the only “cultural override” that would work is a change in the price of things. “Corporations externalize costs—they offload the whole price of things onto the environment,” he says. When you buy a $20 pair of jeans on Shein, for example, you are in no way paying for the thousands of litres of water that went into its production (nor are you paying for the 33 kilograms of carbon emissions that were released during that production).  “If people had to pay those full costs, then consumption would go down,” he says. For a brief, utopian moment, Rees even imagines a globally agreed-upon cap on the output of fossil fuels. But then, with a sigh: “It would be rational—but it ain’t gonna happen.”

Overriding our collective instinct to consume is simply too great a challenge, he fears. “For 99.9 percent of human history, life was relatively tough,” he says. “There was a natural tendency to use what you could get your hands on—a piece of meat, a piece of fruit—before it went bad. We’re wired to consume as much as we can while we have a chance.” In other words, we’re driven to use all available resources unless constrained by those Malthusian negative forces.

We won’t need to wait long to see those forces in action. Climate scientists say we’re on track for three to five degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. Rees believes five degrees would be “catastrophic, likely fatal to civilized existence” and even three degrees would be “enough to inundate coastlines, empty megacities, destroy economies and destabilize geopolitics.”  But holding the line below three degrees of warming would mean an unprecedented de-carbonization of the global economy by 2050. It would mean somehow engaging those “cultural overrides” like never before—a complete undoing of both our material lifestyle and the base animal instincts that fuel it.

By choice or by force, then, Rees foresees the collapse of our economies and populations. The reality of overshoot is that the one-time-only boom in wealth and prosperity that began with the Industrial Revolution is about to go bust.

This is, perhaps, not the news we were hoping for. And Rees’s solution is, admittedly, anathema to modern life. The retraction of the economy—the conscious reversal of endless growth in favour of a “soft landing”—seems almost inhuman. (Or, at least, anti- capitalist; and isn’t that the same thing these days?)

At least mitigating our crisis might be possible, Rees says, if we can somehow change the story humans tell ourselves about our relationship with the natural world. “Human beings don’t live in the real world,” he says. “We live in socially constructed stories. We make up narratives.” And the dominant economic narrative today, he notes, is a neoliberal story that tells us the economy and the environment are separate systems, and that technology can find substitutes for goods or services provided by nature. “Our model springs from ‘human exceptionalism,’ a notion that human activity is separate from the ecosystem,” he says. “We think we’re decoupled from nature. That humans are exceptional.”

Maybe that’s what shook 10-year-old Bill Rees when he sat down to lunch on his grandparent’s farm: the unnerving awareness of a new narrative—one in which humans are again coupled with nature and we do not try to invent our way beyond nature’s laws. The world that such a narrative would support is sometimes called a zero growth society. Rees refers to a “controlled contraction.”  It’s his most optimistic (least chaotic) vision of our shared future.

Are we capable of such a future? Or are we like the proverbial goldfish who eats itself to death because it has no concept of “enough”? The cynics believe catastrophic collapse is a more likely route toward sustainability than any “controlled contraction.” They point out that there have been dozens of international climate pacts in the past half century (the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Agreement, the Paris Agreement and on and on) while atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases keep rising. And yet there’s nothing irrational, after all, in imagining massive change. Change is very possible. In the 1960s, North Americans lived off half the energy per capita that they consume today. Massive change via “cultural overrides” isn’t just possible—it happens all the time.

Whatever change we are capable of, though, it will begin with a simple reckoning. It begins with looking with clear eyes at all we consume and knowing—as 10-year-old Bill Rees knew—that we are of the world, and not above it.

A grandfather clock in the hallway dongs and we rise to make our goodbyes. Rees starts telling me about his vegetable garden out back. His eyes light up. “We grow beans and garlic and tomatoes and squash. Lots of rhubarb,” he says. I stow away my final question—Do you ever get depressed?—because it seems so out of line. He’s 10 years old again, back on the farm (“the happiest time of my life”) and intimately tied to the earth. He’s literally digging up sustenance in his own backyard. We all are, I suppose—the only difference is he knows it.