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Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot

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Status

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	Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." ~~Draft v5.3; submitted to ''Global Environmental Change Advances'',~~ currently in peer review.		Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." is currently in peer review.

	'''Core claim:''' this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains ''why'' a behaviour misfires but not ''why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound'').		'''Core claim:''' this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains ''why'' a behaviour misfires but not ''why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound'').
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	== Status ==		== Status ==

	Unlike ~~Paper One~~, this paper is not yet published: it is a sequel/deeper-look paper currently ~~with ''Global Environmental Change Advances''~~ under peer review, so there is no publication record, Altmetric score, or press coverage to report yet. This page will be updated with publication details, DOI, and reception once a decision is reached.		Unlike [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot]], this paper is not yet published: it is a sequel/deeper-look paper currently under peer review, so there is no publication record, Altmetric score, or press coverage to report yet. This page will be updated with publication details, DOI, and reception once a decision is reached.

	== See also ==		== See also ==

	[[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]		[[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Anthropogenic Ecological Overshoot

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	'''~~Ecological~~ overshoot''' is the human consumption of self-producing and replenishable natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, combined with entropic waste production in excess of the Earth's assimilative and processing capacity.		'''Anthropogenic ecological overshoot''' is the human consumption of self-producing and replenishable natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, combined with entropic waste production in excess of the Earth's assimilative and processing capacity.

	== The three levers ==		== The three levers ==
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	[[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Planetary Boundaries]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[MTI Society]]		[[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Planetary Boundaries]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[MTI Society]]

Ecological Overshoot

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Admin moved page Ecological Overshoot to Anthropogenic Ecological Overshoot Accuracy

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'''Ecological overshoot''' is the human consumption of self-producing and replenishable natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, combined with entropic waste production in excess of the Earth's assimilative and processing capacity.

== The three levers ==

There are three critical components to overshoot: '''population''', '''consumption''' (energy/material), and '''waste generation''' — together, "economic throughput." Growing population acts to multiply resource consumption and waste production. Ecological impact is profoundly unequal: a small, high-income fraction of the global population is responsible for the vast majority of the damage, which disproportionately harms the relatively poorer majority. Individuals with incomes in the top 10% are responsible for 25–43% of environmental impact and 47% of CO2 emissions, while the bottom 10% contribute just 3–5%.

== Scale of the trajectory ==

It took ''H. sapiens'' roughly 350,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion (1820), and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. In that same 200-year period, fossil energy use increased 1,300-fold, fuelling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product. Far from "decoupling" from nature, contemporary civilisation is ever more deeply embedded in ecosystems and the lithosphere — growth is being financed by drawing down cumulative stores of natural resources (fish stocks, forests, soils, fossil fuels, rare minerals), not by any genuine substitution of resource use.

== Planetary Boundaries ==

The changes being tracked under the [[Planetary Boundaries]] framework are the delayed, systemic expression of this overshoot: seven of nine boundaries are now assessed as crossed.

== See also ==

[[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Planetary Boundaries]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[MTI Society]]

Main Page

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	=== Foundational papers ===		=== Foundational papers ===
	* [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot ~~(2023)\|World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)~~]]		* [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot]]
	* [[Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot\|Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (in review)]]		* [[Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot\|Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (in review)]]

World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)

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Admin moved page World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023) to World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot Date unnecessary

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Merz JJ, Barnard P, Rees WE, Smith D, Maroni M, Rhodes CJ, Dederer JH, Bajaj N, Joy MK, Wiedmann T, Sutherland R. ''Science Progress'', 106(3), published online 20 September 2023. DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1177/00368504231201372 10.1177/00368504231201372]. Open access, CC BY-NC 4.0.

'''Core claim:''' anthropogenic [[Ecological Overshoot]] is not itself the root problem — it is a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. The paper names and frames this crisis as the [[Human Behavioural Crisis]]. It argues that mainstream overshoot interventions (renewable energy transition, efficiency gains, carbon accounting) target symptoms, are resource-intensive, slow, and address only single co-symptoms (e.g. climate change) rather than the behavioural cause — so even in the best case they buy time rather than solve anything.

'''The mechanism proposed here (refined in Paper Two):''' behaviours that were once adaptive in early hominid evolution — the impulses to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to acquire/amass/defend resources, to display dominance/status/sex appeal, and to discount distant costs (procrastination, temporal/social/spatial discounting) — have been intentionally and systematically exploited by modern techno-industrial ('''MTI''') economic and marketing systems. What was once fitness-promoting at small scale becomes collectively suicidal at industrial scale.

== The three drivers ==

The paper identifies three critical drivers that catalyse and perpetuate the behavioural crisis, each mapping onto a lever of overshoot:

{| class="wikitable"
! Driver !! Overshoot lever it drives !! Mechanism
|-
| [[Economic Growth]] || Consumption || The economy reframed as boundless rather than embedded in biophysical limits; fossil energy (1,300-fold increase in 200 years) financed a 100-fold increase in real gross world product, normalising the belief that growth is unconstrained and substitutable
|-
| [[Marketing]] || Consumption, waste || Shift from functional differentiation to identity/status-based selling; behavioural targeting via surveillance data (hundreds of trillions of tracking events/year); framing effects (Tversky & Kahneman) used to make overconsumption feel good
|-
| [[Pronatalism]] || Population || Social/institutional pressure to reproduce (patriarchy, religion, nationalism, capitalism), enforced through positive feedback (glorification of motherhood, financial incentives) and negative feedback (stigmatisation of childfree/LGBTQIA+/contraception)
|}

== The three levers ==

The paper frames [[Ecological Overshoot]] itself as driven by three direct levers — '''population''', '''consumption''', and '''waste''' — see [[Levers of Overshoot]] for the full breakdown.

== The proposed response ==

Rather than treat marketing, media and entertainment purely as the problem, the paper argues they are the most realistic lever for intervention precisely because they already have the infrastructure, reach, and proven methods to reshape [[Social Norms]] at speed (e.g. telenovela-based family-planning campaigns in Ethiopia/Brazil; drink-driving stigmatisation over decades; social-convention tipping points shown to occur once ~25% of a population adopts a new norm). The ask is to redirect these same persuasion tools toward genuinely adaptive behaviours — flying less, having fewer children, consuming less — framed around ''benefits to the individual'' rather than sacrifice, since behaviour change that doesn't feel rewarding won't persist.

The paper closes by flagging the double-edged nature of this proposal: behavioural influence at this scale is already happening (by whoever has the money and reach to do it), so the real choice is whether it continues to deepen overshoot, is left to chance, or is consciously and ethically redirected — and it calls for interdisciplinary oversight of large-scale behavioural manipulation.

See [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] for how this argument connects to Paper Two's formal mechanism.

== Reception and impact ==

The paper substantially outperformed typical expectations for a mini-review in a niche journal:

* '''Altmetric Attention Score''': ranked in the '''top 1%''' of all research outputs Altmetric has ever tracked — a status the paper still held as of a September 2025 update talk by Joseph Merz, two years after publication.
* '''Downloads/reads''': approximately 70,000 by early-to-mid 2024, rising to '''almost 75,000''' by September 2025. At peak, the paper was averaging roughly '''4,000 reads and downloads a month across platforms''' (per Joseph Merz, LinkedIn).
* '''Editor's Pick''': selected as Editor's Pick by ''Science Progress''.
* '''Press coverage''': covered by '''The Guardian''' ("Human behaviour crisis drives earth overshoot," February 2024), which was itself republished by multiple outlets.
* '''Academic/civic amplification''': featured by Stanford's Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB), covered in Victoria University of Wellington's own news service (commentary by co-author Dr Michael Joy), and discussed in the peak-oil and degrowth community (e.g. the long-running ''Peak Oil Barrel'' discussion forum), showing reach well beyond the paper's home discipline.
* '''Broadcast''': the subject of a dedicated podcast episode, ''Oh, behave! The real reason for overshoot'', in which Joseph Merz discussed the paper's reception directly with the host.

'''Not yet independently verified:''' Institute records referred to coverage in ''Vogue'' and ''The Economist'' as well. A search did not turn up independent confirmation of either — flag to Joseph for a link or citation before relying on this claim publicly.

== See also ==

[[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Paper Two: Mind the Gap (sequel)]]

Human Behavioural Crisis

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	The '''Human Behavioural Crisis (HBC)''' is the name and frame proposed by Merz, Barnard, Rees et al. (2023) for the claim that ~~anthropogenic~~ [[Ecological Overshoot]] is not itself the root problem, but a symptom of a deeper crisis of human behaviour. Human behaviour is the proximal causal mechanism of overshoot — the point at which the species physically interacts with the ecosphere — and is therefore the critical anchor point for intervention, rather than the downstream symptoms (climate change, biodiversity loss, novel entities) that dominate current policy attention.		The '''Human Behavioural Crisis (HBC)''' is the name and frame proposed by Merz, Barnard, Rees et al. in their 2023 paper [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot]] for the claim that [[Anthropogenic Ecological Overshoot]] is not itself the root problem, but a symptom of a deeper crisis of human behaviour. Human behaviour is the proximal causal mechanism of overshoot — the point at which the species physically interacts with the ecosphere — and is therefore the critical anchor point for intervention, rather than the downstream symptoms (climate change, biodiversity loss, novel entities) that dominate current policy attention.

	The term was deliberately chosen over alternatives despite a risk of confusion with government health-department usage of "behavioural health" (addiction, mental health, eating disorders); the authors are explicit this is not their usage.		The term was deliberately chosen over alternatives despite a risk of confusion with government health-department usage of "behavioural health" (addiction, mental health, eating disorders); the authors are explicit this is not their usage.
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	[[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[MTI Society]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]		[[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[MTI Society]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Main Page

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	=== Foundational papers ===		=== Foundational papers ===
	* [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)\|World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]]		* [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)\|World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]]
	* [[Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look ~~At The~~ Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot\|Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look ~~At The~~ Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (in review)]]		* [[Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot\|Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (in review)]]

	=== Core mechanism ===		=== Core mechanism ===

Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look At The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot

Admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:43:00 GMT

Admin moved page Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look At The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot to Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot

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	Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." Draft v5.3; submitted ~~as manuscript GECADV-D-26-00176~~ to ''Global Environmental Change Advances'', currently in peer review.		Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." Draft v5.3; submitted to ''Global Environmental Change Advances'', currently in peer review.

	'''Core claim:''' this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains ''why'' a behaviour misfires but not ''why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound'').		'''Core claim:''' this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains ''why'' a behaviour misfires but not ''why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound'').
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	[[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]		[[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Paper Two: Mind the Gap (sequel)

Admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:40:53 GMT

Admin moved page Paper Two: Mind the Gap (sequel) to Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look At The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot No need for "Paper two" prefix

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Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." Draft v5.3; submitted as manuscript GECADV-D-26-00176 to ''Global Environmental Change Advances'', currently in peer review.

'''Core claim:''' this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains ''why'' a behaviour misfires but not ''why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound'').

== The mechanism ==

Behaviour is selected by its consequences (Skinner's [[Selection by Consequences]], operating at ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and social/cultural levels). The paper distinguishes two consequence types (see [[Consequences]]):

* '''Neurobiological consequences''' — the immediate, felt, reinforcing-or-punishing outcome of a behaviour. This is what actually, moment to moment, determines whether a behaviour recurs.
* '''Fitness-relevant consequences''' — the effect of a behaviour on survival/reproduction, at individual, group, or species level. Often delayed, diffuse, and costly only in aggregate.

Under low-energy, pre-agricultural conditions these two were close together in time and space — a behaviour's fitness cost showed up fast enough (hunger, ostracism, death) to shift the neurobiological consequence from reinforcing to punishing, correcting the behaviour. [[Exosomatic Energy]] (fossil fuels) broke that proximity: trade, medical advances, synthetic fertiliser, drought-resistant crops and the like let humans keep reaping the reinforcing neurobiological payoff of a behaviour (status, pleasure, comfort) while pushing its fitness-relevant cost over the horizon in time, space, or social distance ([[Discounting]]). The resulting separation is the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] — and it is this gap, not the behaviours or impulses themselves, that is novel to MTI civilisation and that the paper identifies as the actual target for intervention.

Crucially, the paper argues the gap doesn't just let individual maladaptive behaviours persist — it lets the surrounding [[Information Environment]] keep [[Contextualisation]] of evolved impulses running in maladaptive directions, entrenching the behaviours as [[Social Norms]]. The same impulse (status signalling, say) gets expressed as a private jet instead of a feather cloak purely because of what the information environment currently rewards. This active shaping and inheritance of the information environment is itself an instance of [[Niche Construction Theory]].

== Worked example used in the paper ==

A fictional low-energy fishing community over-exploits a temporary glut of fish; fitness-relevant consequences (declining catch, malnutrition, elevated infant mortality) arrive quickly and locally, converting the neurobiological payoff of fishing from reinforcing to punishing, so the community adaptively redirects labour to gardening and population contracts to carrying capacity. Contrast this with a high-energy society: when a drought threatens crop yields, fossil-energy-enabled technology (synthetic fertiliser, trade, drought-resistant seed) absorbs the fitness-relevant consequence before it can bite — so the neurobiological consequences never flip from reinforcing to punishing, and the underlying behaviour, and the norms built on it, persist and scale instead of self-correcting.

== Planetary boundaries and the ecology of overshoot ==

The paper roots the mechanism in the [[Planetary Boundaries]] framework (seven of nine boundaries now crossed) and frames the [[Levers of Overshoot]] — population, consumption, waste — as compounding via the [[Maximum Power Principle]] (systems, including [[MTI Society]], structure themselves to maximise energy capture, producing a self-reinforcing, top-heavy, unequal power structure that actively resists correction).

== The intervention logic ==

The paper proposes two complementary intervention routes within the information environment, since actually closing the gap would require cutting exosomatic energy use (unlikely, near-term):

# '''Recontextualise evolved impulses''' — redirect existing impulses (status, belonging, resource acquisition) toward adaptive, ecologically restorative expressions, rather than trying to suppress the impulses themselves.
# Bridge the neurobiological/fitness gap with proxy consequences — deliberately engineer immediate, salient neurobiological consequences (reinforcing or punishing) that act as ''stand-ins'' for the real, distant fitness-relevant consequences, so behaviour gets corrected on a human, not geological, timescale. [[Levers of Overshoot]] aside, '''Localisation''' follows directly from this: small-scale, local social structures are precisely where proximal consequences (and thus self-correction) remain possible without engineered proxies.

The paper is explicit that the goal is redirection, not suppression, of evolved drives — and flags, as a risk the authors take seriously, that the same toolkit could be captured by existing power structures for more effective authoritarian control rather than genuine correction.

See [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] for how this mechanism connects back to Paper One's naming of the crisis.

== Status ==

Unlike Paper One, this paper is not yet published: it is a sequel/deeper-look paper currently with ''Global Environmental Change Advances'' under peer review, so there is no publication record, Altmetric score, or press coverage to report yet. This page will be updated with publication details, DOI, and reception once a decision is reached.

== See also ==

[[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]] · [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Main Page

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Foundational papers

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	=== Foundational papers ===		=== Foundational papers ===
	* [[~~Paper One:~~ World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)\|~~Paper One~~ (2023)]]		* [[World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)\|World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)]]
	* [[~~Paper Two:~~ Mind the Gap ~~(sequel)~~\|~~Paper Two:~~ Mind the Gap (in review)]]		* [[Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look At The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot\|Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look At The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (in review)]]

	=== Core mechanism ===		=== Core mechanism ===

Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)

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Admin moved page Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023) to World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023) No need for "Paper one" prefix

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Main Page

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Drivers of overshoot

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	~~<strong>MediaWiki has been installed.</strong>~~		== The Human Behavioural Crisis ==

	~~Consult the~~ [~~https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Contents User's Guide~~] for ~~information on using~~ the ~~wiki software~~.		[[Human Behavioural Crisis\|Start here]] for the overview, or browse by topic below.

	== ~~Getting started~~ ==		=== Foundational papers ===
	* [~~https~~:~~//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special~~:~~MyLanguage/Manual:Configuration_settings Configuration settings list~~]		* [[Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)\|Paper One (2023)]]
	* [~~https~~:~~//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special~~:~~MyLanguage~~/~~Manual:FAQ MediaWiki FAQ~~]		* [[Paper Two: Mind the Gap (sequel)\|Paper Two: Mind the Gap (in review)]]
	* [~~https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/mediawiki-announce.lists.wikimedia.org/ MediaWiki release mailing list~~]
	* [~~https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Localisation#Translation_resources Localise MediaWiki for your language~~]		=== Core mechanism ===
	* [~~https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Combating_spam Learn how to combat spam on your wiki~~]		* [[Human Behavioural Crisis]]
			* [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]
			* [[Consequences]]
			* [[Selection by Consequences]]
			* [[Exosomatic Energy]]
			* [[Discounting]]
			* [[Information Environment]]
			* [[Contextualisation]]
			* [[Niche Construction Theory]]

			=== Evolved impulses and norms ===
			* [[Evolved Impulses]]
			* [[Social Norms]]

			=== Three Drivers of the HBC ===
			* [[Economic Growth]]
			* [[Marketing]]
			* [[Pronatalism]]

			=== Levers and limits ===
			* [[Ecological Overshoot]]
			* [[Levers of Overshoot]]
			* [[Planetary Boundaries]]
			* [[MTI Society]]
			* [[Maximum Power Principle]]

Human Behavioural Crisis

imported>Merz Institute — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:52:18 GMT

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The '''Human Behavioural Crisis (HBC)''' is the name and frame proposed by Merz, Barnard, Rees et al. (2023) for the claim that anthropogenic [[Ecological Overshoot]] is not itself the root problem, but a symptom of a deeper crisis of human behaviour. Human behaviour is the proximal causal mechanism of overshoot — the point at which the species physically interacts with the ecosphere — and is therefore the critical anchor point for intervention, rather than the downstream symptoms (climate change, biodiversity loss, novel entities) that dominate current policy attention.

The term was deliberately chosen over alternatives despite a risk of confusion with government health-department usage of "behavioural health" (addiction, mental health, eating disorders); the authors are explicit this is not their usage.

== What the crisis consists of ==

Behaviours relating to overshoot stem from evolved impulses that were once highly adaptive — to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to acquire and defend resources, to signal status and dominance, and to discount distant costs — but have been intentionally and systematically exploited by [[Economic Growth]], [[Marketing]], and [[Pronatalism]] as drivers, scaling previously small-scale, self-limiting behaviours into a planetary-scale, self-reinforcing crisis.

== The formal mechanism ==

Paper One named the crisis and identified its drivers and levers. It did not yet formally explain why the exploited behaviours are able to persist and scale rather than self-correct. The sequel paper, "Mind the Gap," supplies that mechanism: the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]], enabled by [[Exosomatic Energy]], which separates the immediate consequences that actually select behaviour from the delayed fitness consequences that should correct it.

== See also ==

[[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[MTI Society]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Ecological Overshoot

imported>Merz Institute — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:52:18 GMT

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MTI Society

imported>Merz Institute — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:52:18 GMT

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'''Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) society''' is the current dominant form of human civilisation, characterised by large-scale use of fossil fuels, industrial production, global trade, and deep economic inequality.

== Human exceptionalism ==

MTI society rests on a foundational construct the papers call '''human exceptionalism''' — the belief that humanity is not part of nature and is thus exempt from natural laws such as density-dependent population regulation. Were humanity observing this pattern of population regulation in any other species, the limiting role of food, water and material availability would be considered obvious; MTI society's reticence to apply the same framework to itself is, the authors argue, itself revealing. Acknowledging resource limits would also require acknowledging gross inequality, and in turn structural change to economy and society.

== The Maximum Power Principle and top-heavy structure ==

Selfish accumulation within MTI civilisation reflects the [[Maximum Power Principle]]: systems that structure themselves to maximise energy appropriation and most efficiently transform captured energy into self-maintenance, growth and reproduction tend to "succeed." This produces a literal power imbalance in which those who control disproportionate energy flows rise to the top, and the resulting top-heavy, unequal social structure — reinforced by patriarchal, capitalist, industrial and colonialist institutions — persists because institutions only regulate behaviour so long as doing so poses no existential threat to the status quo (institutional path dependence).

== See also ==

[[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Maximum Power Principle]] · [[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]]

Economic Growth

imported>Merz Institute — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:52:18 GMT

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Paper One treats '''economic growth''' ideology as one of three critical drivers of the behavioural crisis, acting primarily on the consumption lever.

== Two definitions of "the economy" ==

Economists conventionally define the economy as the organised activities and behaviours associated with production, allocation, exchange and consumption of scarce goods and services. The paper argues this is a limited definition, and proposes an ecologist's alternative: the set of behaviours and activities by which humans interact with their biophysical environment (the ecosphere) to acquire material resources and dispose of resulting waste. On this view, economic accounts should record all energy and material throughput from the natural world through the human subsystem and back into nature — including goods that never enter formal markets.

== How the growth belief took hold ==

Simplistic economic thinking conceives of humans as self-interested utility maximisers with unlimited material demands and no attachment to family or community, and treats scarcity as solvable by raising the input of other factors (capital, labour, knowledge) or by price-driven substitution. This made it easy for MTI society to accept the economy as untethered from nature and human ingenuity as unbounded — accepting, in turn, the notion of unlimited economic growth fostered by continuous technological progress.

== The numbers ==

Real gross world product has grown 100-fold, and average per-capita income (consumption) has increased 14-fold (twice that in wealthy countries) since the early 1800s. This was made possible not primarily by improving population health but by fossil-fuel-powered technology: fossil energy is still 81% of primary energy (2022). Between 1800 and 2021, global fossil fuel use increased 1,402-fold. The average world citizen today uses 175 times as much fossil fuel as their 1800 counterpart, and humanity has burned half of all fossil fuels ever consumed in just the last 30 years.

== See also ==

[[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]] · [[Maximum Power Principle]]

Marketing

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Paper One identifies '''marketing''' as a critical driver of overshoot, acting on both the consumption and waste levers — while arguing, in its final sections, that the marketing, media and entertainment industries may also be humanity's best available tool for correction.

== From functional differentiation to identity ==

Until the early twentieth century, marketing largely connected functionally differentiated products with willing buyers. As competition intensified, businesses differentiated beyond function: toothpaste became a confidence boost, cars came to signal status, sexiness or rebelliousness rather than space, speed or price. Consumption became less reflective of physical needs and more reflective of mood-boosting, identity-reinforcing, status-elevating psychology.

== Data-driven targeting ==

Consumer targeting has become increasingly effective through data collection and analytics. In the US, personal online data is tracked and shared an estimated 294 billion times a day (747 times per average American); in Europe, 197 billion times a day. By the time a US child reaches 13, AdTech companies hold an average of 72 million data points on them. The resulting overconsumption, combined with the waste it creates, disproportionately multiplied by population, is why the wealthy carry a far greater environmental footprint than the poor.

== Framing and signalling ==

Tversky and Kahneman's framing effects show that choices can be predictably shifted not by changing the options but by changing which qualities of an option are made salient ("98% fat free" vs. "2% milk fat"). The paper argues the same techniques that currently reinforce overconsumption could instead frame adaptive behaviours (flying less, driving less, having fewer children) around concrete personal benefit rather than sacrifice — since behaviour that doesn't feel rewarding won't persist. On status signalling specifically, there is early evidence of a counter-signalling effect among wealthier populations, where consuming visibly less (modest cars, transit, thrifted clothing) itself confers status.

== Tipping points ==

Social-convention research suggests a catalytic threshold around 25% adoption of a new norm in a population, beyond which adoption accelerates — illustrated by how "drink driving," once commonplace, became viewed as unacceptable by 92% of a population within decades.

== See also ==

[[Social Norms]] · [[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Pronatalism]]

Pronatalism

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'''Pronatalism''' is a set of social and institutional pressures placed on people to have children, often driven by forces such as patriarchy, religion, nationalism, militarism and capitalism. Paper One treats it as the critical driver acting on the population lever of overshoot.

== Positive and negative feedback ==

Positive feedback is expressed through glorification of motherhood and large families, and through financial incentives and subsidies for childbearing, including assisted reproductive technologies (an industry projected to reach $41 billion globally by 2026). Negative feedback is expressed through stigmatisation of contraceptive use, abortion, and life paths that don't fit dominant cultural narratives — single adults, childless and childfree people, LGBTQIA+ people, adoptive families, and those who regret parenthood or don't have the "right" number of children. Depending on the degree of patriarchal and institutional control in a given culture, this stigma can escalate to physical and emotional abuse, divorce, economic marginalisation and social ostracisation.

== Economic and political self-interest ==

Economists, political leaders and corporate elites regularly argue that high fertility ensures a steady supply of workers, consumers and taxpayers. Neoliberal feminism — described in the paper as feminism of the privileged, colonised by neoliberal ideology — has, by advocating for women to "have it all," reinforced a mandatory-motherhood narrative that has in turn been exploited by the assisted-reproduction industry.

== Coercion versus rights-based policy ==

Rights-based family-planning policy — giving women the means to control their own fertility through education and access — proved highly effective: Thailand, Indonesia and Iran saw fertility rates fall from over six to under two within decades. By contrast, coercive policies (China's one-child policy, forced abortion and sterilisation in Puerto Rico and India) caused serious human-rights violations and backfired by tainting all family-planning efforts with the association of coercion, strengthening and legitimising pronatalism. Currently, half of all pregnancies globally are unintended, and 257 million women are unable to manage their own fertility due to oppressive pronatalist norms.

== See also ==

[[Levers of Overshoot]] · [[Marketing]] · [[Social Norms]]

Levers of Overshoot

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Both papers frame [[Ecological Overshoot]] as driven by three direct levers: '''population''', '''consumption''' (energy/material), and '''waste generation'''. Growing population acts to multiply resource consumption and waste production — together, "economic throughput."

== A multiplier and two direct levers ==

Population functions as a multiplier on the other two levers rather than a fully independent driver: while per-capita impact varies enormously, total human numbers remain a critical variable in any ecologically grounded accounting of humanity's aggregate footprint. Historically, geometric population growth was regulated by natural negative feedbacks — resource depletion, disease, conflict — as populations approached local carrying capacity. [[Exosomatic Energy]] disabled most of these feedbacks over the last ~200 years.

== Who is pulling the levers ==

Ecological impact is profoundly unequal. A small, high-income fraction of the global population is responsible for the vast majority of the damage, which disproportionately harms the relatively poorer majority: individuals with incomes in the top 10% are responsible for 25–43% of environmental impact and 47% of CO2 emissions, while the bottom 10% contribute just 3–5%. The consumption patterns of this wealthy minority set the goalposts for the poorer majority, meaning interventions should be aimed first at those doing the most harm.

== See also ==

[[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Economic Growth]] · [[Pronatalism]] · [[Marketing]]

Social Norms

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'''Social norms''' are the entrenched, population-level expressions of [[Contextualisation]] — the point at which an individually learned way of expressing an [[Evolved Impulses]] becomes a shared, self-perpetuating cultural pattern, maintained through social and cultural selection.

== How norms form and spread ==

Marketing, media and entertainment industries contextualise, model, and perpetuate behaviours and norms through narrative — film, games, books — often without any intentionality or consideration of their influence. Even well-meaning attempts can unconsciously model and perpetuate MTI society's ecologically destructive norms. Social-convention research shows a catalytic threshold around 25% adoption of a new norm in a population, beyond which adoption accelerates — the mechanism credited with transforming drink driving from commonplace (performed by over half of male drivers) to viewed as unacceptable by 92% of a population within decades.

== Norms as leverage for intervention ==

Because storytelling and modelled behaviour shape appetites and norms so effectively, Paper One argues the marketing, media and entertainment industries — already responsible for creating and exacerbating the behavioural crisis — may be humanity's best available tool for reversing it, by intentionally modelling new, ecologically restorative norms rather than status- and consumption-maximising ones.

== See also ==

[[Marketing]] · [[Contextualisation]] · [[Evolved Impulses]]

Evolved Impulses

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'''Evolved impulses''' are innate human tendencies or drives that brought a fitness advantage and so were genetically preserved across human evolution through natural selection. They are phylogenetically conserved — fixed in form — even though their expression is entirely shaped by an individual's [[Information Environment]] (see [[Contextualisation]]).

== The impulses named in the papers ==

Paper One lists the previously highly adaptive, now self-defeating impulses behind overshoot behaviour as: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; acquiring, amassing and defending resources from competitors; displaying dominance, status or sex appeal through size, beauty, physicality, aggression and/or ornamentation; and procrastinating rather than acting when action has no immediate survival benefit (innate temporal, social and spatial [[Discounting]]).

== Worked examples (Paper Two, Table 3) ==

{| class="wikitable"
! Contextualised behaviour !! Contextualised need !! Evolved impulses
|-
| Purchasing and driving a new car || Personal transportation; affirmation of status || Status signalling; resource acquisition; belonging; pleasure seeking
|-
| Installing cameras, building a fence || Personal and family/in-group security || Territory defence; threat awareness; resource defence; out-group wariness
|-
| Eating candy, drinking soft drinks || Satisfying a "sweet tooth"; blood-sugar maintenance || Craving sweets (energy homeostasis); pleasure seeking; preference for calorie-dense food; effort minimisation
|-
| Sitting by and operating a heater || Thermoregulation || Attraction to "campfire"; comfort-seeking; discomfort avoidance
|-
| Founding and acquiring businesses || Material security; self-expression; increased social status || Resource acquisition and accumulation; status signalling; dominance signalling; pleasure seeking
|}

== See also ==

[[Contextualisation]] · [[Social Norms]] · [[Discounting]]

Contextualisation

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'''Contextualisation''' (and recontextualisation) is the process by which [[Evolved Impulses]] are given meaning through interaction with an individual's [[Information Environment]]. Impulses are innate, but the ways they manifest are not — they are informed over an individual's lifetime through learning that occurs in that environment.

== How it works ==

The impulse to signal status, for instance, appears universal, but whether it is expressed through feathers, jewellery, or a car depends entirely on the surrounding information environment — where and when a person was born and lived. From birth, individuals learn how to meet their needs through observation and experience; social context, learning and cultural norms support the formation of expectations — conscious and unconscious mental models of how the world works and what behaviours produce which consequences. These mental models are continuously revised as new experience interacts with existing ones, driving an ever-evolving set of predictions that influence behaviour.

== Where it happens ==

In MTI society, marketing and entertainment contextualise behaviours and norms through media (narrative, film, games, books) often without intentionality or consideration of the effect. The paper calls the information environment "a long lever for changing behaviour, culture and norms through widescale recontextualisation" — the basis for the intervention logic set out under the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]].

== See also ==

[[Evolved Impulses]] · [[Information Environment]] · [[Social Norms]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Selection by Consequences

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'''Selection by consequences''' is the principle, foundational to Paper Two's argument, that behaviour is shaped by the outcomes that follow it. B.F. Skinner argued behavioural selection occurs at three levels — ontogenetic (within an individual's lifetime), phylogenetic (across generations, via natural selection), and social/cultural (via group-level transmission). The premise traces back to Thorndike's Law of Effect, and while much of the surrounding detail has since been challenged, the core claim — that individual behaviour is determined by its consequences — has held.

== Reinforcement and punishment ==

Behaviour Analysis categorises consequences as reinforcing (desirable/rewarding — increased resources, social approval, higher status — which increase the likelihood a behaviour recurs) or punishing (undesirable/aversive, which decrease that likelihood). Reinforcement and punishment are not isolated events; they are often heavily socially mediated. Behaviour selection is an active, path-dependent process, based on the mental models an individual has built of likely consequences through observation and experience — and for a consequence to shape behaviour at all, reality has to go on satisfying the expectation it creates; an expected consequence that fails to materialise won't catalyse change.

This three-level selection framework is the scaffolding the paper builds the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] on top of: it is specifically the relationship between neurobiological and fitness-relevant consequences (see [[Consequences]]) that the gap concerns.

== See also ==

[[Consequences]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]

Consequences

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Paper Two co-opts terminology from Behaviour Analysis and Evolutionary Biology into two general categories of consequence, which together define the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]].

== Neurobiological consequences ==

An often-immediate neurobiological event — a feeling or sensation — experienced consciously or unconsciously as desirable/rewarding or undesirable/aversive. Formally, this is Behaviour Analysis's "reinforcing" or "punishing," and it is this outcome that actually determines, moment to moment, whether a behaviour is likely to be repeated. How a reinforcing consequence is delivered matters: reinforcement on a variable-ratio schedule (intermittent reinforcement, as in gambling) produces particularly strong and persistent behaviour patterns, linked to the dopaminergic system and reward prediction error — the mechanism behind the appeal of novelty and surprise.

== Fitness-relevant consequences ==

The effect of a behaviour on an individual's — or group's, or species' — likelihood of surviving and reproducing. These can be costly or beneficial, and immediate or delayed, but are characteristically more distant and diffuse than neurobiological consequences. They can be understood as self-inflicted selection pressures: the compounding, delayed bill a population's behaviour runs up against itself.

== Worked examples (Paper Two, Table 2) ==

{| class="wikitable"
! Behaviour !! Neurobiological consequence !! Fitness-relevant consequence
|-
| Using PFAS-laden products (non-stick cookware, raincoats, carpets) || Reinforcing convenience || Longer-term adverse health effects from PFAS exposure
|-
| Using a superyacht or private jet || Reinforcing status and pleasure gains || Increased mate preference from higher status; increased atmospheric carbon leading to ocean acidification and heat-related mortality
|-
| Outsourcing cognitive function to an AI LLM || Reinforcing ease || Depletion of freshwater and greenhouse-gas emissions from the resulting rise in energy consumption
|-
| Intensifying a dairy farming operation || Reinforcing financial and social status gains || Increased mate preference from higher status; delayed groundwater nitrate increases, with elevated cancer risk
|-
| A group decision to avert an operational crisis at a sewage plant by discharging partially treated sewage || Socially mediated reinforcement (crisis averted) || Increased disease burden from pathogen exposure downstream
|}

== See also ==

[[Selection by Consequences]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] · [[Discounting]]

Neurobiological/Fitness Gap

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The '''neurobiological/fitness gap''' is the energy-enabled temporal and/or spatial separation between the [[Consequences]] that actually determine whether a behaviour recurs (neurobiological) and that behaviour's longer-term fitness-relevant consequences, which have the potential to select the behaviour out. It is the paper's central theoretical contribution — distinct from standard evolutionary mismatch theory, which explains why an adapted-to-ancestral-conditions behaviour misfires in a modern environment, but not why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound rather than self-correct.

== How the gap forms ==

Under low-energy, pre-agricultural conditions, fitness-relevant consequences arrived close enough in time and space to shape neurobiological consequences directly — hunger, ostracism or death followed quickly enough on a maladaptive behaviour to flip its neurobiological payoff from reinforcing to punishing. [[Exosomatic Energy]] broke this proximity: trade, medical advances, synthetic fertiliser and similar technologies let humans keep the reinforcing neurobiological payoff of a behaviour while pushing its fitness cost over the horizon via temporal, spatial or social [[Discounting]]. The paper illustrates this with a fictional low-energy fishing community, where a fish-stock collapse quickly and locally converts fishing from reinforcing to punishing and the community adaptively contracts — contrasted with a high-energy society, where a drought's fitness-relevant consequences are absorbed by fertiliser, trade and drought-resistant seed before they can bite, so the underlying behaviour never gets corrected.

== Why it matters ==

Because the gap lets maladaptive behaviours persist, it also lets the surrounding [[Information Environment]] keep contextualising [[Evolved Impulses]] in maladaptive directions, entrenching them as [[Social Norms]]. The gap, not the impulses or behaviours themselves, is what is genuinely novel to MTI civilisation.

== Bridging the gap ==

Actually ''closing'' the gap would require cutting exosomatic energy use, which the paper treats as unlikely in the near term. It proposes instead that the gap can be ''bridged'' within the information environment, via two complementary routes:

# '''Recontextualise evolved impulses''' — redirect existing impulses (status, belonging, resource acquisition) toward adaptive, ecologically restorative expressions, rather than attempting to suppress the impulses themselves.
# '''Proxy consequences''' — deliberately engineer immediate, salient neurobiological consequences (reinforcing or punishing) that stand in for the real, distant fitness-relevant consequences, correcting behaviour on a human rather than a geological timescale. To extinguish a maladaptive behaviour, such proxies need to be heavily punishing, proximal and salient; to promote an adaptive one, heavily reinforcing and immediate.

'''Localisation''' follows directly from this logic: small-scale, local social structures are precisely where proximal consequences — and thus self-correction — remain possible without any engineered proxy at all, which is why the paper treats localisation/"recommunitisation" as a structural argument, not merely a value position.

The paper is explicit that the goal throughout is redirection, not suppression, of evolved drives — and flags, as a risk its authors take seriously, that the same toolkit could instead be captured by existing power structures for more effective, authoritarian control of the status quo.

== See also ==

[[Consequences]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]] · [[Discounting]] · [[Information Environment]]

Exosomatic Energy

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'''Exosomatic energy''' is energy sourced from outside the body — principally fossil fuels — as distinct from the metabolic energy the body extracts from food. It is the enabling condition for the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]]: humanity's access to dense exosomatic energy let it evade the negative feedbacks (resource depletion, disease, conflict) that previously kept population, consumption and waste in check.

== The scale of the shift ==

In roughly 200 years, fossil fuel use increased 1,300-fold, fuelling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product. It took ''H. sapiens'' about 350,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion (1820), and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion — a trajectory made possible by mechanised agriculture, irrigation, scientific plant breeding, synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and improved sanitation and healthcare, all underwritten by exosomatic energy.

== Distancing, not decoupling ==

The paper is explicit that this is not a genuine decoupling of the human enterprise from biophysical limits: growth is being financed by drawing down cumulative natural capital (fish stocks, forests, soils, fossil fuels, rare minerals), and contemporary civilisation is in fact more deeply embedded in ecosystems and the lithosphere than ever. High-income populations use financial wealth — itself a product of energy access — to distance themselves temporally and spatially from the worst effects of this drawdown; the poor have no equivalent recourse.

== See also ==

[[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] · [[Discounting]] · [[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Maximum Power Principle]]

Discounting

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'''Discounting''' is placing less value on something because of its distance in time, space, or social connection. Humans are described in both papers as innate temporal, spatial and social discounters — a strategy that was once wholly adaptive, prioritising the here-and-now and close relatives and friends, for individuals living in small, stable social groups within familiar home ranges. Discounting is central to how the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] operates: it is precisely what lets a distant fitness-relevant consequence fail to register against an immediate neurobiological payoff.

== Temporal discounting ==

Temporal discounting is not linear: the steepest drop in perceived value occurs closest to the present, so the difference between now and tomorrow feels more significant than the difference between ten and eleven years from now. This means immediate consequences exert a disproportionate pull on behaviour, making motivation for change unlikely in response to long-term ecological threats, even existential ones.

== Spatial and social discounting ==

Spatial discounting occurs when consequences in other countries or regions are discounted relative to local ones. Social discounting occurs when consequences affect people outside one's immediate social group. The paper's worked example is using an AI large language model while knowing its water and energy footprint: the people affected aren't in the user's social group (social discounting), the places affected aren't physically nearby (spatial discounting), and the impacts may be distant in time (temporal discounting) — so these discounted consequences have far less influence on behaviour than the immediate, gratifying neurobiological payoff of using the tool.

== See also ==

[[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] · [[Consequences]] · [[Evolved Impulses]]

Information Environment

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The '''information environment''' is the combination of a person's physical and social surroundings — everything perceived through the senses, consciously or unconsciously, including built spaces, natural environments, culture, media and social interactions. It is the medium through which [[Evolved Impulses]] get [[Contextualisation]], and the site in which the paper locates its proposed interventions.

== As a conditioning apparatus ==

Environmental inputs are perceived through the senses, both consciously and unconsciously, and interpretation is mediated by biological factors alongside conscious and unconscious cognition. The information environment contextualises evolved impulses: food, status signalling and home environments are all contextualised differently in different places around the world, and this is why the same underlying impulse can manifest as a decorative natural artefact in one culture and a luxury vehicle in another.

== Why it's the lever for intervention ==

Marketing, media and entertainment model and perpetuate behaviours and norms through narrative, often without intentionality — even well-meaning entertainment can unconsciously model and perpetuate ecologically destructive norms. Because behavioural susceptibility to storytelling and narrative is itself plausibly an evolved, adaptive trait, storytelling today likely still invokes that same susceptibility. This is why the paper calls the information environment "a long lever for changing behaviour, culture and norms through widescale recontextualisation," and the proposed route to [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] bridging operates entirely within it.

== See also ==

[[Contextualisation]] · [[Evolved Impulses]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] · [[Social Norms]]

Planetary Boundaries

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The '''Planetary Boundaries''' framework (Rockstrom et al., 2009) identifies nine dimensions of the Earth system, each with a boundary within which humanity and complex life can safely operate. Seven of the nine have now been crossed, which may lead to tipping points — abrupt, irreversible shifts in relevant variables that can cascade across interconnected systems. Paper Two treats the changes tracked by this framework as the representative, delayed [[Consequences]] (fitness-relevant) of human activity — the long-run bill that the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] keeps deferred.

== The nine boundaries (as described in the paper) ==

* '''Novel entities''' — synthetic chemicals, plastics, heavy metals and other substances introduced faster than the Earth can process them, including microplastics acting as vectors for other contaminants such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
* '''Stratospheric ozone depletion''' — raises surface UV risk; its recovery may itself become an unintended driver of accelerated warming, illustrating how interventions in complex systems can cascade unpredictably.
* '''Atmospheric aerosol loading''' — influences climate and regional patterns (e.g. monsoon systems); reduced aerosol emissions from marine shipping are credited with contributing to accelerated global heating.
* '''Ocean acidification''' — excess atmospheric CO2 absorption is lowering ocean pH, threatening calcifying organisms (corals, shellfish) and the ocean's role as a carbon sink.
* '''Modification of biogeochemical flows''' — industrial-agriculture-driven alteration of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles causing eutrophication, marine dead zones and biodiversity loss.
* '''Climate change''' — excess greenhouse gas emissions driving warming beyond the Holocene range and acting as a threat multiplier across other boundaries.
* '''Freshwater change''' — overextraction and mismanagement stressing rivers, aquifers and wetlands, with consequences for biodiversity, food security and human health, and a major contribution to sea-level rise.
* '''Land system change''' — conversion of forests, wetlands and grasslands to agricultural/urban land, a primary driver of biodiversity loss that also disrupts regional water and energy cycles.
* '''Biosphere integrity''' — accelerating loss of biodiversity and genetic diversity undermining ecosystem resilience and function; once crossed, considered irreversible on timescales relevant to modern humans.

== See also ==

[[Ecological Overshoot]] · [[Consequences]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]]

Maximum Power Principle

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The '''Maximum Power Principle''' (Odum & Pinkerton, 1955; related to Lotka's 1945 "Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle") is a systems property invoked in Paper Two to explain why selfish accumulation dominates [[MTI Society]] despite its ecological cost. The most "successful" natural systems — from individuals to species to whole ecosystems — are those that structure themselves to maximise their energy appropriations and most efficiently transform captured energy into self-maintenance, growth and reproduction.

== From energy capture to power structure ==

This produces a literal power imbalance: those who control disproportionate energy flows, by whatever means, rise to the top. The paper argues the top-heavy structure of MTI civilisation, with its extreme levels of inequality, is a direct expression of this principle operating at civilisational scale — and that the resulting concentration of financial and political influence creates self-reinforcing feedbacks that prioritise short-term economic growth and wealth preservation, entrenching the status quo against correction (institutional path dependence).

== See also ==

[[MTI Society]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]] · [[Economic Growth]]

Niche Construction Theory

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'''Niche construction''' is when an organism alters its environment in ways that change how natural selection operates on it, or on other species — the definition used in Joseph Merz's VUW guest lecture on the behavioural crisis, and a mechanism that runs implicitly throughout Paper Two. Niche Construction Theory is one of the four theoretical strands the [[Human Behavioural Crisis]] framework integrates, alongside Selection by Consequences (operant conditioning), evolutionary biology, and Exosomatic Energy.

== How it applies to the behavioural crisis ==

Humans are an extreme case of niche construction: rather than simply adapting to a given environment, humanity actively builds the [[Information Environment]] it then has to adapt to — cities, markets, media, technology. This is also an ecological inheritance: the constructed environment is passed down to the next generation, who inherit not just genes but the modified niche itself, including whichever [[Social Norms]] and contextualised [[Evolved Impulses]] that niche currently rewards.

The lecture frames this as placing a design obligation on humanity: "We need to go about niche construction in a way that leaves fitness-relevant consequences of our behaviours proximal enough to influence the neurobiological consequences that influence behavioural selection." In other words, niche construction is not inherently good or bad — it is the mechanism by which the [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] either stays open (an information environment that keeps consequences distant) or gets bridged (one deliberately designed to keep them close).

== See also ==

[[Human Behavioural Crisis]] · [[Information Environment]] · [[Neurobiological/Fitness Gap]] · [[Exosomatic Energy]]

Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023)

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Paper Two: Mind the Gap (sequel)

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