Human Behavioural Crisis

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.

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