William Catton: sequel to overshoot.

AuthorArdery, Phil Jr.
PositionBottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse - Book review

Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr., Xlibris, 2009, 290 pp, ISBN: 978-1-4415-2241-2 (hardcover), 978-1-4415-2224-5 (softcover).

Near the end of this book, William R. Catton, Jr. writes, "All the previous chapters have been aimed at enabling the reader to see why, with great reluctance and regret, I am compelled to doubt that we can confidently hope to avoid a serious 'crash' as the focal human experience of the 21st century--envisioned also as our species having to pass through an ecological 'bottleneck.'"

The bottleneck will involve some measure of "actual population die-off, such as befalls other species when they overshoot their habitat's carrying capacity." Die-off will be reduced to the degree that birth rates fall, and, more significant still, to the degree that people in industrialized countries, Americans in particular, "drastically downsize our per capita 'ecological footprint.'"

To achieve the less painful passage through the impending bottleneck, Catton says, "Unprecedented society-wide and world-wide cooperation is urgently needed" to pull back from "the abusive dominance of the biosphere by Homo colossus." (The term Homo colossus, coined in Catton's 1980 classic Overshoot, describes modern human beings whose acquired technology greatly enlarges per capita resource appetites and per capita emissions.) Probabilities for achieving the needed cooperation are close to zero, Catton reasons, because our biological and cultural inheritances militate against it. Specifically, Catton points to the disastrous interplay of natural selection, the commercial takeover of human language, and industrial society's extreme specialization in the workplace.

Catton credits early 20th century American sociologist E.A. Ross (Sin and Society, 1907) for recognizing the desocializing impact of specialized labor, though of course Ross did not foresee its ecological consequences. Catton writes, "In a society with elaborate division of labor we rely upon others to look after our sewage, invest our savings, nurse our sick and teach our children." Today's mutualism differs from pre-industrial mutualism in the degree to which modern transactions are commercialized, executed as an exchange for money. As Catton states it, "The interdependence generated by division of labor has made money an essential aspect of life. This drives people toward seeing 'the economy' as a money tree. We grow up learning ways to participate in plucking...

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