Global consumption rates of vital resources suggest that we have surpassed the capacity of the Earth to sustain current levels, much less future trajectories of growth in human population and economy.
Humans have a dual nature. We are subject to the same natural laws and forces as other species yet dominate global ecology and exhibit enormous variation in energy use, cultural diversity, and apparent social organization. We suggest scientists tackle these challenges with a macroecological approach-using comparative statistical techniques to identify deep patterns of variation in large datasets and to test for causal mechanisms. We show the power of a metabolic perspective for interpreting these patterns and suggesting possible underlying mechanisms, one that focuses on the exchange of energy and materials within and among human societies and with the biophysical environment. Examples on human foraging ecology, life history, space use, population structure, disease ecology, cultural and linguistic diversity patterns, and industrial and urban systems showcase the power and promise of this approach.
The current economic paradigm, which is based on increasing human population, economic development, and standard of living, is no longer compatible with the biophysical limits of the finite Earth. Failure to recover from the economic crash of 2008 is not due just to inadequate fiscal and monetary policies. The continuing global crisis is also due to scarcity of critical resources. Our macroecological studies highlight the role in the economy of energy and natural resources: oil, gas, water, arable land, metals, rare earths, fertilizers, fisheries, and wood. As the modern industrial technological-informational economy expanded in recent decades, it grew by consuming the Earth’s natural resources at unsustainable rates. Correlations between per capita GDP and per capita consumption of energy and other resources across nations and over time demonstrate how economic growth and development depend on “nature’s capital”. Decades-long trends of decreasing per capita consumption of multiple important commodities indicate that overexploitation has created an unsustainable bubble of population and economy.
Complexity is both a buzzword and a paradigm in the biophysical sciences and, increasingly, the social sciences. We define “social complexity” as the nonlinear escalation of costs and emergent infrastructure with rising energy use and concentrated power as societies develop. Two paths to social complexity are technotasking, which relies on technological break-throughs and is often politically hierarchical, and labortasking, which relies on skilled labor pools and is often heterarchical. We suggest several pathways to greater degrees of complexity and present two case studies emphasizing the role of labor-tasking; an in-depth review of the ancient Maya and a shorter introduction to the recent Balinese. Both of these complex societies used labortasking to adapt to local ecological limitations in semitropical settings. These societies used heterarchical organizations to accretionally engineer and manage their environments, strategies that promoted long-term resilience. Case studies such as these provide a nuanced picture of different paths to social complexity and highlight their relative costs, benefits, and potential for long-term sustainability.
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