Humans depend upon a healthy environment to sustain vital life-support systems. Yet, our decisions about economic progress are dominated by the conflicting notion of limitless growth despite living in a world having a finite capacity to sustain life.
The total rate of human use of the earth is now estimated to be about 75% greater than the world’s capacity to support humanity sustainably. The Global Footprint Network finds that a year’s worth of the earth’s capacity to support humans was reached by the end of July in 2026. Consumption of resources during the remaining five months of the year will further diminish nature’s ability to support future needs. Therefore, the dominant civilization, operating under the framework of unlimited growth, is fundamentally threatening our shared future.
Evidence of this accumulating global deprivation takes various forms which, in combination, are known as the meta-crisis. Among the components of the meta-crisis are climate change, growing famine, increasing disruption in supply chains, rising rates of premature death, record-breaking concentration of wealth, spreading impoverishment and disease, worsening water quality, rampant disinformation that undermines essential collaboration, the decline of democratic institutions, and alarming rates of species extinction.
The Global Social Progress Index reports a decline in human well-being worldwide that has been stagnating for at least the past five years. Their assessment, which covers 171 nations and some 99% of total human population “is the first effort of its kind measuring the social progress impact of climate change. By Measuring CO2 emissions per capita, material consumption per capita, and biodiversity, we see that the countries that perform well on the Just Transition Score have more sustainable social progress.”
As enlightening and helpful as this endeavor is, by focusing on climate change alone, it does not encompass all critical aspects of the insidious meta-crisis.
Others analyzing these issues conclude that prevailing incentives reward limitless growth and unrestrained resource exploitation by prioritizing short-term profits over long-term viability of life-support systems worldwide. The values and negligent assumptions reflected in our development practices cultivate a false sense of control and confidence, propagating material accumulation and other self-destructive practices that generate an assortment of problems entangled in the meta-crisis.
To resolve this destructive cycle, some are promoting a regenerative model for economic transformation.
“There is a broader crisis of civilizational purpose that appears to necessitate political and economic transformation, and there are deeper socio-emotional, educational, epistemic and spiritual features of our predicament that manifest as many [indicator] of meta-crisis: the lack of a meaningful global [identity], widespread learning needs, self-subverting political [policies], and disenchanted worldviews.
“These different features of our world are obscured by their entanglement with each other. It is difficult to orient ourselves towards meaningful action that is commensurate with our understanding because we are generally unclear about the relationship between different [challenges] and what they mean for us.
“We pursue economic prosperity, national security, political stability, and environmental sustainability in [isolated] fashion as narrow goals without considering the more complex repercussions.”
To expediently transition toward practices that are sustainable, restorative, and regenerative, strategic planning on a systemic basis must be adopted on a broad scale, incorporating three challenging factors:
· Strategic decisions must often be made without sufficient information.
· Decision-makers must understand and acknowledge evidence of global environmental damage, its causes, and its consequences.
· The precautionary principle must be applied throughout development policies.
The precautionary principle [PP] is a risk management tool used to guide public policy development. It features four important guidelines: (1) taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; (2) shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; (3) exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and (4) increasing public participation in decision making.
The PP reverses the burden of proof applied in many prior decision-making practices, but that is now under attack by the powerful proponents of artificial intelligence (AI). They claim that such assessments interfere with expedient pursuit of profitable ventures, especially when these activities are misleadingly portrayed as urgent matters of national security.
Consequently, the difficulty of this dilemma is further complicated by AI, making it yet another entrenched aspect of the meta-crisis. Controlling AI has become prominent in response to recently reported renegade AI activities that broke the rules of their governing algorithms, deceiving human operators. For similar reasons, controlling all interconnected aspects of the meta-crisis is an urgent priority because these entangled problems pose monumental threats to our environment, democratic institutions, and perhaps human existence itself.
Given ongoing global-trade issues, entrenched self-defeating's policy incentives, and intense domestic and international political tensions, achieving the needed transformation presents an unprecedented challenge. However, a good place to start is signing and circulating the petition urging Congress to endorse global controls on artificial intelligence.