Indigenous Leader, Voice, Guardian of the Rainforest

Chumpi Washikiat is an indigenous Achuar leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon. He is a global advocate for the protection of one of the last intact rainforest ecosystems on Earth. As General Manager of Kapawi Ecolodge, a community owned initiative of the Achuar, he leads a model that integrates environmental stewardship, cultural preservation, and sustainable economic development.

Chumpi’s work represents a bridge between worlds: connecting ancestral knowledge with global conversations on sustainability, leadership, and long term responsibility. He has been a long standing ambassador of the Achuar worldview, contributing to international dialogue, including participation in global climate forums such as COP30 and ChangeNOW.

Chumpi’s leadership reminds us that leadership is about restoring balance between people, communities, and the living systems that sustain us all.

Connecting with Chumpi

Chumpi had requested that we meet up whilst he was attending the World Travel Market 2026 in London. I was keen to explore indigenous wisdom. The story of the Eagle and the Condor seems very real to me. The modern techno-industrial community is the Eagle in the story of humanity splitting into two directions, the indigenous people are represented by the Condor. My upbringing was within the Eagle community, Chumpi comes from the Condor. We urgently need to work together to experiment with ways to return within Earth’s biocapacity.

Chumpi learned English thirty years ago when he spent nine months in the USA. It was a painful experience after his young life in the Amazon rainforest, but he felt called by a vision. Through learning English he was able to commence a small trade in tourism allowing a few visitors to experience the powerful natural beauty of the Amazon and the Achuar way of life. Chumpi is responsible for the Kapawi Ecolodge experience; it is one of the most remote and culturally immersive destinations in the entire Amazon basin. Profits from this tourism help the Achuar people to fight to protect their surrounding rainforest from financial exploitation.

Chumpi told me that the Eagle NGOs that profess an interest in the Amazon rain forest do not pass profits into the hands of the local indigenous people. Having realised that this is unlikely to change, he is now in the process of setting up an NGO to directly represent the Achuar community and the protection of the rain forest. The NGO he has established is called Fundación MAKETAI SO MUCH. The Achuar word ‘maketai’ translates to ‘thank you’ in English.

Chumpi also told how he senses the opening of the mind when visitors from the Eagle communities experience the way of life of the Achuar. This leads me to believe that the Kapawi Ecolodge experience serves as both an educational and emotional experience. This brief video is about the life experiences of a Dominican Catholic Nun, Sister Jaguar, who eventually found personal peace through her experience of visiting Kapawi.

Chumpi would like to see the Achuar people develop their own university and hospitals. We urgently need to learn from each other’s experiences; and work together to slow the human momentum that is destroying Earth’s ecosystems. I warned Chumpi that Eagle medicine comes with ecological and emotional costs. The Eagle community often forget that death is a natural process that is essential for new life to flourish. I explore these issues in chapters 7, 8, and 10 of my free book: Saving Us From Ourselves.

Pronatalism and Patriarchy

I asked Chumpi “How do the Achuar ensure that their population does not grow too great?” He confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that they are inclined to have large families. Chumpi has nine children. The first died, and then he had been hoping for a boy and instead baby girls kept arriving, he lost one child of three years old. Child mortality is common among Achuar. He told me that the status of an Achuar man grows with the number of children that he sires. This culture is common in other indigenous communities.

In the Eagle cultures the status of a man grows with the size of his wallet. Both of these status measures are unhelpful in global ecosystems collapse and they need to change. Chumpi acknowledged that if everyone had nine children it will soon exacerbate resource problems.

Chumpi’s eldest daughter has been to university and is qualified in engineering. She has one child and he has heard her saying they are unlikely to have more. Apparently, there is a growing ‘midwife’ role within Achuar communities, these women are teaching about birth control. Chumpi is hoping that his daughter will learn English and help him to run the Kapawi Ecolodge some day. It is often said that female education is the best way to tackle population overshoot. However, we clearly need to discuss the unhelpful culture of admiring large families as well.

A Toxic Manosphere within the Eagle Community

Within the Eagle culture the ‘virility’ status has morphed into the violent behaviour towards women that we see in the toxic manosphere that is inhabited by the rich and powerful like the Epstein elite, and the men that admire and emulate those elite. The author James Dakin is playing a key role initiating the difficult conversation about Healing the Divide between men and women that exists in the Eagle population.

It is clear that neither the Eagle worldview nor the Condor are ready to fully acknowledge the extent of global population overshoot. Science informs us that a sustainable global population would be less than one third of the eight billion today; this estimate assumes a minimal consumption per capita.

A new Educational Model

The Kapawi Ecolodge is an invaluable educational facility that could accelerate the coming together of the Eagle and the Condor cultures. Perhaps Oxford University could fund it as a center for cultural cross-pollination and biodiversity monitoring and research?

Direct involvement from such a prestigous university could enable the Achuar people to directly contribute their unique culture and their understanding of the biodiversity in the Amazon rain forest into developing a new educational model intended to steer humanity back within the carrying capacity of Earth.

Humanity’s Transition

The substack series Humanity’s Transition aligns with the Eagle and the Condor story. In the article What does it mean to be Humanity? two concepts are defined that align with the Eagle / Condor split. Importance is the dominant focus of the Eagle community and Meaning dominates in the Condor communities.

The 𝗦𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲 offered by the author Alex Goodhall, suggests that every action we take is influenced by what feels most significant at that moment.

Significance has two components:
• 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲: What benefits us as individuals. Food, security, wealth, recognition and advancement.
• 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: What gives us connection, relatedness and coherence. Love, compassion, belonging and our relationship with nature.

This significance principle will help us to navigate a transition wisely. But only if we are willing to sacrifice the delusion that we can fix the existential crisis. Global ecosystems collapse presents a grave predicament, climate change is one symptom. A predicament cannot be solved; it requires a wise response that will maxmise mitigation. Minimal consumption per capita and minimal birth rates will maxmise mitigation from global ecosystems collapse. It is as simple as that. The psychology that prevents this response is the challenge. So far, we lack the humility and the emotional maturity to admit that we have entirely failed to protect Earth’s ecosystems from man-made collapse.

The Earth Stewardship Journal are planning a Special Edition to offer ideas connected to Strategy 5 of the IPES Transformative Change Assessment. My abstract Higher Education — Experimenting with Equitable Economic Degrowth is being considered. The paper would aim to alter the entire dynamic of our existing higher education structure. The existing education model was designed to accelerate the industrial revolution. Technology alone cannot mitigate the collapse. We have yet to acquire the wisdom to use technology frugally and wisely. There are three key drivers to man-made ecosystems collapse: Population, Affluence, Technology (I=PAT). If we wish to slowdown the momentum in the collapse we need to minimise birthrates, affluence per capita, and our reliance on technology.

The image below provides a helpful introduction to the common differences arising between the Eagle and Condor worldview.

Sustainably Talking

Michael Baxter was brave enough to invite me to share my radical ideas on a public platform. Any discussion like this is extremely helpful for both participants to share their perception on the human predicament. I would love for everyone to have the time and the opportunity to pitch into the collective conversation that is needed to reshape our civilisation into a direction that migh maximise mitigation from ecosystems collapse.

The full video is available on YouTube. I was grateful for the experience to express my opinions on the challenges that face humanity as ecosystems collapse escalates. The time in minutes and seconds is shown below if you are interested in listening to some highlights.

7:00 Deciding Whether to Have Children. Discussing the difficulty facing young adults when deciding whether to risk bringing a child into our collapsing world. Our young adults need our emotional support both ways, whether they decide to become parents or not. They do not need to be made to feel guilty about choosing not to have children. Nor do they deserve to have contraceptive or abortive healthcare withheld. We must provide as much help as possible for them to make fully informed choices, and to facilitate that choice, and the global village needs to come together to ensure every child receives subsistence and shelter. Rachel Donald’s article Should You Have Kids? is an excellent guide.

15:15 Pronatalist Peer Pressure. Huge peer pressure exists for a women deciding they do not want to bring children into ecosystems collapse. The Birth Strike movement collapsed in 2020 from the vindictive reception it received from mainstream media. JD Vance sneered at women choosing not to have children as ‘Cat Ladies’.

17:30 Catastrophe. Tipping points, the Black Swan concept by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A mindset tipping point would be a good thing.

20:10 Energy Transition and Doughnut Economics. 100 years of ecological debt means that we cannot simply step into sustainability by using Kate Raworth’s Doughnut model.

21:20 Ecological Debt versus Financial Debt. Money is just a tool for exchanging resources, a financial debt is a concept that we can erase if we choose. Ecological debt has existential qualities, like the mass extinction event and climate change. Jean Christophe Duval (Debunk’Onomy) is suggesting a monetary model (NEMO IMS) that could run alongside the debt-based model to facilitate the very long-term projects that offer ecological returns rather than monetary returns.

23:07 Efficiency. Confronting Jevon’s Paradox

24:00 Military Industrial Complex and the Financial Ponzi scheme. The many conomists who are pointing out the Ponzi Scheme qualities of the global financial system: e.g. Gary Stevenson and Prof Steve Keen

28:20 Global North/South. The total lack of wise leadership from the Global North means they have no right to criticise anyone else.

29:50 Our Fantasy World. Accepting the speed and scale of escalating ecosystems collapse is key to the mindset shift.

31:34 The Energy Transition. This just exacerbates the situation whilst we keep the mindset for economic growth and pronatalism.

33:55 Immigration (UK). Reference to the Das Gupta report: Economics of Biodiversity which clearly states that the UK is overpopulated. Discussions about immigration need to be framed in the context of man-made global and local ecosystems collapse to avoid drifting into the Machiavellian technique of finding a scapegoat to blame.

37:28 Valuing Natural Capital It is a huge challenge for business leaders to learn that Natural Capital is more valuable than money

39:16 Who needs to Sacrifice What? We all need to sacrifice the belief that we can fix the existential crisis. We also need to embrace the belief that we can achieve profound changes to our socio-economic cultures that would enable us to minimise consumption per capita and birth rates globally. We all need to give up the pretence and the delusion. We cannot afford the military industrial complex nor the wealth hierarchy in its current grotesque and growing proportions.

40:30 Climate Change Denial. This is just part of the same mass psychosis that enables us to pretend that the global finance system is not collapsing. Our prestigious universities are dedicated to maintaining the wealth hierarchy. There is no funding for researching how to implement Degrowth strategies, so they don’t go down that route, although it is quite obviously a prerequisite for sustainability.

43:21 Closing Words. Life could become very exciting for everyone if we just had the guts to admit growth economics is not working and begin to collaborate on peaceful downsizing.

The Stupids

According to Carlo Cippola, behavior that injures both yourself and others can be defined as ‘Stupid’. This article puts forward a case that most of our environmental organisations are currently operating in this category. My justification for this claim follows.

The Living Well Within Limits (LiLi) project is widely referenced as an aspirational model by those in the field of sustainability. The LiLi project models the minimum biophysical resources (like energy and materials) required to guarantee a decent standard of living for the global population while preventing warming from exceeding 1.5°C. There is nothing in this project that factors in the extra burden of air-conditioning as temperatures soar up into unbearable levels, nor the impact of escalating ecosystems collapse, nor the growing ecological burden incurred by AI.

The LiLi project concluded in 2021; it assumes that 1.5 degrees of warming does not play out. Current data shows emissions have not dropped fast enough, making an overshoot of the 1.5°C limit very likely. There is recent research that estimates that previous models underestimated by 25%. The conclusion has enormous implications. For instance, a project called the Climate Action Tracker currently projects that average global surface temperatures will rise by 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 if countries implement existing policies. This new research suggests that we are instead heading for 3.25°C.

We are on a finite planet of 12 billion global hectares. We consume 20 billion global hectares per annum. We have been consuming more than 12 billion global hectares per annum for over 50 years. This is the definition of ecological overshoot. The carrying-capacity is about 6 billion global hectares, this allows space for biodiversity to flourish. The last time humans consumed less than 6 billion gha per annum was about 100 years ago. Consumption per capita was much less and population was about 2 or 3 billion. We have recent research that estimates a sustainable human population is around 2.5 billion, less than one third of current levels.

I know of no environmental organisation that is suggesting that we would be wise to shrink our global enterprise back within 6 billon global hectares. There is unanimous refusal to consider the obvious route to maximise mitigation from ecosystems collapse, namely minimal birth rates and minimal consumption per capita. This is an example of Stupid behaviour as defined by Cippola; we are harming ourselves and harming others by not even attempting to maximise mitigation from ecosystems collapse.

The Intelligents

According to Cippola the ‘Intelligents’ create win-win situations. Many people will be inclined to think that a successful entrepreneur will come into this bracket. An entrepreneur creates jobs so their employees will also benefit from his ingenuity, and they can afford to buy houses and raise families. However, this is a thoroughly anthropocentric view. The extra houses for the staff and their children will all add to the total burden on Earth’s ecosystems. In ecological terms this type of ‘intelligent’ behaviour has become extremely harmful to both employer and employee. This was not the case before we began to exceed Earth’s carrying capacity. This example demonstrates that behaviour that was at one time beneficial can become harmful in a different context. In this way behavior that was once Intelligent by Cippola’s definition, can shift into the Stupid category through changing externalities.

Unfortunately, humans became habituated to admiring the wealthy and believing that they help us to ‘progress’. Wealthy people are assumed to be in the Intelligent category unless they are seen to be Bandits by directly harming other humans. The damage that they do to Earth’s ecosystems was always ignored. We have created huge ecological debts; not one environmental organisation admits that these debts need to be fully repaid before genuine sustainability can be achieved.

The Bandits

If we factor in the harm to our ecosystems, then we can see that any wealthy financial Bandits are harming themselves as well as the victims of their malicious actions; for they will have a high ecological footprint due to their wealth. Therefore in the current context, many Bandits have also moved into the Stupid category.

As for the Bandits inflicting physical harm, examples like Israel and the USA are inflicting huge ecological damage in their attempts to rule the world. Thus these Bandits are also relocating into the Stupid category.

The Helpless

The Helpess probably needs to include people like me, living in torment and anguish. Spending my time saying ‘We are in trouble, we are harming ourselves’ please stop. Those who believe that they are Intelligents, or Bandits despise people like me. They don’t think an ordinary person can criticise beliefs that they hold. They have not yet spotted the shifting reality that recategorised them into the Stupid quadrant.

Conclusion

This article is dedicated to Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov, who has great faith in the LiLi project and rejects the idea of teaching eco-aware family planning. A special thank you to the Fair Start Movement for all your work tackling the illegal baselining that underpins most of our modern techno-industrial civilisation.

UK citizens are invited to submit their opinion regarding a Green Paper that suggests big changes to our public media channels e.g. BBC, Channel4. The Jewish Voice for Liberation published an article discussing the potential dangers in this idea. The JVL article is full of excellent evidence of the failures of the UK public media to report news events accurately, especially concerning the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel.

The deadline for public comment is the end of August 2026. This article shares the response made in the name of my publishing company Poems For Parliament. By submitting my response as an organisation I was able to waive the need for anonymity. If you wish to comment yourself on the Green Paper, please go to this document, scroll down to where it says respond online, and then click. Below is my letter to watchthisspace@dcms.gov.uk .

Poems for Parliament — letter to Ian Murray, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport

26 August 2026

Dear Ian Murray

Response to Watch this Space: a new strategic direction for UK media

I am responding in the name of the publishing house Poems for Parliament. We share all the concerns expressed in the letter dated 12 August 2026 from CAMPAIN Ltd and shared publicly in this JVL article. This publishing house focuses on lobbying the UK government to recognise the ecocidal qualities of growth economics. It was established in 2020 and delivered a booklet of poems to every MP in September 2020. The recommendations in that booklet are still appropriate in 2026 and they form the basis of the response from Poems for Parliament to the ‘Watch this Space’ Green Paper.

In order to set a worthy example at the climate COP we need the following:

Raise Awareness — An awareness campaign equivalent to that achieved for the COVID emergency. Advising UK citizens that climate and ecological collapse is now underway. Advising them that in order to mitigate the long-term impact it is not wise to try to maintain all aspects of the way of life that the UK have enjoyed in recent decades. The ecological cost of that life-style was never sustainable.

Emergency Government - Create a cross-party emergency government. This will ensure that the responsibility for the difficult decisions that need to be taken are shared. It will also send a powerful message to other world leaders, that we regard the Climate and Environmental breakdown as both real and urgent.

Ecological Objectives — Make the UK the first country to rewrite its objectives from the perspective of an ecological budget rather than a financial one.

Embrace Degrowth — Make the UK the first country to actively seek Degrowth as part of its emergency damage limitation exercise with regard to the ongoing and rapidly accelerating Climate and Ecological collapse.

Public information is key to achieving these recommendations, but instead it is being used to protect and perpetuate ongoing ecocidal social patterns.

Overall response

The Green paper explicitly states ‘driving growth and inward investment’ as one of its aims. Driving GDP growth is very unwise during escalating ecosystems collapse. For humanity to survive the Sixth Mass Extinction we need to shrink both global GDP and population to a third of current levels. This draft research paper about the cultural causes of climate change links to the relevant research. The paper weaves together psychology, geopolitics, environmental science, economics, philosophy and demography into a single, cohesive framework that might help to steer humanity into a wiser direction. The role of public media is key in achieving the awareness and emotional resilience required for the profound behavioural changes that are needed to soften the unfolding ecological collapse.

Media Spending Power Issues

The media is experiencing spending power issues because of growing wealth inequality and the fact that public assets have migrated into private hands over recent decades. This arises from the fact that there is no cap on personal wealth, and no mechanisms for ensuring that wealth is evenly distributed.

We rely on a model of coercive consumerism to fuel GDP growth. This strategy incurs a high ecological cost. We are in an escalating global ecological crisis and a growing wealth inequality crisis. These phenomena are closely inter-related. We would be wise to introduce a wealth cap at around ten million USD; see Ingrid Robeyns book Limitarianism for the ethical justification. A wealth cap would facilitate a national rationing scheme that ensures basic provisions for everyone whilst we work out how to downsize back within the carrying capacity of the UK whilst hopefully maintaining our sense of humour. Artistic skills and any storytelling that addresses these harsh realities imaginatively will help to build communal and emotional resilience.

Trustworthy Sources

The designers of the online questionnaire will have preconceived ideas about ‘trustworthy’ sources. Any source that challenges their cultural norms will likely be regarded as ‘untrustworthy’. Therefore, all this part of the online survey becomes irrelevant once we accept the need for profound behavioural changes because of ecosystems collapse.

For evidence of ecosystems collapse please refer to the following:

• IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019
• State on Nature Report 2023
• WWF — Living Planet Report 2024
• UK Nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security 2026
• Scientists Warning to Humanity 2026

Questions about Media Literacy

Right now, the UK government is resisting the need for socio-economic transition towards economic Degrowth. Therefore, all the changes in the Green Paper are intended to defend business-as-usual. If the Green Paper was intended to drive the emotional evolution towards maximum mitigation from climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse then the survey would have had a very different framing. However, that is clearly not the case. Instead, the outcome might become tool to perpetuate the misleading belief that growth economics and growing wealth inequality are not driving ecosystems collapse. These dangers are described in detail in the JVL article that included the response from CAMPAIN Ltd.

Timeframe

The suggested time frame extends way beyond the escalating ecosystems crisis. This demostrates the total failure of the UK government to acknowledge the speed and scale of the unfolding ecosystem collapse. Parents are still pestering for grandchildren whilst the chances of humans surviving this century are diminishing daily. Recent research estimates a sustainable global population would be less than one third of current levels. The UK itself is in population overshoot to a similar extent. Any debate about immigration will regress into racist overtones if the reality of population overshoot is not acknowleged. A voluntary birth pause would be the wisest recommendation whilst we reorient our priorities.

The ecosystems collapse is accelerating rapidly. It needs addressing now. During the timescale discussed in this Green Paper we shall see the end of the stable ecosystems that we have known in recent decades.

Poems For Parliament — Commitment to delivering the Education needed for Eco-equity and Degrowth

If the UK government was to aspire to lead the world in shrinking the wealth hierarchy back within the biophysical limits of Earth, then the work by Poems for Parliament can help with this profound change. The public media could lead a citizen-wide assembly to discuss the ecological emergency publicly and explain the need for a wealth cap and to enable everyone to vote on an acceptable level. In the same way a public debate about the eco-cost of modern healthcare could be delivered. An eco-aware healthcare system would include a cap on the eco-cost of healthcare for any individual.

Universities might choose to put a hold on traditional formats for study, whilst a collective envisioning exercise is hosted by public media. All these ideas are described more fully in the paper: Global Imperatives — A call for Leadership from the UK which envisions a UK transitioning to a fair and sustainable economic model.

Environmental Impacts

The opportunity to soften the escalating ecosystems collapse may already be in the past. It is impossible to know what humanity could achieve if they choose profound behavioural changes to mitigate the ecosystems collapse. This is not on any political agenda as yet. We are engineering our own extinction with enthusiasm, in this brief video George Tsakraklides describes the biological mechanism that is in operation.

Numerous economists like Gary Stevenson, Hans Stegeman, Yannis Varoufakis, and Prof Steve Keen are monitoring the unfolding financial collapse. It is only the public media that allows the mainstream economists to continue to deceive themselves and their audience.

To what Extent does the Media need Reform?

It is the GDP growth mindset and tacit acceptance of extreme wealth inequality that needs to be reformed before any improvement in the media content can be achieved. Our modern-day society does nothing to address birth inequity. The wealth hierarchy that exists today is not legitimate. The UK government is doing nothing to challenge this. They continue to employ the public media to perpetuate this inequity and the white supremacy which is embedded in UK and global history.

All our wealth is built on our extractive behaviours towards our colonies and towards Earth’s ecosystems. We need to engage in reparation towards the ethnic groups that lost some, if not all, of their identity as part of the ‘white supremacy’ model. The UK government could begin with a public apology and an acknowledgement that what we did was unjust. They could also apologise to every climate activist and every pro-Palestine activist and release any who are imprisoned.

The Underlying Principles for Public Media

In escalating global ecosystems collapse any public media needs to be designed to facilitate the survival of the majority of its citizens with a minimal further impact on Earth’s ecosystems. This crucial aspect of our future does not feature at all in this Green Paper. There is an underlying assumption that business-as-usual will still be operational a decade into the future. This is not a feasible scenario in escalating ecosystems collapse.

Yours Sincerely

Barbara Williams FSI (Fellow of the Schumacher Institute)

Founder Poems for Parliament

Healing Gaia

The mindset required to execute daily ecocide is similar to that required to enable daily genocide. In this clip, Hannah Arendt explains how an unhindered stream of misinformation will eventually break our ability to distinguish between true or false, fact or fiction. We have rich and powerful people in control of our mainstream media and education, and we are entrenched in an ecocidal civilisation that is perpetuated by the delusional belief that this arrangement is both ‘safe’ and ‘peaceful’. In the WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Developed) our educational institutions have successfully maintained and reinforced this illusion for decades with ease.

In this clip about Eichmann, Hannah Arendt asks ‘How does society produce men for whom obedience replaces conscience?’ She explains that this requires bureaucracy, language rules, and the relief of personal judgement. These are never far away, she rightly observes. Later in this article I define the dominant ecocidal business-as-usual behaviours that are reflected in every political party in our democracies. This renders us almost incapable of steering into a wiser path.

Fortunately, Hannah Arendt explains that the way out of this trap is plurality, where we work together in all our diversity to navigate a wiser way forward. There are already wiser behaviour patterns that are attempting to overthrow the dominant patterns. This article documents my observations, and points to some key players within this paradigm shift who are helping others to see the reality of the accelerating collapse of Earth’s ecosystems that we are causing and encouraging everyone to start to challenge the dominant paradigms.

The Reality of Accelerating Ecosystems Collapse

The climate breakdown is just one symptom of the wider ecosystems collapse. There are quite a few people who see the world in a rapidly escalating ecosystems collapse. George Tsakraklides a very vocal example. In his book, ‘The Biology of Collapse’, he reinterprets political and economic failure as the predictable biological outcome of endless growth and systemic overshoot. Acharya Prashant is another example of brutal honesty in the face of man-made ecosystems collapse.

We have caused chronic global ecological overshoot for more than fifty years. We shall not become genuinely sustainable over the long term until this global ecological debt is repaid. Until that time, the phrase ‘becoming more sustainable’ is a means to greenwash our ecocidal business-as-usual behaviours. ‘More sustainable’ is an oxymoron that is best avoided. A strategic plan to shrink the global economy and population size fairly and voluntarily offers the fastest path to achieving global sustainability. We would be wise to rename and reframe the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals as Sustainable Degrowth Goals.

The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis offered by James Lovelock, suggests that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a single, self-regulating, complex system. In his book ‘Healing Gaia’ he suggests that we cannot actually ‘heal’ or save Gaia because the planet is a self-regulating super-organism that will heal itself, potentially by eliminating or drastically reducing the human population. Neverthless, we are currently harming Gaia on a massive scale; therefore it is reasonable to conclude that changing our behaviour profoundly could begin a healing process.

Nowadays, humans coupled with their technology and affluence make up an increasingly self-harming section of Gaia’s self-regulating mechanism. We are enthusiastically persisting with necrocapitalism; this drives both anthropogenic climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction. As Lovelock observes, we are not exempt from the unfolding mass extinction event.

We have a lot of ingenuity and technology especially in the field of contraceptive healthcare that we could deploy to peacefully and voluntarily begin the process of self-regulation. Our most difficult challenges involve overcoming the pronatalist mindset and the economic algorithms that fuel the coercive consumerism that drives our ecocidal growth economics and the exponentially expanding inequality in health and wealth and power.

To Heal Gaia we must first Heal Ourselves

We are very sick with misinformation right now. Evidence of our sickness can be seen in our daily ecocidal behaviour and the numerous genocides that are underway. Both of these tragic outcomes arise directly from our dependence and obedience to business-as-usual.

Business-as-usual — six dominant ecocidal behaviour themes

There are six dominant ecocidal behaviour patterns that define the dominant model of ‘business-as-usual’. These are:

• Colonialism and oppression — this destroys diversity and inhibits peaceful interactions
• Military supremacy — is eco-costly, mentally and physically damaging, not peaceful
• Patriarchy — admires eco-costly wealth, and increases power inequality
• GDP Growth Economics — drives environmental damage (I=PAT)
• Nationalism -weakens collective responsibility for the Commons
• Pronatalism — disregards the carrying capacity of Earth

All these behaviours are unwise during global ecosystems collapse. These are deeply entrenched behaviours and they are often reinforced by social media, mainstream media, and formal education. They can all be characterised as a ‘fluency’ response from the human limbic system. This means that our critical thinking gets by-passed in favour of these business-as-usual behaviours. This is why Lovelock rightly suspected that we might be unable to stop ourselves engineering our own extinction.

There is a book by Si Alhir (Sinan Si Alhir) called ‘Primal Patterning: Surviving and Thriving Inside Modernity’. It helps people to navigate past the entrenched business-as-usual ideology that I describe later in this article. I am currently reading the draft of his next book. It is rather challenging to assimilate, but I feel confident that the ideas might serve a key role to help managers and leaders to navigate past the limbic response system that usually prevents us from considering making profound changes in our behaviour patterns.

We cannot begin to correct our ecocidal direction until we work together to challenge all of these ecocidal behaviour patterns. We are in a Moloch trap. A profound mindset shift is required to extricate ourselves. The remainder of this article offers a roadmap to navigate that mindset shift.

Wiser Behaviours are Emerging — they need help

There are eco-friendly behaviour patterns that could replace all these entrenched ecocidal habits. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Colonial oppression gets replaced by Place-based Stewardship

Israel demonstrates that colonialism and oppression is behaviour that is still admired and defended by many. We could demonstrate a global rejection of the colonial mindset by merging Israel and occupied Palestine into a single state called Palestine in which all citizens would enjoy equal rights. Israel operates at seventeen times the biocapacity available within its borders. The Zionist concept that a small area of land could ever be home to every Jew in the diaspora was never ecologically feasible. We must all let go of the Zionist ideology, it has done all of humanity a great disservice. Likewise, we must let go of the name ‘Israel’.

Military Supremacy is replaced by Mutual Security

Military expenditure is the practice of spending money to cause environmental harm and mental and physical harm to humans. Therefore, if we genuinely wish to heal Gaia, there is no justification for any military expenditure. Note that the harm that is done to humans during any military operation applies both to those controlling the weapons and those in the firing line. We could redirect this entire aspect of our human enterprise into building a global safety net that ensures everyone has basic provisions and shelter. This shift offers a shared purpose that will build trust on a global scale. The new social contract suggested by Consilium Dignitatis would be a helpful concept to begin to facilitate this aspiration.

Patriarchy gets replaced by Relational Leadership

The wealth and power hierarchy, patriarchy, might be more aptly named the Eco-destruction Hierarchy. Gender inequality can be considered as one facet of this ever expanding power inequality pyramid. Relational leadership is a people-centered management approach that prioritizes human connection, trust, and collaboration over rigid hierarchy and task control. The core components of this emergent model are inclusivity, empowerment, purpose, ethics, and a strong focus on the relational process. Some ideas that would help this aspect of shift:

• Limitarianism — Ingrid Robeyns suggests a wealth cap at about ten million US Dollars
• Fair Start Movement — argues that birth equity is the foundation upon which every conversation about justice, democracy, human rights, sustainability, and accountability ultimately rests.
• Truth Alliance — restoring equity, addressing historic injustices
• The work by Alaka Oluwatobi offers many new perspectives on co-authorship of power in a post-sovereignity world.

Growth Economics gets replaced by GDP Downsizing

Governments need to recognise their obligations to protect present and future generations from foreseeable environmental harm. This article from Debunk’Onomy describes why our debt-based monetary system is an encouragement to destroy Earth’s ecosystems, and describes his alternative NEMO IMS.

The mainstream Degrowth movement have worked with traditional economists to offer a Roadmap for a New Economy to Eradicate Poverty. The ideas in this roadmap are all helpful, but maximum mitigation will require us to imagine beyond these ideas. Our main challenge is not poverty, it is avoiding starvation and lack of potable water; because in ecosystems collapse no amount of money can continue to buy these precious essentials.

The I=PAT insights from environmental science imply that shrinking the global economy would undoubtedly ease up the pressure on the collapsing ecosystems. Therefore, instead of debating whether we can decouple GDP growth from environmental harm, it would be a wiser strategy to simply use GDP as a measure of ecological harm, and work together to shrink global GDP in a manner that minimises suffering to all life forms.

Abandoning aspirations to exert military supremacy over others would be an easy first step in that direction. Our entire military budget is founded on the paranoia that is encouraged by the rich and powerful to facilitate the ‘divide and rule’ principle. For Gaia to heal, we must recognise that all of life on Earth is interconnected and interdependent.

Nationalism gets replaced by Bioregional Identity

Protecting the Commons is a global survival requirement that crosses National borders. Regenerative agriculture relies on bioregions being restored or kept intact.

A Global Aspiration for Eco-equity would addresses the flaw in our human rights declaration. We cannot deliver Human Rights unless we successfully protect the commons. The suggested wording describes an aspiration to voluntarily and fairly downsize the global economy until we return within the carrying capacity of Earth. To successfully work towards this aspiration will require global sharing of skills and resources in a mutually beneficial way. Becoming isolationist in the way that the USA is attempting with ‘America First’, is not a helpful mindset to prepare us to rise this challenge.

Pronatalism gets replaced by Eco-aware family planning

There will undoubtedly be demographic challenges arising from facilitating a global campaign to encourage eco-aware family planning. We need to rise to that challenge for the sake of future generations. Minimal birth rates will help to minimise suffering for both parents and children in the current context of escalating ecosystems collapse. EarthOvershoot offers data on the sustainable population by country. The Life Map Foundation is working to coordinate different data sources to provide a great deal of ecological data at a more detailed level.

Eco-costly longevity gets replaced by Eco-aware quality of life

It is important that we accept that death is essential for new life to flourish. The ecological cost of modern healthcare in the UK is discussed in chapters 7, 8, and 10 of the free book Saving Us From Ourselves.

Reflections of a Paradigm Shifter

An earlier article ‘Envisioning Eco-equity’, tries to envision how this cultural shift might emerge in the UK. A key step involves raising public awareness. The UK National Emergency Briefing has galvanised a gallant nation-wide attempt to do what the UK government has categorically failed to address. There are thousands of People’s Emergency Briefings occurring all over Britain as a result of their initiative. Sadly, there is nothing in these briefings about the cultural shift that is described in this article.

Create more to consume more — is this wise?

During an East meets West interview discussing climate change, Acharya Prashant captures our modern day growth economics mindset into a simple slogan: ‘Create more people to consume more stuff’ (at 11 mins in). Prashant tackles the toxic psychology that makes role models of the people who emit the most emissions (ref. 13:30 Are we really suicidal?).

We need a new slogan to steer us into a wiser path. Perhaps ‘Shrink and Share’ could replace the ‘Grab and Grow’ mentality that got us into this pickle. According to recent research we need to shrink our population and economic throughput by about 75% to achieve genuine sustainability. Most of the sustainability and Degrowth movement still exhibits denial about the gravity of our predicament. Therefore, delusion and hypocrisy are still available in abundance. They are probably our most abundant resources right now.

Diversity and Historical Injustice

Global human society is rich in diverse cultures that reflect the diversity of Earth’s surface. The well-being of any individual human is increasingly dependent on where they are located and the financial wealth of their parents. This means that a child’s well-being is increasingly dependent on the history of their parents and country. On top of that fundamental injustice, comes the increasingly grim existential reality of the escalating ecosystems collapse.

If you are unconvinced about global ecosystems collapse. Below is a list of references to evidence of global ecosystems collapse.

• Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019

• Living Planet Report 2024 | WWF — reads more like a dying planet report

• Nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security 2026 from UK government

Historical Injustice from GDP growth

Most financially wealthy countries have become wealthy by over-exploiting natural resources and by coercing other countries into financial debt. The insights from I=PAT inform us that the wealthier countries will have inflicted more ecological damage than poorer countries in the process of growing their GDP.

Both financial wealth and debt correlate to ecological damage. When money is loaned, that money is usually used in ecologically damaging ways. Building infrastructure destroys natural habitats and diminishes biodiversity. All infrastructure development comes with an ecological cost. The Sustainable Development Goals have been conceived within an ecocidal socio-economic model that ignores the biophysical limits of Earth. They are worthy goals, but they are framed in a way that will increase environmental damage.

The SDGs are an example of how we ignore the biophysical limits of Earth when we aspire to achieve equity. There is no recognition of the need to minimise further damage to the environment whilst we work towards repaying historical injustice. If we do not teach and facilitate eco-aware family planning whilst we engage in efforts to lift people out of poverty, then we will just increase the number of people that suffer in the unfolding mass extinction event. There are demographic models that predict imminent population collapse if we continue with business as usual. The image below is from the Bystroff World 4.5 demographic model. The lowest line represents business-as-usual (BAU).

To minimise ecological damage going forwards it will help to minimise infrastructure development in the less developed countries. If less developed countries are willing to help to minimise ecological damage in this way they must receive appropriate recompense.

The Existential Reality

Humanity has been in chronic global ecological overshoot since the 1970’s. Recent research estimates that a sustainable human population would be about 70% smaller than the 8 billion of today. About 2.3 billion people faced food insecurity in 2025. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached. Data on insect decline indicates that the Sixth Mass extinction has been underway for at least a century. Climate breakdown is just one symptom of global ecosystems collapse.

In 2022 the Human Rights Council resolution 48/13 unequivocally recognised the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment for all people. This ‘right’ is not being met for anyone right now, this failure will persist until we repay the global ecological debt.

The Mainstream Degrowth Movement

I have debated and evolved my ideas over several years partly with the help of a local Oxfordshire businessman. He is a very clever man, but deeply trapped in the arrogant belief that humans are far too clever to be engineering their own extinction. He also admires Trump, and believes that powerful men should be forgiven any sexual indiscretions. Apart from these flaws, he is a nice chap who has followed my work for several years.

He recently asked who do I actually agree with? I sent this list in response: Herman Daly, E F Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Jason Hickel (Less is More), Timothée Parrique , Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics), Yanis Varoufakis (Techno-feudalism), Clara Mattei (Escape from Capitalism), Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism), Gary Stevenson (The Trading Game), Andrew Fanning , Ingrid Robeyns (Limitarianism), Hans Stegeman , Jeremy Lent (Eco-civilisation), Elinor Ostrom (The Tragedy of the Commons), Prof. Steve Keen (tells it straight), Dr Victoria Hurth (Beyond Profit).

His response provides a helpful summary of where these different voices sit within the spectrum of the paradigm shift that I can see emerging. He is quite right to point out that none of these voices fully align with my own. But full consensus is never seen on the road to a socio-economic paradigm shift of this magnitude. However, his analysis helped me to more fully understand in what ways these voices differ from each other and from my own perspective. I thought that my readers might find his comments helpful and his style entertaining. His words follow in italics.

Many thanks for your list, Barbara… Most enlightening. Of course, they are a splendid bunch of anti-neoliberals: they all agree on there being too much corrosive inequality, that ecological limits are real, and that orthodox economics has failed… But they most certainly do not agree with what to do next, and therefore most of them do not really agree with you, Barbara!

There are two big and quite separate questions: ‘how big should the economic pie be?’ and ‘who gets which slice?’

Rigid Degrowth answers the first question: aggregate material throughput must fall, in absolute terms, as a matter of deliberate policy.

But most of the names on your list are more concerned with the second question.

Only a minority are genuinely Degrowthers. Hickel and Parrique advocate planned contraction of throughput in rich countries as an explicit policy goal. Daly is the intellectual grandfather (though notably more benign than his heirs!) His steady-state economics worked through market mechanisms (cap, auction and trade) within fixed biophysical limits. Schumacher belongs in spirit, his emphasis being scale and appropriate technology rather than contraction as such. And he always seemed concerned with more ethereal philosophical concerns, about ‘rurality’ for instance. Fanning, through the Doughnut Economics Action Lab and the “living well within limits” research, completes this core group.

A second group is growth-agnostic rather than Degrowth. Raworth is studiedly neutral: economies should make us ‘thrive’ whether or not they grow, a distinction you need to overlook to claim her as your ally! Lent wants a values-led civilizational shift, compatible in mood but more culture than programme oriented. Stegeman and Hurth work through banks and businesses, an outlook Degrowthers usually dismiss as ‘greenwashing’.

NEEP, the initiative of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, is instructive: it says that growth is not the enemy, only growth as currently pursued. “Beyond growth” in this sense means ending growth-dependence in the rich world while accepting that poverty eradication in the South will require material expansion there. That is more some sort of post-growth pragmatism, than it is about contraction.

The largest group is for sure anti-capitalist but not Degrowth at all: these are the ‘slice’ people. Stevenson’s entire project is that ordinary people should have more money and more consumption, funded by taxing wealth; he would welcome handsome growth provided the gains went to wage earners rather than asset holders. (Though take him with a pinch of salt, for he sensibly took the precaution of working the system to get fairly rich!)

Robeyns’s limitarianism caps riches at the top for distributional and democratic reasons, saying nothing much about aggregate output. Blakeley and Varoufakis want democratic control of investment: redirected production, not less of it (‘technofeudalism’ is a theory about rent extraction, not about overshoot, a central ‘degrowth concept.)

Mattei (the book is The Capital Order, about austerity being ‘invented’) is positively awkward for Degrowth, since her argument is that imposed consumption discipline on ordinary people is a class weapon… which is what Degrowth’s critics level at it. Keen has genuine common ground with the biophysical wing (energy in production functions, the demolition of Nordhaus), but his politics are about intervention than about overall contraction.

Ostrom is a complete misfit, and citing her as “The Tragedy of the Commons” gets it backwards twice: Hardin wrote the essay, and Governing the Commons is her celebrated ‘practical’ denial of it. Her method (essential no overall answers) is the methodological opposite of a single global programme of managed Degrowth contraction.

Of the appended organisations, NEMO IMS brands itself as a route to Degrowth, yet proposes a maximally top-down design: global labelling of approved activities, a new exchange standard, money issued for commons regeneration. Ask about who decides all these things and how, and the proposal coughs and splutters to a halt! Consilium Dignitatis is a tax and welfare redesign: redistribution within a monetary growth economy. The Fair Start Movement concerns population and birth entitlements, which is something that mainstream Degrowth tends to shy away from, although I do accept, Barbara, that you are willing to wade into this one.

Of course to some extent the conflation of the two groups does serve both sides. The distributionists lend Degrowth their moral energy and audiences; Degrowth lends the distributionists an aura of ecological necessity, as though wealth taxes are what ‘physics’ demands. But contraction only becomes necessary if one adds an independent empirical premise: that decoupling output from throughput is impossible. That’s the Big Bit, and most of the people on the list have not signed up to it.

A simple test sorts the list: if fair and reasonable decoupling proved feasible, would this person still want the economy smaller? For Hickel and Parrique, arguably yes, since their sufficiency ethic runs deeper than the carbon arithmetic. For Stevenson, Robeyns, Blakeley, Varoufakis, Mattei and Ostrom, I’d say somewhere between probably and deffo no.

So that is roughly five of twenty who pass the test. The rest are really more of a ‘fairness coalition’, and presenting them as Degrowth buddies is a tad optimistic.

Will we steer towards World War III or Global Peace?

In Colin Tiyani Anderson’s LinkedIn post that features the image above, he observes the emerging moral outrage focussed on the ongoing Gaza Genocide thus:

Genocide creates odd bedfellows. It turns out that those on the Left and former MAGA cheerleaders on the Right can unite in opposition to Israel’s inhuman, behaviour. It would appear that, for some, morality is more important than political allegiance.

Credit where credit is due, Tucker Carlson gave an admirable show of integrity while being interviewed by Israeli Channel 13. “Israel has lost its morality”. “You murdered thousands of children in Gaza”.

The emerging global paradigm shift has very little to do with political alliances. It reflects the fact that we are working to socio-economic norms that are ecocidal and therefore damaging to our collective mental and physical health. Commentators like Colin Tiyani are helping the collective mindset to question these norms.

Monitoring the Paradigm Shift

I subscribe to a newsletter that until recently was called ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’. The articles are always fiercely critical of Israel and the Zionist ideology. When the latest newsletter arrived I noticed that the title was now ‘Jewish Voice for Liberation’. Apparently the members voted to adopt the new name and an explicitly anti-Zionist position at a general meeting. This change reflects the group’s shifting focus away from the Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

This is a sign that opinions are solidifying against Zionism within the British Jewish community. There is considerable evidence that the escalating paradigm shift is reaching ever higher levels of clarity as people start to question the old norms. The continuing genocide of Palestinians is becoming a key factor in propelling the shift in public opinion.

What is the Mindset shift?

People are beginning to question deeply entrenched norms that have dictated our collective behaviour for decades or in some cases much lomger. The mindset shift reflects the awareness of the need to let go of old ecologically destructive habits. It is the shift away from the dominant worldview, towards a wiser direction.

The Dominant World View:

• The wealth and power hierarchy must be maintained and respected
• We must persevere with growth economics, we’ve always expanded in the past, it’s called progress
• Colonialism would have happened anyway; there is no need to apologise for any injustices from the past
• Military strength is essential to maintain peace
• A shrinking population is a worry
• Israel is to be admired for holding its own in a hostile Muslim part of the globe.
• Climate change and ecosystems collapse are problems that can be dealt with using technological ingenuity
• We can be proud of our democratic governance

The Emerging World View

• The extremes within the wealth and power hierarchy have now grown beyond anything that is ethically acceptable (Ingrid Robeyns book Limitarianism). The very wealthy are so powerful they direct the narrative. Jean Jaques Rousseau warns us: ‘Democracy exists where there is nobody rich enough to buy anyone else and no-one poor enough to sell themselves.’
• There are lots of LinkedIn posts appearing nowadays about alternative economics.
• Again, on LinkedIn nowadays there is a great deal of criticism about colonialism and Israel is cited as an example.
• So far, I am not seeing posts calling for global peace. I am expecting this idea to emerge from the growing disapproval towards USA, Israel, and UK.
• There is far less pushback on posts that address population overshoot nowadays, often no pushback at all, and many welcome the honesty
• Anti-Zionist, and anti-genocide posts are abundant. I enjoyed a picture of an activist with a placard reading ‘Genocide is only complicated when you are implicated’.
• Ever more voices are recognising the severity of the twin existential crises of climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse
• There is little evidence of distrust in the democratic system. Graham Hall did an helpful post about the effort that went into removing representative Massie: ‘Massie is exposing a system, not a political party issue. This is why so much work is being put into ridding him. Most social media influencers are stuck playing the team game, trying to make their audiences think this is about one party or another. This is, after all, the most profitable thing to do, but it also does a disservice as it leaves audiences misinformed about how the world truly functions.’ It referenced a 2018 interview with a network survivor. On the same topic this article from Al Jazeera: Massie defeated: The Israel lobby’s pyrrhic victory in Kentucky | Donald Trump | Al Jazeera

I am optimistic that public opinion will evolve to favour global demilitarisation, but obviously that cannot happen whilst the Trump administration continues to increase its stranglehold on the USA. Someone shared with me a depressing video about the Pentagon’s unfettered use of AI to detect pockets of political disloyalty. There is a lot of evidence that the Republicans are working hard to alter voting legislation to ensure that they win the midterms. If you are still clinging to the belief that the USA can still be called a democracy, there is a list of brief articles provided below regarding voting in America. There is considerable scope for steering the result to keep the Republicans in power.

https://afj.org/article/what-drives-the-gop-obsession-with-restricting-voting-race/

The Republicans and Restricting Voting

https://ir.law.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1643&context=articles

Republicans and the Voting Rights Act

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7502764/

Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republican’s Commitment to Democracy

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-midterm-elections-takeover-takeaways

Stolen elections claim and guardrails gone

https://www.newsweek.com/midterm-elections-redistricting-voting-rights-republicans-trump-11897546

Voting rights and the SAVE act

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk845r4vlyo

The SAVE act

https://19thnews.org/2026/04/voting-citizenship-proof-laws-trump-save-america-act/

GOP States SAVE Themselves

https://democracy.psu.edu/poll-report-archive/americans-not-only-divided-but-baffled-by-what-motivates-their-opponents/

…and how does this relate to Mr. Christ?

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-08/Civil%20Rights%20Platform%20Comparison.pdf

Democrats and Republicans in their own words over a century

The Visionaries

Are you a visionary? I am hearing many inspired ideas that are helping the mindset shift to gather pace and form. Join us, it is fun it replaces the denial, delusion, and hypocrisy with integrity, mutual trust and respect. The essential qualities of an inspired team:

Profound Social Change

Many people recognise that profound social change is needed to prevent humanity from engineering its own extinction. This incomplete shift in understanding is hindering wise behaviours from emerging:

• Patriarchy becomes Relational Leadership
• Pronatalism becomes Eco-aware Family Planning
• Nationalism becomes Bioregional Identity
• Colonialism becomes Bioregional Stewardship
• Growth economics becomes Degrowth towards Steady-state
• Military Supremacy becomes Cooperative Security providing Universal Basic Provision
• Growth economics becomes Degrowth into Steady-state
• Eco-costly longevity becomes Eco-aware quality of life, when we recognise that death is essential for new life to flourish

Using AI to accelerate social change

Timothy Gieseke is pioneering some work that can help to accelerate this transition towards eco-aware social behaviours. Timothy is harnessing AI to assess the extent to which strategy documents accommodate the type of governance that will enable us to jointly protect the global commons. The assessment tool is named GADGET. The acronym stands for the Governance Architecture Diagnostic Generative Engineering Tool.

GADGET — Specification

This document, Misaligned Governance and its Role in Creating Wicked Problems, describes the governance theory that informed GADGET’s development.

The specification explains that it is not complexity that creates wicked problems, it is governance misalignment, thus:

For fifty years, “wicked problems” have been explained as the inevitable result of complexity. Climate change, healthcare reform, and public lands management are challenges too multifaceted, too interconnected, too dynamic for straightforward solutions. Complexity, we’re told, makes them wicked. Yet Elinor Ostrom provided multiple examples of complex socio-economic systems not devolving into wicked issues.

Timothy has been considering this conundrum during fifteen years of work in agricultural economics, environmental management systems, sustainable agriculture, and sustainability consulting. This experience provided him with the necessary ingenuity to build a tool that augments AI with both his own wisdom and that found in Elinor Ostrom’s work. The resulting tool is already very useful, and can be further enhanced to assist us with implementing any social changes that we all agree are desirable.

Examples of Input and Output to GADGET

As part of my own work I have tried to suggest frameworks that might drive profound social change that can maximise mitigation from climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse. My most comprehensive effort to date is the document linked below:

Global Imperatives — A Call for Leadership from the UK

Timothy ran my proposals through the GADGET process. You can view Timothy’s comments and his explanations about the different phases in the GADGET processing at this link. Below is an extract from the summary, which was very welcome to my eyes.

Barbara, your work in Global Imperatives represents one of the most comprehensive and morally serious attempts to articulate what genuine sustainability demands of us. You ask the questions most avoid — and you answer them with a courage that most commentators lack. This document offers a different kind of contribution: not a challenge to your vision, but a governance lens through which that vision might be strengthened for implementation.

Timothy has granted me permission to share this version of the output from the GADGET assessment of my proposal, the concluding paragraph states:

‘Global Imperatives’ is a compelling advocacy document. GADGET™ would give its vision a better chance of surviving contact with the political and social reality through which it must pass to become consequential.

Thank you Timothy for this invaluable tool!

There are endless opportunities for deploying this wise approach to using AI, that would enable us to accelerate desirable social change. For example, we could use AI that is enhanced with eco-wisdom to detect the weaknesses within the guidance notes behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Timothy’s work shows how we could use AI wisely to steer ourselves away from extinction towards living within Earth’s biophysical limits. It is important that we first agree a wiser set of social aspirations.

Global Aspirations

Eco-aware social changes will require some refinement to our global aspirations. ‘The Declaration of Human Rights’ wreaks of entitlement with no regard for the biophysical limits of Earth. The ‘Global Aspiration for Eco-equity’ seeks to correct that omission.

We would also be wise to rename the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ as ‘Sustainable Degrowth Goals’; at least until we successfully return within the biophysical limits of Earth. All the advice offered by the United Nations regarding these goals could be checked with an eco-wise AI program, for those ideas were conceived within an ecocidal socio-economic model, and will inevitably contain numerous flaws.

An Emotional Evolution

We shall all be involved in the mindset transition away from pursuing GDP growth, towards embracing voluntary, equitable Degrowth. Emotional evolution describes the process of deploying our emotional toolkit in a helpful way during this transition. To collaborate peacefully towards global ecological justice we can retain our diverse cultures; but it will be necessary to navigate an emotional evolution thus:

• Arrogance can evolve into Humility once we accept the reality of ecological collapse, recognising the injustice for future generations, and those already unable to subsist
• Self-interest can evolve into Extended Ubuntu as we accept the need for a mindset that recognises our interconnectedness with all of life on Earth, and respects the global commons
• Anxiety can evolve into Resolve to act wisely and collectively
• Anger can evolve into Empowerment if a suitable mode of expression can be found
• Hate can evolve into Respect and Understanding given a suitable relearning process
• Guilt can evolve into Reparation if a route for reparation can be identified
• Blame can evolve into Forgiveness if reparation is offered, and forgiveness is sought
• Judgement can evolve into Trust in each other, given enough collective discussion and collaboration; altered behaviours from leaders, will be key to inspiring trust

Using Eco-wisdom to Analyse Human Behavior

Since the original publication of this article Timothy Gieseke has expanded his own insights to draw parallels between human organisational structures and that in the ant world. His article, Connecting AI Governance, Ant Colonies, and European History offers an insightful way to understand human geopolitics over the last ~150 years.

Another very insightful article by Timothy reveals the absence of logic when examining the Trump administration through governance logic: When the Map Doesn’t Match the Territory: The Trump Administration Through a Governance Logic. Then a further insightful piece advising where AI algorithms might lead us if we don’t ensure built-in eco-wisdom: The AI Ant Colony Cometh.

Social Transition Map

A friend of mine has brought my ideas together in the image below. He does not believe in climate change nor ecosystems collapse, so he prefers not to be named. He is a very dear ‘frenemy’, and a great admirer of Trump. He exhibits an amazing combination of deep cognitive dissonance coupled with the desire to help. This is an example of what can be achieved when you collaborate with an opponent to your worldview.

We stand at a junction right now, we can continue with ecocidal social norms, or we can aspire to return within planetary boundaries:

Why Out-of-the-Box does not come from Academia

‘Academic integrity’ rarely integrates into the real world, the one where supply chains collapse and communities starve while food rots in warehouses. Our ivory-tower academics often represent our point of catastrophic failure. When they don’t know the answer, they often don’t ask the people living through collapse, in these instances they are not honest, nor virtuous, they are incompetent, and downright dangerous.

People like Shannon Dobbs and Bob Philipson become creative and more wise through lived experience. For the most part our academics are trapped within the walls of their universities, they do not interact directly with the ebb and flow of day-to-day communal survival.

Shannon has put together a playful protocol to share the essence of his lively inventiveness with the rest of us. Shannon identifies that academia, and high-performing individuals, often become ‘the point of catastrophic failure’. In The Scrounger Protocol, Shannon describes appropriate education for collapse, designed to equip all civilians for supply chain disruption. Shannon envisions an economy that exploits AI wisely, thereby enabling everyone to navigate complexity by rapidly evolving and sharing collective intelligence.

Minimising Food Waste

The United States loses $970 billion annually to coordination failures in food, waste, and resource systems. Those same resources, if they were in the right place, can reduce waste and deliver more useable food within a modest budget. This article summarises and links to various articles from Shannon’s blog on his website: The Fellowship of Living Systems. In this article we shall explore Shannon’s imaginative ideas to integrate the many facets of the growing eco-regeneration movement with our existing food supply chain.

Shannon has ruffled a few feathers by thinking outside-the-box. I am urging his critics to reconsider. We are all guilty of some level of denial, delusion, and hypocrisy. It is important that we step out of siloed thinking and become willing to imagine different strategies and learn to see our shared existential predicament from different perspectives. In this playful sci-fi story, Grokking the Elephant: A Fable for Fragmented Times, Shannon captures the importance of dropping our toxic desire to compete or outshine or silence others.

The linear supply chain model is haemorrhaging value. Feeding America and other sources estimate that food waste in the United States results in an economic loss of over $408 billion annually. The cost of Nitrogen and chemical fertilizer pollution comes to $157 Billion annually. The healthcare costs of diet-related disease amounts to $1.1 Trillion. The cost of climate disasters like fires, storms cost $165 Billion in 2022 alone. Perpetuating business-as-usual costs the USA $2 trillion a year in waste, damage, and sickness. Investing in tensegrity infrastructure like blast chillers, soil nodes, etc, is not an ‘expense’, it’s a ‘stop-loss’ order on the biggest haemorrhage in human history.

Permaculture Paradise Lost

In this article Your Permaculture Paradise is Fed by the Same Broken System You Left Behind, Shannon reveals that the Permaculture movement is one of many examples where we attempt to implement a solution whilst trapped within a toxic socio-economic model.

Bob Philipson is working hands-on with the Goulburn Mulwaree Community Sustainability Hub which operates within an urban arena. Bob explains that Shannon’s article proposes what they are in the process of building. Bob says that Permaculture can form a large part of the story once it is adopted in its entirety. The proposals unfolding in Goulburn Mulwaree and Bega Circular Valley, involve building a series of community sustainability hubs that collaborate towards collective sustainability. These projects are inspired by the One Planet Living framework from Bioregional UK.

Threatening Existing Power Structures

Shannon’s ideas do not require changes to policy, but they do fundamentally threaten the existing commercial power structures. In this article: The Food Preservation Myth: How ‘Do It Yourself’ Thinking Prevents ‘Do It Together’ Solutions , Shannon offers numerous real examples of communal food preservation strategies that have optimised existing infrastructure and minimised food waste, thereby scaling skills and possibilities from the individual to impacting entire communities.

Shannon’s blog contains many imaginative perspectives on the challenges facing humanity. Shannon demonstrates how AI can break through barriers of both language and belief. In this article he describes how a 13 year-old, after listening to a salesman talking about a water filtration system, subsequently used AI to learn about the difference between physical filtration and reverse osmosis. The teenager then prepared a little primer video to explain what she had learned, and shared this impactful message with her community who were suffering from the polluted water from Lake Victoria in Kenya. This interplay between AI and an inquisitive teenager avoided a costly community investment that would not have delivered drinkable water to the community.

Sadly, the key driver of the pollution in Lake Victoria is human overpopulation. EarthOvershoot.org indicates that Kenya is overpopulated by about 25 million people, which is about 46% of the entire population. Although too much reliance on AI, would undoubtedly be problematic, AI offers us all the scope to contribute creatively during the transition away from the current ecocidal socio-economic model. Wise use of AI enhances knowledge sharing and learning; this could accelerate our evolution towards a global society operating within the carrying capacity of Earth.

Land Syndication

When you invest in a regenerative farm through syndication you are decoupling from the existing power structure. You own a piece of actual land. You are not reliant on a company founder’s promises; a company that might choose to pivot to selling NFTs next quarter. Land is real, physical, it can only be disrupted by weather extremes and human folly. If we learn to respect Nature, and recognise our dependence on healthy ecosystems, then Shannon explains Land Syndication offers a way to finance some of the changes needed in his article: There’s a Better Way Than Venture Capital to Fund Climate Solutions

The secret is not just investing in land; it’s about decoupling the asset from the operation. In the Venture Capital model, investors buy shares in the company itself. This gives them the power to force the company to grow too fast, cut corners, or sell out to a conglomerate. In Shannon’s Land Syndication model, investors buy the physical infrastructure: the building, the land, or the blast chillers. The Community Organization then leases these assets.

This means the investors get a steady, reliable return (rent) secured by real property, but they never own the mission. They cannot force a pivot or derail the strategies. They cannot demand a sell-out. It creates an ‘anti-fragile’ alliance where capital gets safety, and community gets sovereignty.

The switch from ‘control’ to ‘rental’ income is the ingredient that defuses the tendency to injustice through Capitalism. Our politicians could encourage this type of investment, with reduced wealth-taxes when wealth is invested in schemes that are clearly beneficial to the community. It also builds the socio-economic resilience, the ‘Tensegrity’, within the food supply chain that Shannon recommends in his Scrounger Protocol.

Achieving changes within the existing model

Food suppliers, or any empowered coordinators within large corporations can initiate and take responsibility for changes to the supply chain simply by exploring the possibilities for varied vendor relationships. The new arrangements can be established with appropriate insurance and cold chain processes that can align with the public mandates, by obtaining approval from the appropriate governance health agency.

New or altered supply systems can emerge from plans initiated at any point within any hierarchy. It could be within a city planning department or many levels down from the board of directors in some large commercial enterprise. If supply-chain wastage problems are addressed and solved by enterprise and imagination that emerges at the lower levels in a big company, this makes the choices at the top levels easier.

Shannon identifies three points of leverage in the food system where such mechanisms might be appropriate, and offers some examples of successful implementation:

1) Blast Chillers — MGM Grand Hotel celebrated 5 million meals rescued in Las Vegas over the past decade in a pilot program initiated by their food bank, ThreeSquare, which also services most of Southern California. Shannon reverse engineered their successes to make the technology and processes they developed accessible to community scale groups, including churches and others who have or can access under-utilized commercial kitchens. The experience is covered in this story: The Implementation Crisis: A Tale of Innovation, Institutional Inertia, and the Future of Food System Transformation | LinkedIn

2) Humisoil. This bacteria 🦠 was discovered in the Amazon jungle in the 90s, has been proven in over 32 countries. This powerful soil-improvement method is being rejected by composting industries as a competitive threat to their other products and services. It makes the entire sunk cost of their industry unnecessary. This process converts organics into a topsoil amendment that GROWS WATER through bacterial photosynthesis.

At COP28, VRM Biologik case studies were presented in this video. This process potentially amplifies John Kempf’s excellent analysis of transitioning strategies to accelerate conversions from conventional to regenerative farming practices. Shannon discusses this omission in his article The Missing Acceleration Layer: How Urban Waste Streams Could Speed Kempf’s Regenerative Transition.

3) Dry goods stores. Shannon offers a model based on pre-1930s stores that were ubiquitous throughout the US and globally until the supermarket model took over due to cold-war propaganda. These stores are specifically designed for urban and rural food deserts, they promise to create new pathways into markets regional farmers currently cannot access. They serve as the cornerstone in the methodologies that Shannon describes in this article: Why Safeway Is Closing: When Cold War Propaganda Infrastructure Meets Community Reality

Are You Comfortable With These Ideas?

Because the smart route to take to accomplish these goals is through rural producers and not city NGOs, Shannon developed a replicable and scalable business model that shows farmer collectives and rural communities how to accomplish this goal. Shannon had decades of successful businesses before he retired, as well as relevant military training and experience, and over a decade of subsequent research. Shannon’s expertise is freely available; he advocates open source sharing of experience and knowledge.

Most kitchen managers want to reduce and divert their waste streams. They cannot do that internally, because they cannot change their SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) without executive approval. They can sign vendor agreements with companies to take that waste, and they have discretion about which vendors they choose. That is the shift; sustainability hubs need to become the preferred vendor.

Most farmers would love to access new markets, and new sources of organic topsoil that reduces irrigation and chemical fertilizer dependency. Unlike city dynamics, which are complex and filled with often competing priorities to the point of dysfunction, rural communities have growth metrics and the expertise to create soil from inputs.

Every community without access to healthy food would benefit from better access. Every ‘Food is Medicine’ program and doctor who recommends healthy whole foods would love to be able to point their patients toward accessible healthy food.

Those points are the only things that matter other than these:

The legal framework that empowers business activities is robust and sufficient enough to handle innovative business solutions without requiring new laws. Policymakers by definition write and argue about policy, aka new laws and changes to existing laws. People trained in policy level advocacy simply do not understand this point 👉 nor do they wish to.

The reason that Shannon made the shift from focusing on support for regenerative practitioners to municipal planners is simple. The regenerative practitioner knows soil health, agroforestry, silvopasturing, they may even know cottage industry, and farm scale processing, but they do not understand city market dynamics, and that makes them uncomfortable.

It makes them uncomfortable enough to reject these common sense approaches as delusional rather than explore their discomfort with the unknown and seemingly complex, but very real, other side of the market that many like to pretend doesn’t exist outside their idyllic visions of regenerative futures.

Paradigm Shifting

Thank you to Shannon Dobbs for sharing with me your experiences within the ongoing paradigm shift from unnecessary waste to sustainability. I have adapted much of the material from your private texts and emails to me, to ‘author’ this article. I hope that it will inspire your critics to reconsider your imaginative ideas and respect your ingenuity. Your ability to think outside the constraints and assumptions that are still taught through our mainstream media, and our education system that was hijacked long ago by the industrial revolution and growth economics.

The homepage of the Mother Pelican Journal for Solidarity and Sustainability is a wealth of information, and it serves as a mission statement for my own journey. The editor, Luis Gutierrez, identifies key articles each month and reproduces them within the monthly publication. In the issue for February 2026, an article caught my eye. The author was Olivia Nater communications manager for Population Connection.

In the article GEO-7 ~ Major UN Report, Highlights Overpopulation and Overconsumption, Need for Profound Transformation, Olivia explains that the recommendations expressed in the GEO-7 report from the United Nations conflict very strongly with pronatalism and growth economics, thus: The report notes the effectiveness of promoting the health and economic benefits of smaller family sizes in reducing population growth. It even states that removing barriers to contraception and encouraging smaller family sizes (through media outreach as well as tax and benefits policies) are “a moral duty that also yields environmental benefits for both nature and people.” Apparently the usual procedure for summarising and sharing the recommendations has been delayed and may not happen, because so many government representatives refused to even accept this important report’s findings.

Denial, Delusion, and Hypocrisy

We are all guilty of different degrees of denial, delusion and hypocrisy relating to different aspects of our lives. Our entire global socio-economic model remains reliant on deluding ourselves that we can survive the existential polycrises that we are escalating by persisting with an ecocidal socio-economic model. Numerous collaborations are emerging that aspire to steer humanity in a wiser direction. However, they all remain constrained within a toxic global socio-economic model that compels us to compete with each other to make a financial profit.

We need education systems that are experiential from kindergarten through to the highest level. That is the only way that we can become creative enough to survive and hopefully minimise the ecosystems collapse that is now unfolding. Education needs to reinforce our connections with Nature and ensure an understanding of the carrying-capacity of Earth from a very young age.

8 Billion Angels — Free Film

Terry Spahr produced the excellent film 8 Billion Angels, it was released in 2019 and is now available to watch for free. The film links to the EarthOvershoot.org where one can drill down from the world map to discover details like sustainable population size for a particular country. The results are in line with the rough estimating method that I explained in an earlier article. Drilling down from the UK arrives at the page of information reproduced below.

Joining the Dots was originally published in Ending Overshoot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hawkins Scale of Consciousness

The Hawkins scale of consciousness is an excellent example of the sort of self-deceit that we employ to ensure that modern citizens remain complacent and unaware of climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse.

The author of this concept, David R Hawkins, exploited powerful meditation techniques that can genuinely help humans towards self-discovery, to build a profitable business out of conning unfulfilled people out of their money and their connection to reality. Hawkins chose to define ‘enlightenment’ in a manner that was completely disconnected from the real world.

I met a qualified practitioner of the Hawkins methods early on in my journey of realisation. I had deduced that humanity is trapped in an ecocidal direction with growth economics and pronatalism. I was looking for explanations as to why it was so difficult for most people to accept the scientific insights from I=PAT and data from the Global Footprint Network. He was the one of the most self-satisfied individuals that I have encountered on my journey. He was aware of the existential threats, and his answer was to teach the Hawkins way of dumbing down anxieties so they can have no effect on our behaviour or our life-choices. In the Hawkins worldview, once you are ‘enlightened’, you no longer feel worry or anger.

Abusing our Emotional Toolkit

Hawkins’ work is not the only example of how we are taught to abuse our emotional toolkit. Hawkins was a product of our society. He was overlaying common socio-economic themes onto the deep traditions of meditation that underpin many oriental spiritual traditions. He came to conclusions about how we should use our emotional toolkit that simply reflected the society in which he grew up. He never questioned the wisdom of the socio-economic structure, he never recognised that our socio-economic model was the main cause of our emotional woes.

Hawkins probably genuinely believed that he was helping people. However, his ideas served to dig his audience deeper into an immature use of our emotional toolkit. He was greatly admired, and made a good deal of money selling his ideas, this all served to increase the illusion that he was speaking truthfully. That same illusion still applies to all the billionaires and oligarchs today.

Interplay between Emotions and Outcomes

Let us analyse Hawkins’ summary of the interplay between emotions and outcomes:

When I look at the emotions that drive my own work, they are all at the lower end of this table from Hawkins. They are extremely powerful emotions without which I would not write anything at all. Hawkins was very unwise to dismiss these powerful emotions and to discourage his audience from using them to good creative effect.

• Shame — about my own responsibility for upholding the wealth hierarchy, and being part of a global ecocidal society
• Guilt — for not realising and acting sooner
• Hopelessness — this comes in waves, apathy never comes nowadays
• Grief , Regret — at the damage we are doing to Earth’s ecosystems
• Fear, Anxiety — at the lack of awareness in those around me
• Desire, Craving — for profound social change, I am enslaved to my work
• Anger, Hate — this comes less and less, as my work gets recognised
• Pride, Scorn — these come into play at little bit, I am proud when my work gets recognised, it does encourage me to continue. I get the impression, from listening to one of his lectures, that Hawkins was a very arrogant man, which is possibly why these emotions feature quite high on his list.

Right now, we are in man-made climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse. All the entries in the top half of Hawkins analysis are only likely to emerge as the consequence of a collective effort to overturn our toxic society that relies on ecocidal exponential growth and pronatalism.

I see the top half as a list of desirable outcomes, and the bottom half as the drivers. However, I would delete the top row entirely, as it is not a helpful aspiration. Achieving ‘completeness’ (I prefer ‘fulfilment’), joy and serenity, should be plenty for any one of us.

Spiritual Strength — Zen Buddhism

My journey as a writer and an activist has required enormous emotional resilience, especially in the early years.

I found some insights from Zen Buddhism that helped me to keep my anxieties calm whilst I worked on raising awareness in others. Nowadays, before I invite sleep, I revisit six thoughts which were inspired by Zen Buddhism. I have adapted these thoughts to reflect my personal ambitions for humanity:

• Today is over, I must let go of today’s events
• I forgive myself and others for the man-made ecological destruction that continued throughout today
• I am grateful for everything that I learned or achieved today
• Today I continued to play my part in the push for radical change
• Tomorrow is a new day, we shall be further along in the mindset shift
• I wish everyone acute awareness of the escalating man-made existential threats. I wish everyone the moral courage to accept that reality and to find their own purpose within that challenging context.

A Global Aspiration

Early on in my work I realised that a collective ambition to return within the carrying capacity of Earth would steer all of humanity into a wiser direction. If you like this idea, please sign the petition and share it:

Petition · Ask the UN to ratify a ‘Global Aspiration for Eco-equity’ — United Kingdom · Change.org