Too clever by half, but not nearly smart enough - Bill Rees to the Canadian Club of Rome

Abstract Humans pride themselves as being the most ‘intelligent’ species on Earth yet, despite a half century of stark warnings by many of our best scientists, the human enterprise remains in a state of potentially fatal ‘overshoot’.  The human enterprise is exploiting ecosystems far beyond nature’s regenerative and waste assimilative capacities; we are growing by liquidating the biophysical basis of our own existence.  Remarkably, the global community shows little sign of taking the corrective action necessary to avoid potential disaster.  I argue here that this seeming paradox is perfectly natural, that H. sapiens is inherently – and even predictably – unsustainable. The human ecological predicament is the product of base human nature reinforced by an ingrained, increasingly global, but radically maladaptive growth-based cultural narrative. Modern techno-industrial (MTI) society cannot be ‘reformed’ to mesh harmoniously with biophysical reality.  Hubris, born of humanity’s clever success in manipulating