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OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Ranking in the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally, we draw over 20,000 listeners from across 80 countries.
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New to our podcast?
There are over 60 episodes of OVERSHOOT. If you are new to the podcast and are looking for a good place to start, we recommend you listen to these episodes first.
Latest Episodes
The Poverty of Growth
Obsession with growth is enriching elites and killing the planet. That’s the message of this week’s guest, Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and author of The Poverty of Growth.
The Delusion of Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Impact
Dr. James Hopeward, an environmental civil engineering professor at the University of South Australia, highlights the limitations of conventional economic growth models and their environmental impacts, emphasizing the need for more holistic and ecologically grounded engineering practices (and cultural beliefs).
Highway to Hell: The Dystopian Fantasies of Tech Billionaires
In this episode, we chat with philosopher and historian Dr. Émile Torres about the dystopian fantasies of ecologically blind tech billionaires — transhumanists, longtermists, and effective altruists — of defying nature, transcending humanity, and colonizing the universe.
Navigating the Great Unraveling with Resilience
In this episode, we chat with Asher Miller and Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute about their latest report "Welcome to the Great Unraveling", which explores ways to navigate the environmental and social breakdown resulting from multiple intersecting crises.
Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism
We chat with population ecologist, originator of “ecological footprint”, and one of the world’s best big-picture ecological thinkers, Dr. Bill Rees. Bill explains how our blind faith in human exceptionalism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics fooled us into disregarding ecological limits and brought us into a state of extreme overshoot. How can we confront this reality, in which we are degrading the biophysical basis of existence, to prepare for a post-industrial world?
The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation
Dr. Trevor Hedberg discusses his recent book The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation about the ethical implications of procreation, both in terms of the risk of harm to the child and to the planet, understanding how pronatalism influences procreative decision-making, while rejecting antinatalist and misanthopic philosophies.
How Free-Market Fundamentalism Fuels Population Denialism & Undermines Democracy
Naomi Oreskes, a world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker explains how free-market fundamentalism has had a long history of undermining democracy and exploiting marginalized communities to benefit a small minority of elites.
Powering Down: Beyond Growth, Toward Simplicity
Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s foremost experts on energy and sustainability explains why unfettered human expansionism, even with a “green” tint, is incompatible with natural limits and how we might deliberately rein in our power and move toward a culture of sufficiency, simplicity, and resilience.
Embracing Limits With Ecospheric Grace
Author Robert Jensen discusses his latest book An Inconvenient Apocalypse that he co-authored with The Land Institute’s co-founder Wes Jackson, about the need to grapple with difficult questions and to consciously embrace limits, as a pathway to a more graceful and meaningful co-existence with Nature.