William Catton Jr. hadshot William Catton Jr., author of the seminal volume about our human destiny, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change , died last month at age 88. Catton believed that industrial civilization had sown the seeds of its own demise and that humanity’s seeming dominance of the biosphere is only a prelude to decline. His work foreshadowed later works such as Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies , Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies , and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive . In Overshoot Catton wrote: “We must learn to relate personally to what may be called ‘the ecological facts of life.’ We must see that those facts are affecting our lives far more importantly and permanently than the events that make the headlines.” He published those words in 1980, and now, it […]