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Overshoot
- The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
- Narrated by: MJ McGalliard
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
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Publisher's summary
Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology.
A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that "the principals of ecology apply to all living things". These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not irreversible and population growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.
The book is published by University of Illinois Press.
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- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.
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A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.
- By Scott on 02-10-18
By: Raj Patel, and others
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Nonzero
- The Logic of Human Destiny
- By: Robert Wright
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.
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Non-Zero (but pretty close to zero)
- By Douglas on 02-06-14
By: Robert Wright
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The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
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I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
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The Vertical Farm
- Feeding the World in the 21st Century
- By: Dickson Despommier
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. The vertical farm has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face.
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Excellent Brainstorming - Not reality
- By Texas Community Project on 01-25-11
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Overheated
- How Climate Change Will Cause Floods, Famine, War, and Disease
- By: Andrew T. Guzman
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.
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A must read!
- By Ted on 03-22-15
By: Andrew T. Guzman
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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The Rational Optimist
- How Prosperity Evolves
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.
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Personal
- By Robert F. Jones on 09-15-17
By: Matt Ridley
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The Challenge for Africa
- By: Wangari Maathai
- Narrated by: Chinasa Ogbuagu
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai has campaigned for environmental activism and democracy in Africa for more thanthree decades. In The Challenge for Africa, she delivers an insightful call to action, presenting a realistic look at the diverse problems facing Africans today.
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10 years later, this is still powerful.
- By Presence on 04-21-18
By: Wangari Maathai
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Why Geography Matters
- More Than Ever
- By: Harm de Blij
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In recent years our world has seen transformations of all kinds: intense climate change accompanied by significant weather extremes; deadly tsunamis caused by submarine earthquakes; unprecedented terrorist attacks; costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a terrible and overlooked conflict in Equatorial Africa costing millions of lives; an economic crisis threatening the stability of the international system.
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A book that needs more than just narration
- By Organic Design on 06-10-15
By: Harm de Blij
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Work
- A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots
- By: James Suzman
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Work defines who we are. It determines our status and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hardwired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like? To answer these questions, James Suzman charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are.
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if you like Jared Diamond's work, you'll like this
- By Mark on 04-09-22
By: James Suzman
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Trekonomics
- The Economics of Star Trek
- By: Manu Saadia
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What would the world look like if everybody had everything they wanted or needed? Trekonomics, the premier book in financial journalist Felix Salmon's imprint PiperText, approaches scarcity economics by coming at it backward - through thinking about a universe where scarcity does not exist. Delving deep into the details and intricacies of 24th-century society, Trekonomics explores post-scarcity and whether we, as humans, are equipped for it.
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An Amusing & Practical Analysis of Fictional Ideas
- By Lost In The Wash on 09-19-16
By: Manu Saadia
What listeners say about Overshoot
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Thomas S Griggs PhD
- 08-23-23
Our True History
This is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to be aware of how the world really works. I have listened to it twice and got as much out of it the second time as I did the first because it is written in such depth. It staggers me that it was written decades ago yet perfectly explains everything happening around us today. Certainly not for the faint hearted, but very compassionately written, it may be the one thing that could keep us out of standing in judgment of each other.
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- Liz
- 08-06-21
WE ARE HEADING FOR THE CLIFF AND THEY KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. BUT FAILED US.
This is the year 2021. I am seeing floods and fires. Circling the entropic abyss. Good luck to your future self.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 09-07-21
One of the most important books you’ll ever read
This book was prophetic in its examination of how the combination overpopulation and overconsumption are destroying the planet. The performance was severely lacking however. There were odd pauses that made me unsure it was even being read by a human. Still, take in this book however you can and adjust your life accordingly.
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- Josh D.
- 05-14-22
The most important book of our era
But with god awful naration. It was so bad, my Mom when she heard it thought it was an actual computer reading it like siri lol.
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- John Warren
- 09-19-23
Powerful and compelling!
I only wish I had found this book decades ago. I wish it had been written a century ago.
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- Joshua
- 11-04-20
A Five Star Book... In Print Form.
As CJ's review points out, the narrator is, shall we say, subpar. The voice is nasally, grating, and sounds almost as if the narrator was trying to portray Catton as a college nerd in an 80's flick. I stopped noticing it after a while, however. Partially I got used to it, but mostly I was taken away by the content.
The ideas presented in this book are intellectually bracing. I think, to most people, the word ecology calls up a vague sense of plant and animal food chains, maybe in the context of climate. Humanity is removed from ecology's proper focus, except maybe as a kind of walk-on villain, entering the picture and disrupting how nature "should" be. But this is wrong; humans are animals, in the end, and ecology’s laws control predator as much as prey. This book takes that thought and runs with it.
Essentially, Catton wants to apply the principles of ecology to everything human. He does this with a sort of detached relentlessness. The history of civilization is brought under the microscope, as well as the American Dream, Manifest Destiny, liberty, and progress. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are described as broadly foreseeable results with ecological causes. The physical limits approaching industrial civilization are discussed. The overpopulation of the world is discussed. This is a strikingly clear-eyed book, and one which rebuts human exceptionalism. One of the best passages is when he points out that given the opportunity, both yeast and reindeer will overpopulate then starve, and humans are much closer to reindeer than reindeer are to yeast. Throughout it all, Catton presents neither glib solutions nor vague optimism nor apocalyptic doomerism nor bitter hatred for past generations. That last one impresses me the most. By his argument, the harms our forefathers have passed on to us are really much worse than usually supposed, yet he doesn't hate them. He's fully capable of appreciating the importance of ideals and sincerity with which our predecessors held them.
Like most things, Overshoot is not perfect. As might be expected of the book described above, sometimes I felt Catton over-reached. I felt this especially when he expounded on World War 2 as being caused by "redundancy anxiety", as if the three decades prior to that war could be reduced to the rest of Europe saying to Germany, "You're redundant!" followed by Germany getting an army and screaming back "Noooo, YOU'RE redundant!! You're ALL redundant!" Another problem, this book thinks it's won. It doesn't so much suggest a new paradigm so much as it describes people acting the way they do because they aren't aware of the new paradigm. They still aren't, forty years after publishing and five after his death. I hope he wasn't too much invested in the day when everyone would have to admit he was right.
At times I wonder how much of his generosity came from a sense of victory. What would he have written had he known Carter would be out, Reagan in, and the problem simply ignored? In essence, “got mine, screw yours” across generations. The doomers have been far from helpful in this regard. Lacking Catton’s restraint, they’ve churned out a line of imminent, all-consuming damnations, unfailingly wrong, giving a clean conscience to who support business-as-usual forever. Yet the general premise stands: things that can’t go on forever will end, even if said thing is having more food than mouths. It feels, at least to me, that environmentalist stories are taking a steadily increasing share of the news cycle: forests burning, aquifers running down, fisheries running down, ocean levels rising up… the check has arrived, and even the masses, famously dull as they are, can’t ignore it forever. Sometimes I worry, what will happen when it finally clicks?
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- Janet Pittman Henley
- 10-14-21
Possibly the Most Important Book Ever Written
Excellent content. The narration does sound automated, but it’s clear & easy to hear. The main concepts should be basic learning for everyone age 12 & up. Human survival may depend on spreading ecological sophistication more broadly.
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- Kay Williams
- 01-11-23
I’ve listened to this twice.
The message is that important. He applies principles from biology to our human condition, totally rearranged my thinking on the subject of human progress and fossil fuels. Not light reading, but if you like precise and scientific language, very eye opening.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-03-23
My first review….
The contents within this book are of the Utmost Importance…. Enlightening, but utterly depressing… but worst of all… the “Narration” is absolutely HORRIBLE!!! I’d SO much rather listen to the computer voice on my phone than this guy, MJ McGalliard… seriously, if this is what Audible and the Author considers acceptable/passable for their paying customers..well, I must be in the wrong business! In fact, I may just buy the print version, record myself reading it, and send it to William Catton for free! Perhaps they’ll replace it! And spare anyone else the aggravation of listening to McGalliard’s, ummm…
“performance”… 🙉
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- CJ
- 02-14-18
Worst narrator ever
What disappointed you about Overshoot?
Sounded like it was read by a robot.
What do you think your next listen will be?
I need to listen to some good dystopian fiction after this dry, rambling book.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
The worst narrator I've heard, by far.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Good points were made, many, many times over.
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1 person found this helpful