Page - 297 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

297 13.2 New Biophysical Context Numerous vulnerabilities have been uncovered within the techno-industrial devel- opment approach adopted in many parts of the globe (Meadows et  al. 1972, 2004). Tainter (1988) evaluated 11 ways that societies might succumb to constraints and, in the process, identified a new vulnerability. Tainter’s concept, the risk of diminish- ing marginal returns from increasing social complexity, is a social version of the economic principle of diminishing returns. In essence, societies solve the problems they face through an increasing investment in social and/or political complexity. However, this approach eventually becomes too costly to maintain and the society adopting that problem-solving approach becomes unsustainable. Without providing an exhaustive account of all vulnerabilities, it is nonetheless possible to establish our predicament by considering a basic idea. Like all living systems, techno-industrial civilisation has a metabolism: resources are consumed, work done and waste products discharged. It is sufficient for the purpose here to follow just one of many metabolites, hydrocarbons, starting as a source of energy, consumed in the creation and support of social services and eventually becoming a waste. On the input side, the system vulnerabilities are from limits-to-growth (Jackson and Webster 2016; Turner 2008, 2012), a notion that has lingered on the fringe of environmental discourse. Most reactions to the fact of biophysical limits to material growth have varied within a narrow range between dismissive and derisive. However, an expected end to energy-fueled growth is receiving renewed attention from both ecologists and economists (Bardi 2014, 2011; Daly and Farley 2010; Hall and Day 2009). One aspect of hydrocarbon-based limits-to-growth, that of declin- ing net energy, is particularly troublesome and discussed below. On the output side, the waste involves carbon-based emissions that create the well-documented disrup- tions to the climate system (Hansen et  al. 2017). Taken together, these highlight a radically changed biophysical reality where, as McKibben (2010) contends, the planet onto which we were born has been so altered that it is not the world on which we now live. 13.2.1 Surplus Energy Decline Social systems voraciously consume energy in the course of doing their work. Thus, for social services (e.g. infrastructure, manufacturing, maintenance, provisioning, education, governance, health-care, travel, tourism, entertainment) to continue functioning, there must be a net surplus of energy generated elsewhere. Maintaining a sufficient surplus is becoming increasingly difficult. The issue here has many technical aspects but is also commonsense; it takes energy to get energy and trans- form it into socially usable forms. Prosperity in techno-industrial society derives from there being a significant surplus available after deducting from the total energy extracted, the amount used to get it (Morgan 2016). One concern that highlights the 13 Supporting Behavioural Entrepreneurs: Using the  Biodiversity-Health Relationship…