A Darwinian Guide to Surviving the Anthropocene: Between Hopium and Doom Scrolling

ABSTRACT Coping with the impacts of global climate change on the biosphere in general and humanity in particular requires that we shift attention from economic principles of sustainability to evolutionary principles of survival. Darwinism provides a third way between unattainable utopia and unacceptable apocalypse. The Four Laws of Biotics provide Darwinian guidelines for interacting with the biosphere and improving humanity’s chances of survival as a technological species. The biosphere is a complex evolutionary system comprising species that generate, store, and use their own potential to survive. This allows the biosphere to continue to cope with change by changing, making ecosystems robust, not fragile. This is the only means by which the biosphere has survived previous episodes of climate change, and it has never failed. Conservation policies need to shift from treating the biosphere as a material commons to treating the biosphere as an evolutionary commons. Within a survivable biosphere, humanity’s future can be enhanced by (1) implementing the economics of well-being, (2) reducing population density through climate migration into rural areas, revitalizing them into circularized economies, (3) re-growing sustainably by creating networks of cooperating circular economies, not consolidating into densely populated urban centers, and (4) ensuring social institutions are responsive to the desires of the grassroots. Technological urbanized humans can alter their behavior now at great expense and difficulty, extending the benefits of the Anthropocene, or can fail to act, and face imminent collapse.