William E. Rees: Difference between revisions

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{{Infobox person

'''William Rees''' is a professor at the [[University of British Columbia]] and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC. Rees has taught at the University of British Columbia since 1969-70 and is currently a professor at SCARP. His primary interest is the public policy and planning relating to global environmental trends and the ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development.

| name = William Rees

| image = William Rees, 2008 (cropped).jpg

| caption = William Rees, in 2008

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| birth_date = {{birth-date and age|December 18, 1943}}

| birth_place = [[Brandon, Manitoba]], Canada

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| known_for = Creating the [[ecological footprint]] concept

| education = [[University of Toronto]] ([[Ph.D]])

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| occupation = Professor

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'''William Rees''', [[Royal Society of Canada|FRSC]] (born December 18, 1943), is a Canadian professor. He is the originator of the "[[ecological footprint]]" concept and co-developer of the method,

==Biographical information==

William Rees received his PhD in population ecology from the University of Toronto. He founded SCARP’s ‘"Environment and Resource Planning" concentration and from 1994 to 1999 served as director of the School. Rees’ book on ecological footprint analysis, ''Our Ecological Footprint'' (co-authored with then PhD student Dr Mathis Wackernagel) was published in 1996 and is now available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian and Spanish.

Rees taught at the [[University of British Columbia]] from 1969–70 until his retirement in 2011–12, but has since continued his writing and research. His primary interest is in public policy and planning relating to global environmental trends and the [[Ecology|ecological]] conditions for [[Sustainable development|sustainable socioeconomic development]].

Much of Rees' work is in the realm of ecological economics and human ecology. He is best known in this field for his invention of "[[Ecological footprint|ecological footprint analysis]]," a quantitative tool that estimates humanity's ecological impact on the ecosphere in terms of appropriated ecosystem (land and water) area. This research reveals the fundamental incompatibility between continued material economic growth and ecological security, and has helped to reopen debate on human carrying capacity as a consideration in sustainable development.

He was the Emeritus at the [[University of British Columbia]] and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC.

==Academic interests==

Prof Rees is a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. He is also a co-investigator in the ‘Global Integrity Project,’ aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation. Building on these interests, his present book project examines factors that seem to drive the repeating cycle of human societal collapse. A dynamic speaker, Prof Rees has been invited to lecture on areas of his expertise across Canada and the US, as well as in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, the former Soviet Union, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the UK. In 1997, UBC awarded William Rees a Senior Killam Research Prize in acknowledgment of his research achievements and in 2000 The Vancouver Sun recognized him as one of British Columbia’s top “public intellectuals.”

==Background==

Rees teaches courses in the following subject matter fields:

William Rees was born on December 18, 1943 in [[Brandon, Manitoba]]. His father worked for the [[Royal Canadian Air Force]] and was stationed nearby at [[RCAF Station Carberry]]. Rees moved to his family's hometown in [[Montreal]], where he worked on his grandfather's barn banking on the [[St. Lawrence River]].<ref>{{Cite web |date=2009-03-02 |title=Rees's Thesis |url=https://www.vanmag.com/city/people/reess-thesis/ |access-date=2025-08-12 |website=Vancouver Magazine |language=en-US}}</ref>

#Human bio-ecology and the ecological basis of civilization

He received his [[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]] degree in [[population ecology]] from the [[University of Toronto]]. He founded SCARP's '"Environment and Resource Planning" concentration and from 1994 to 1999 served as director of the School. Rees' book on [[ecological footprint]] analysis, ''Our Ecological Footprint'' (co-authored with then PhD student Dr [[Mathis Wackernagel]]), was published in 1996 and is now available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, and Spanish.

Much of Rees' work is in the realm of [[ecological economics]] and [[human ecology]] including behavioural and cultural barriers to sustainability. He is best known in these fields for the co-development of [[ecological footprint]] analysis with his then PhD student [[Mathis Wackernagel]].<ref>Wackernagel, M. (1994), ''Ecological Footprint and Appropriated Carrying Capacity: A Tool for Planning Toward Sustainability.'' Ph.D. Thesis, School of Community and Regional Planning. The University of British Columbia. Vancouver, Canada.</ref> The [[ecological footprint]] is a quantitative tool that estimates humanity's ecological impact on the ecosphere in terms of appropriated ecosystem (land and water) area. This research reveals the fundamental incompatibility between continued material [[economic growth]] and ecological security, and has helped to reopen debate on human [[carrying capacity]] as a consideration in sustainable development.

==Academic, policy and research interests==

Rees is a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. He is also a Fellow at the [[Post Carbon Institute]], a co-investigator in the "Global Integrity Project" aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for [[biodiversity]] preservation, a founding director of the One Earth Initiative and a Director of the Real Green New Deal project. A dynamic speaker, Rees has been invited to lecture on areas of his expertise across Canada and the US, as well as in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, the former Soviet Union, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the UK.

Rees' academic interests are in the following subject matter fields:

#Human bio-ecology and the ecological basis of civilization including the role of energy in the expansion/sustainability of the human enterprise.

#Ecological economics: Biophysical realities in resource allocation and distribution

#Global change and the dynamics of societal collapse.

#Why high intelligence (e.g., the capacity for logical thought and reasoning from the evidence) plays so small a role in societal decision-making particularly pertaining to sustainability.<ref name = Rees>University of British Columbia [http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/faculty%20profiles/rees.htm William E. Rees]. School of Community and Regional Planning.</ref>

==Philosophy==

Modern techno-industrial society is a product of the "enlightenment project" and is deeply rooted in what philosophers refer to as ‘Cartesian dualism.’ This perspective sees humans as somehow separate from the biophysical world, assumes we are masters of nature and enables us to act as if society is not subject to serious ecological constraints. Dualism, and its companion expansionary-materialist worldview, are arguably the major source of many of the so-called ‘environmental problems’ confronting humankind today. Much of my work, by contrast, adopts a bio-ecological perspective that recognizes that humans are part of nature (in fact, we are the dominant consumer organism in all major ecosystems on the planet), that we cannot assert effective control over critical ecosystems and that the future development of civilization is seriously constrained by natural limits. My research on the means for achieving sustainability therefore leads to policies and planning that is cognitive of potentially dangerous biophysical trends. My approach argues for managing human demand rather than resources.

{{Expand section|date=June 2008}}

Rees has said that the "[[Age of Enlightenment|enlightenment]] project," rooted as it is in [[Cartesian dualism]],{{Citation needed|date=July 2011}} has resulted in a techno-industrial society that sees itself as somehow separate from the [[biophysical]] world.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-12/dont-call-me-a-pessimist-on-climate-change-i-am-a-realist/|title=Don't Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist|last=|first=|date=12 November 2019|website=resilience|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=}}</ref> This dualism and its expansionary-[[economic materialism|materialist]] worldview are the basis of many of the "[[Natural environment|environmental]] problems" facing humankind.<ref name = Rees/>

==Awards and honours==

Mainstream neo-liberal economic theory is rooted in concepts borrowed from Newtonian analytic mechanics. This paradigm fosters the development of simple, reductionist, linear, deterministic, single equilibrium-oriented models that are highly abstracted from biophysical reality. Conventional economists also tend to see the human economy as a distinctly separate system, all but independent of the ecosphere. This frees the discipline to emphasize efficiency and continuous economic growth. By contrast, the emerging ecological economic perspective is derived from political science, ecology, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics and complex systems theory. Its models are characterized by real-world complexity, including non-linear behaviour (surprise) and multiple equilibria. From their more holistic perspective, ecological economists see the economy as a dependent, growing, fully-contained sub-system of a non-growing finite ecosphere. Ecological economics therefore emphasizes steady state dynamics, biophysical limits and social equity. My major contribution in this ___domain is the development of ‘ecological footprint analysis’ (EFA), a quantitative tool based on energy and material flows that estimates the area of productive ecosystems required to sustain any specified human population or economic activity. EFA has done much to re-open the debate on human carrying capacity—we’d need four additional Earth-like planets to raise just the present world population to North American levels of consumption—and suggests novel interpretations of key planning ideas such as what constitutes ‘urban’ land.

{{BLP unreferenced section|date=June 2023}}

Rees has received a Dean's Medal of Distinction (UBC Faculty of Applied Science 2016) and the 2015 Herman Daly Award in Ecological Economics (USSEE). In 2012 he was awarded the 2012 Blue Planet Prize (jointly with Dr Mathis Wackernagel), the 2012 Kenneth Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics (ISEE), and an honorary Doctoral Degree, Laval University. Previously he was a recipient of a 2007 Trudeau Fellowship, an annual prize awarded by the [[Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation]] "...in recognition of outstanding achievement, innovative approaches to issues of public policy and commitment to public engagement", and in 2006 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Rees was a member of the winning team receiving the City of [[Barcelona]] 2004 Award (Multimedia Category) for the exhibition ''Inhabiting the World.'' In 2000, ''[[The Vancouver Sun]]'' recognized him as one of British Columbia's top "public intellectuals." In 1997, UBC awarded William Rees a Senior [[Killam Prize|Killam Research Prize]].

==References==

In 1995, anthropologist Joseph Tainter wrote: “what is perhaps most intriguing in the evolution of human societies is the regularity with which the pattern of increasing complexity is interrupted by collapse…” Ominously, modern, complex global techno-industrial society exhibits many symptoms similar to those that heralded previous societal collapses. More ominous still, contemporary decision-making processes seem incapable of responding creatively to the gathering evidence of potential crisis. While science is advancing a coherent understanding of the proximal conditions and mechanisms that precipitate collapse, I am most interested in the ‘distal’ factors that drive human societies to expand and complexify to the point where implosion seems inevitable. Is the cycle of human society similar to the “never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [collapse] and renewal” that we find in nature? Most important, is our more knowledge-intensive modern society capable of breaking free of the cycle of collapse that characterized earlier civilizations?

{{reflist}}

==Representative publications==

* Merz, J.J., Barnard, P., Rees, W.E., Smith, D., Maroni, M., Rhodes, C.J., Dederer, J.H., Bajaj, N., Joy, M.K., Wiedmann, T., Sutherland, R. 2023. "World scientists' warning: the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." ''Science Progress.'' '''106:''' https://doi.org/10.1177/00368504231201372.

* Barnard, P., Moomaw, W.R., Fioramonti, L., Laurance, W.F., Mahmoud, M.I., O'Sullivan, J., Rapley, C.G., Rees, W.E., Rhodes, C.J., Ripple, W.R., Semiletov, I.P., Talberth, J., Tucker, C., Wysham, D., Ziervogel, G. 2021. "World scientists' warnings into action: local to global." ''Science Progress.'' '''104:''' https://doi.org/10.1177/00368504211056290

* Rees, W.E. 2020 “MegaCities at Risk: The Climate–Energy Conundrum”, chapter in: Sorensen, A and Labbe, D (eds.) The International Handbook on Megacities and Megacity Regions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

* Rees, W.E. 2020. “Scorched Earth”, foreword to H. Washington, What Can I do to Help Heal the Environmental Crisis, London: Earthscan (Routledge), p. xxii-xxvi.

* {{cite journal |last1=Rees |first1=William E. |title=Ecological economics for humanity's plague phase |journal=Ecological Economics |date=March 2020 |volume=169 |article-number=106519 |doi=10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106519 |bibcode=2020EcoEc.16906519R |s2cid=209502532 }}

* Rees, W.E. 2019. “Avoiding the ‘Endarkenment’”, foreword to J Bell and J Marlow, Sketches of the History of Science, Montreal: Champlain St-Lambert, p. ix –xi.

* {{cite journal |last1=Rees |first1=William |title=Why Place-Based Food Systems? Food Security in a Chaotic World |journal=Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development |date=26 June 2019 |pages=1–9 |doi=10.5304/jafscd.2019.091.014 |doi-access=free }}

* Rees, W.E. 2019 “End Game – The economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change”. Real-World Economics Review ( March 2019) at http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/Rees87.pdf

* Rees, W.E. 2018. “Planning in the Anthropocene”, Chapter 5 in: M Gunder, A Madinipour and V Watson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory. New York: Routledge.

* Rees, W.E. 2017. “Going Down? Human Nature, Growth and (Un)sustainability,” Chapter 22 in: PA Victor, B Dolter (eds), Handbook on Growth and Sustainability. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

* Rees, W.E. 2013. “Ecological Footprint, Concept of.” In: Levin S.A. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, second edition, Vol. 2: 701–713. Waltham, MA: Academic Press.

* {{cite journal |last1=Rees |first1=William |title=What's blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial |journal=Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy |date=October 2010 |volume=6 |issue=2 |pages=13–25 |doi=10.1080/15487733.2010.11908046 |bibcode=2010SSPP....6...13R |s2cid=8188578 |doi-access=free }}

* Rees, W.E. 2010. “True Cost Economics”. Chapter in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, Vol 2, The Business of Sustainability. C. Lazlo et al. eds. Berkshire Publishing Group.

* Rees, W.E. 2010 “The Roots of Our Crises: Does Human Nature Drive Us Toward Collapse?” Chapter 6 in: D Lerch (ed), The Community Resilience Reader. Washington, Island Press (for the Post Carbon Institute.)

* Rees, W.E. 2006. "Ecological Footprints and Bio-Capacity: Essential Elements in Sustainability Assessment." Chapter 9 in Jo Dewulf and Herman Van Langenhove (eds) ''Renewables-Based Technology: Sustainability Assessment,'' pp.&nbsp;143–158. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.

* Rees, W.E. 2006. "Why Conventional Economic Logic Won't Protect Biodiversity." Chapter 14 in D.M. Lavigne (ed.). Gaining Ground: In Pursuit of Ecological Sustainability, pp.&nbsp;207–226. International Fund for Animal Welfare, Guelph, Canada, and the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

* Rees, W.E. 2004." Is Humanity Fatally Successful?" Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis 30-31: 67-100 (2002–2003).

* Rees, W.E. 2003. "Understanding Urban Ecosystems: An Ecological Economics Perspective." Chapter in Alan Berkowitz et al.eds., ''Understanding Urban Ecosystems.'' New York: Springer-Verlag.

* Rees, W.E. 2002. "Globalization and Sustainability: Conflict or Convergence?" Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 22 (4): 249–268.

* {{cite journal |last1=Rees |first1=William E. |title=Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: what urban economics leaves out |journal=Environment and Urbanization |date=October 1992 |volume=4 |issue=2 |pages=121–130 |doi=10.1177/095624789200400212 |bibcode=1992EnUrb...4..121R |s2cid=153374382 |doi-access=free }}

* Moore, J and W.E. Rees. 2013. “Getting to One Planet Living”. Chapter 4 in: State of the World 2013 – Is Sustainability Still Possible? Washington, World Watch Institute.

* Kissinger, M. & W.E. Rees. 2010. “An interregional ecological approach for modelling sustainability in a globalizing world—Reviewing existing approaches and emerging directions.” Ecological Modelling 221(21):2615-2623.

* Kissinger, M & W.E. Rees. 2010. “Importing terrestrial biocapacity: The U.S. case and global implications.” Land Use Policy 27: 589–599.

* Kissinger, M & W.E. Rees. 2009. “Footprints on the Prairies: Degradation and Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture in a Globalizing world.” Ecological Economics 68: 2309–2315

* Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees. 1996. ''Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth''. New Society Publishers.

==External links==

*[http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/video/3335 Video of talk for the World Federalist Movement] Vancouver, Canada; April 2010

*[http://www.chs.ubc.ca/people/contrib.asp?name=Rees] Centre for Human Settlements, University of British Columbia - ''Contributor Profile.''

*[http://www.postcarbon.org/ Post Carbon Institute]

*[http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/faculty%20profiles/rees.htm] Faculty profiles, School of Community and Regional Planning

*{{YouTube|Ig4ZWyUHp68|Warning To the People of Earth. 29-minute web documentary}}

*The Great Simplification podcast (Jan 2023): [https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/53-william-rees William E. Rees: “The Fundamental Issue – Overshoot”]

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[[Category:Living people]]

[[Category:Canadian ecologists]]

[[Category:University of Toronto alumni]]

[[Category:Academic staff of the University of British Columbia]]

[[Category:Sustainability advocates]]

[[Category:1943 births]]

[[Category:Ecological economists]]

[[Category:Human ecologists]]

[[Category:Environmental planners]]

[[Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada]]