"Humans invade and populate all accessible favourable habitats; human populations use up all available resources; under favourable conditions, human populations are capable of exponential growth. […] The industrial/scientific revolution spawned technologies, particularly improvements in public sanitation and disease control, that greatly reduced death rates while fossil fuels alleviated food and resource shortages. With the suppression of negative factors, positive feedback prevailed; between the early 1800s and 2023, the human population exploded from one to eight billion. Meanwhile, what we now call ‘neoliberal economics’ began taking form in the late 1800s. In just two centuries, the human population grew eight times larger than the maximum attained over the previous 3000 centuries, and the world economy grew 100-fold in real terms! […] Overshoot may be a quasi-natural phenomenon, but it is also a potentially terminal condition. There are now about 80 cities in the world with populations in excess of five million—each has more people than existed on the entire planet at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. […] Life in higher-income countries just seemed to be getting better and better, at least in material terms. Little wonder that by the 1950s, MTI governments and international institutions everywhere were adopting the neoliberal vision of perpetual economic and population growth via continuous technological advance as the dominant development narrative of global culture. There are, of course, significant problems—all this occurred on a finite, non-growing planet with serious history. With nurture-reinforcing-nature in propelling the expansionist juggernaut, the human enterprise surged into ecological overshoot; resource consumption and waste production are overwhelming the bio-productive and waste assimilation capacities of the ecosphere. This is not merely an aesthetic concern: the functional integrity of the ecosphere is essential for human existence. Overshoot may be a quasi-natural phenomenon, but it is also a potentially terminal condition."