Too clever by half, but not nearly smart enough Bill Rees to the Canadian Club of Rome

Abstract Humans pride themselves as being the most intelligent species on Earth yet, despite a half century of stark warnings by many of our best scientists, the human enterprise remains in a state of potentially fatal overshoot. The human enterprise is exploiting ecosystems far beyond natures regenerative and waste assimilative capacities; we are growing by liquidating the biophysical basis of our own existence. Remarkably, the global community shows little sign of taking the corrective action necessary to avoid potential disaster. I argue here that this seeming paradox is perfectly natural, that H. sapiens is inherently and even predictably unsustainable. The human ecological predicament is the product of base human nature reinforced by an ingrained, increasingly global, but radically maladaptive growthbased cultural narrative. Modern technoindustrial (MTI) society cannot be reformed to mesh harmoniously with biophysical reality. Hubris, born of humanitys clever success in manipulating