From Grief to Regeneration | Sarah Bexell
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Release Date: 02/04/2025
Leading the Legal Fight for Animals | Jeff Kerr
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Animal rights are the next frontier of civil rights. Jeff Kerr, PETA’s longtime Chief Legal Officer, leads the organization’s bold, precedent-setting legal strategy. From the “monkey selfie” case to freeing animals from experimentation and exploitative entertainment to exposing agribusiness humane-washing, Jeff fights to secure legal recognition of animals as beings with inviolable rights. Highlights include: How Jeff was inspired to get involved in animal law and become a lifelong vegan after attending an accidental lecture on animal rights; Why PETA’s legal strategy rejects...
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The Rise of One-Child Families | Susan Newman
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
The one-child family is becoming the fastest-growing family size in many countries. Social psychologist Susan Newman, author of Just One, shares the abundant research challenging long-held myths that only children are lonely, selfish, or spoiled, and why the growing popularity of one-child families reflects greater parental and child satisfaction and ecological awareness. Highlights include: How Susan’s experience parenting four stepchildren earlier in her life and one biological child later in life shaped her understanding of one-child families; Why negative stereotypes of only children as...
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Capitalism's War Against Animals | Dinesh Wadiwel
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
A global war against animals is driven by capitalist exploitation and profit. Dinesh Wadiwel, author of Animals and Capital and The War Against Animals, shows how capitalism treats animals as commodities, raw materials, and self-reproducing labor. He advocates for an anti-capitalist animal politics that builds alliances with social justice movements to advance both animal and human justice. Highlights include: Why the concept of 'hierarchical anthropocentrism' is essential in revealing how human-centered thinking and systems of hierarchy together justify domination over both animals and...
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Humachines, Big Tech, & Our Future | Michael D.B. Harvey
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
A dystopian fusion of human and machine is being pushed on us by a big tech elite. Michael D.B. Harvey, author of The Age of Humachines: Big Tech and the Battle for Humanity's Future, warns of the 'humachinator' worldview that weds unrestrained technology and capitalism - and what we might do to reclaim a future rooted in democracy and ecological balance. Highlights include: How the 'humachine' blurs the line between human and machine, technologizing everything and everyone; How the history of scientism and empiricism has led humachinators to imagine the brain as a computer and the body as a...
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Radical Alternatives to “Progress” | Shrishtee Bajpai
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Across India and around the world, communities are resisting destruction and reclaiming their right to shape their own futures. Shrishtee Bajpai, researcher and activist with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, reveals how local struggles for self-determination connect across cultures and what is being done to weave a 'pluriverse' of possibilities rooted in social and ecological justice. Highlights include: How Shrishtee's upbringing as an upper caste, urban Indian girl living along the river Ganga shaped her search for personal freedom and ecological and social justice; How her work with...
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Progress: Humanity’s Worst Idea | Samuel Miller McDonald
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
For 5,000 years civilizations have told themselves stories of progress. Today, the progress myth has become humanity's most dangerous illusion. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea, illuminates the destructive lineage of progress, why these myths endure, how they enable socially and ecologically parasitic societies, and what values might guide us beyond them. Highlights include: How narratives of progress have persisted from Mesopotamia to today, and how those narratives have persisted even as the means of material subsistence and...
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Complexity and Collapse | The Honest Sorcerer
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Modern techno-industrial civilization is running up against the law of diminishing returns - and societal collapse is inevitable. B, author of The Honest Sorcerer blog, reveals why our civilizational complexity carries the seeds of its own destruction. Highlights include: What led B (who also shares his reasons for remaining anonymous) from believing modern civilization would persist for centuries to recognizing collapse as inevitable; Why diminishing returns on energy, materials, and innovation are central to the collapse of complex societies; Why societal collapse is a long process taking...
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The Elite’s Fixation with Low Birth Rates | Samuel Miller McDonald
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
From center-left Ezra Klein to right-wing Matt Walsh, the fertility panic is an elite fixation that is rooted in a human supremacist worldview and a deep fear of slowing growth. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of the book Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, exposes how our parasitic relationship with Earth lies at the core of ecological overshoot, and why resisting authoritarianism in an age of contraction means embracing a pluralistic and just degrowth vision. Highlights include: Why our modern relationship to Earth is fundamentally parasitic - regardless of whether...
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The Fertility Industry’s Dirty Secrets | Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is often seen as a triumph of reproductive freedom, but its origins are deeply entangled with patriarchy, pronatalism, and eugenics. Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, IVF survivor and author of Silent Sorority and Finally Heard, discusses how under-regulation and cultural obsession with biological motherhood allows the multi-billion dollar fertility industry to obscure the truth about its low success rates and the trauma it causes. Highlights include: What the IVF process entails how time-consuming, expensive, and emotionally and physically wrenching it is; How John Rock,...
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The Omnivore's Deception | John Sanbonmatsu
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
The meat industry and its defenders promise ethical consumption and sustainable farming, but animal agriculture fuels ecological destruction, entrenches human supremacy, and masks cruelty with comforting myths. John Sanbonmatsu, philosopher and author of The Omnivore’s Deception, shatters the myths of “humane meat” and the 'naturalness' of eating meat, and explains why abolishing the animal economy is essential to living an ethical human life. Highlights include: Why growing up as the child of a Jewish mother and Japanese-American father in the U.S. sensitized John to bullying and...
info_outlineWe have it in us to create a more beautiful, regenerative future that allows both humans and nonhumans to flourish. Dr. Sarah Bexell, professor of social work and co-founder of the Center for a Regenerative Future at the University of Denver, joins us. Highlights of our conversation include:
- Why captive breeding programs for endangered species are both cruel and ineffective;
- How the mental health of both conservation professionals and animal rights activists is deeply impacted by the ongoing suffering of both wild animals and farmed animals;
- How ongoing ecological destruction is causing eco-anxiety and eco-distress in students and some of the more effective classroom approaches to address it;
- How environmental justice differs from ecological justice and why we need to address both if we hope to create a more just, regenerative future;
- How Sarah helps students become aware of the role that human overpopulation plays in humanity’s ecological overshoot and helps make the classroom a comfortable place to discuss it.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/sarah-bexell-2
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Learn more at populationbalance.org