Gameful Degrowth_ Elfed Alexander Samuel

Gameful Degrowth, A Creative Toolkit For an Ecological Community Mindset.

CHS Dissertation 19.04.21 Word Count - 10,533 Elfed Samuel 799987@network.rca.ac.uk

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Table of Contents Seeds of a Nightmare Nightmare World

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Our Global Addiction

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An Inevitable Outcome 14 Motivations In An Entangled World Dissecting The Gameful

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Considering a Gameful Ecology Platform Bibliography

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SEEDS OF A NIGHTMARE 11,000 years ago, the warming and stabilisation of global temperatures, following the tumultuous conditions of the Pleistocene, when shifts in “world temperatures as great as 8° C occurred over timespans as short as two centuries”1, allowed the observations of increasingly regular ecological patterns and the social ingenuity of our hunter-gatherer ancestors “in at least seven separate locations around the world”2 to centralise around a “physical surplus in production exceeding the groups’ immediate caloric needs”3.

An intrinsically divisive invention, agriculture became the predominant way of life through sequential conditions of a “shrinking subsistence base”4, driven by generational periods of ecological scarcity towards a system providing “new jobs, hierarchies, and complexity”5. Centralised societies led a fifty-fold increase in population6 by the time of the common era, but to the drastic detriment of the lives of most, with dramatic declines in average physical health, with “more debilitating diseases, from leprosy to arthritis to tooth decay”7 as well living within “rigid caste systems as virtual or actual slaves”8.

Though ecological cycles of scarcity were more readily handled through “the dependence on grains”9, such resource resilience displaced previously “aggressively egalitarian”10 humans from the immediacy of their subsistence ways to “the hereditary control of surplus”11, with conditions of “imperfectly equalized payoffs”12 inherently and increasingly dividing populations, an “ethic of sharing that was central”13 to nomadic gatherers replaced by the asymmetric “intergenerational transmission of economic success”14. Contrary to the presumption of greater energy surplus in agriculture our nomadic ancestors enjoyed a “relatively large energy surplus of 10 to 1”15 which further emphasises the likelihood that the transition to agriculture was driven by periods of scarcity.

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Gowdy, John, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, Futures, 115 (2020), 102488 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488, p. 2 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 1 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 2 Gowdy, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, p. 3 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 2 Gowdy, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, p. 2 Gowdy, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, p. 2 Gowdy, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, p. 2 Gowdy, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, p. 2 Pennisi, Elizabeth, ‘Our Egalitarian Eden’, Science, 344.6186 (2014), 824–25 Pennisi, ‘Our Egalitarian Eden’, p. 824 Bechtel, Michael M., Roman Liesch, and Kenneth F. Scheve, ‘Inequality and Redistribution Behaviour in a Give-or-Take Game.’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115.14 (2018), 3611–16 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720457115 Pennisi, ‘Our Egalitarian Eden’, p. 825 Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis, ‘The Inheritance of Inequality’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16.3 (2002), 3–30 Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 154 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001

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The trend towards centralised societies has been mirrored in our steadily increasing use of energy, moving from the subsistence of the late paleolithic at “around 5 GJ per person annually in the sum of food energy metabolised plus biomass for cooking”16 to 4 times that by the 19th century. Such growth in energy’s availability and efficacy of use17 seemed to give rise to recurring instances of increasingly advanced civilisation, in disparate parts of the world confirmed by Cortes’ discovery of “roads canals, cities, palaces, schools, etc. High civilisation, differing in detail but alike in essentials”18 during his invasion of the Aztecs.

Such trends experienced a steroidal increase through the advent of coal and later oil with our global average energy use “reaching 80 GJ per capita”19 today, bringing great increases in productivity, population and standards of living by enacting the gambit of “adding ancient solar productivity from underground to the agricultural productivity of the land”20. The proliferation of cheap energy also yielded adverse phenomena of international energy dependency, ecological crisis and a monetary system which “cut free from physical tethers”21 accelerated our consumption and material throughput, giving rise to further surplus and societal wealth.

This extreme bounty of cheap fuel has dramatically warped our relations between; time, in tandem with the social contract of debt as an “intertemporal transfer of consumption”22, the value of land, which by the 1970s was of such menial concern that “macroeconomic descriptions had been reduced to labour and capital”23 and our perception of energy which, under the conditions of “increases in energy availability and a decrease in energy price”24 led to the global development of a material production and agricultural capital base predicated on continual returns, an ever-cheapening energy supply and growing consumption, driven by the “assumption that rising incomes could consistently raise wellbeing”25.

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Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168, p. 1 Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 153 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Wright, Ronald, A Short History Of Progress (Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd), p. 50 Lambert, Jessica G. et al, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, p .153 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 4 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 2 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 7 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 5 Lambert, Jessica G. et al, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, p .164 Millward-Hopkins, J. et al, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, p. 3

The import price of oil hit a low in 1998 at $12.07/BBL before increasing to $27.72/BBL by 200026, between 2005 and 2014 the “US drilling oil and gas wells producer price index increased by 350%”27 and since then, debt fuelled capital expenditure on shale oil extractions has “exceeded cash flow 19 quarters in a row”28. This parallels trends of global debt/GDP ratio passing 300%, growing at 3.5 times the rate of domestic output since 2007. All signs that our society is now experiencing an inversion of our recent relationship with energy with “decreasing energy quality and increasing energy cost”29.

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Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 164 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 6 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 6 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 12

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NIGHTMARE WORLD This energetic hedonism is a global expression of our neurological bias for gratification in the short term, which has led a chorus of consumption “at great cost to the stability of humanity’s medium and long-term lifesupport system”30 toward a myriad of adverse conditions of inter alia, a halving of terrestrial vegetation since agriculture began31, poorer water and air quality32, rapid growth in zoonotic pathogen transfer33 and rising levels of social unrest34, with “inequality, and especially affluence, now widely recognised as core drivers of environmental damage”35.

Despite the growth and proliferation of ever-cheaper renewable energy systems, with the cost of solar cells falling by almost 90%36 over the last decade, our increase in global electricity demand just in 2018 was “more than the entire historical installed capacity of solarvoltaics”37, negating any reduction on our fossil fuel reliance. We inhabit a condition in which our atmospheric carbon concentrations (currently >500 ppm) continue to rapidly surpass recommended limits, with the IPCC outlining “450 ppm CO2-e would give Earth a mere 66% chance of not exceeding a 2 °C warming”38, leading us deeper into a “descent into the maelstrom”39 in which such gases remain in the atmosphere for millennia after their release40. The hopes of the UN’s climate goals rest overwhelmingly on technologies of carbon capture “never proven to be economically viable at scale”41 as well as biofuel plantations requiring “land 2 to 3 times the size of India”42. Further belittled by the irreversible causal feedback loop linking anthropogenic emissions and natural carbon sinks, which is likely to cause “permafrost carbon loss to continue for many years after anthropogenic emissions have stabilized”43 meaning even in a climate scientist’s Goshen of decarbonised energy and widespread nuclear fusion, our ecological conditions would continue to deteriorate.

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Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), 9 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419, p. 4 Bradshaw, Corey J. et al, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, p. 2 Smith, Pete, Mike R. Ashmore, Helaina I. J. Black, Paul J. Burgess, Chris D. Evans, Timothy A. Quine, and others, ‘REVIEW: The Role of Ecosystems and Their Management in Regulating Climate, and Soil, Water and Air Quality’, Journal of Applied Ecology, 50.4 (2013), p. 812 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12016 Austin, Kelly F., ‘Degradation and Disease: Ecologically Unequal Exchanges Cultivate Emerging Pandemics’, World Development, 137 (2021), 105163, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105163 Acemoglu, Daron, Leopoldo Fergusson, and Simon Johnson, ‘Population and Civil War’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 23322 (2017) https://doi.org/10.3386/w23322 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168, p. 4 Zachary Shahan, ‘Solar Panel Prices Have Dropped Off Cliff & Sunk Into Ocean’, CleanTechnica, <https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/30/solar-panel-prices-have-dropped-off-cliff-sunk-into-ocean-solar-panels-9x-cheaper-than-in-2006/>, [accessed 30 January 2021] Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 10 R.K. Pachauri, and L. A. Meyer., ‘Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 1–24.

Latour, Bruno, Down to Earth : Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018), eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1985306&authtype=shib&site=ehost-live&authtype=ip,shib&custid=ns010826, p. 44 Gowdy, John, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, Futures, 115 (2020), p. 4, 102488 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488, Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, Sustainable Development, 27.5 (2019), p. 877 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947 Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, p. 877 Burke, Eleanor J., Sarah E. Chadburn, Chris Huntingford, and Chris D. Jones, ‘CO 2 Loss by Permafrost Thawing Implies Additional Emissions Reductions to Limit Warming to 1.5 or 2°C’, Environmental Research Letters, 13.2 (2018), p. 1, 024024 https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa138

Declining ecological conditions, as noted in our shift away from subsistence lifestyles, have a historical record of exacerbating social and political instability with recent examples of the 2014 Syrian uprising “driven by another drought that was the worst drought on record”44 with the concurrent refugee crisis likely just the beginning of an estimated “1 billion environmental migrants expected by 2050”45.

The inherent evolution of humanity and our now-complex societies is a direct outcome of the predominantly stable ecological conditions of the Holocene and the impact of anthropogenic emissions “just beginning to be felt”46 with predicted conditions “far more dangerous than currently believed”47 bringing into focus the bleak point that “all the wisdom accumulated over ten thousand years, even if we were to succeed in rediscovering it, has never served more than a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million human beings on a relatively stable stage”48. Such unpreparedness for radical ecological change is echoed by Bradshaw et al. that the scale of threat “is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts”49 with every damaging secondary effect of our atmospheric alterations seemingly amplifying further degradation.

Such an inhumanly colossal scale of challenging conditions inherently inspires responses of apathy, denial and nihilism, understandably natural reactions which allow the mind to “remove dissonance and thus emotionally absolve”50 us from problems we are not neurologically evolved for. Ecological problems are highly abstract and long-term, incongruent with the temporal bias that leads us to “discount distant outputs over those available at the present time”51. Reactions of indifference to a tragedy of global scale are further weakened by the fact that “the maximum permissible CO2 limit was crossed just before 1990”52, a crisis point, blindly passed long ago. Humans are creatures of empathy, finding identity through shared social myths53 “which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate”54 and are thus out of scale to the tragedy in which they find themselves implicated.

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Wallace-Wells, David, “When Will The Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.”, Intelligencer, 2021 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html [Accessed 30 January 2021] Oli Brown, Migration and Climate Change (United Nations, 2008) https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213630235 Gowdy, John, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, Futures, 115 (2020), p. 4, 102488 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488, Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), p. 1, 9 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419 Latour, Bruno, Down to Earth : Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018), eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1985306&authtype=shib&site=ehost-live&authtype=ip,shib&custid=ns010826 Bradshaw, Corey J. et al, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, p. 1 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, Hagens, N.J, and H Kunz, “The Oil Drum | Applying Time To Energy Analysis”, Theoildrum.Com, 2021 http://theoildrum.com/node/7147 [Accessed 30 January 2021] Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45.1 (2014), p. 1 Gazzaniga, Michael, Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (Hachette UK, 2012) Wallace-Wells, David, “When Will The Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.”, Intelligencer, 2021 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html [Accessed 30 January 2021]

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Climatologists present the edict that “this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public”55, and yet the targets of a sequence of unilateral summits continue to be missed, likely because such a breadth of societal aspirations like the SDG’s “lack theoretical grounding and suffer from internal contradictions between development and sustainability”56, as well as “the tone of the IPCC’s probabilistic language being remarkably conservative”57 which leads to a dilution of necessary action; characteristic of political arenas of multinational consensus. The relationship between rapid action and the deliberations of multinational theatres seem overly swayed by political optics rather than aggressively mobilised actions, which may be reflected in the comparison of COVID vaccination response between the UK & EU58. In a political landscape of gestural action and intrinsic contradiction, how can the necessary shifts in society be made?

Scientists’ rational approach of “technoscientific reasoning and topdown, expert knowledge”59 though fundamentally necessary to the recognition of highly abstract processes has, through its abstraction, distanced the patterns of nature and man into “two domains, one that is inanimate and has no agency(nature), and one which is animated and concentrates all the agencies(human)”60. We have deanimated the natural world into “a mere ‘factor in production’, an externalised resource, indifferent to our actions, grasped from afar”61. Indeed, throughout the literature of persuasive sustainability, a field of behavioural analysis aiming to engender ecologically minded actions, great emphasis is given to providing useful data to individuals in the hope of behavioural change, following the “assumption that people are rational actors seeking to optimize activity based on what they know”62, which fails to take note of the impact of the emotional and habitual aspects of human behaviour that overwhelmingly influence our actions.

This is particularly true regarding the seemingly distant future of climate catastrophe, our very conception of future events occuring within the neocortex, a relatively new area of the brain with “no direct connection to deep-brain motivational centres that communicate urgency”63.

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Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), 9 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419 Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, Sustainable Development, 27.5 (2019), 873–84 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947 Herrando-Pérez, Salvador, Corey J A Bradshaw, Stephan Lewandowsky, and David R Vieites, ‘Statistical Language Backs Conservatism in Climate-Change Assessments’, BioScience, 69.3 (2019), p. 209 https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz004 Adler, Katya, “Covid: Why Is EU’S Vaccine Rollout So Slow?”, BBC News, 2021 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55844268 [Accessed 30 January 2021] Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 950 https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539 Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45.1 (2014), p. 14 Latour, Bruno, Down to Earth : Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018), eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), p. 74 http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1985306&authtype=shib&site=ehost-live&authtype=ip,shib&custid=ns010826 Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, et al, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, p. 952 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 1

Our Global Addiction The absolute primacy energy has in the modern world cannot be overstated. The surplus of fossil fuels has spurred the establishment of a civilisation generating ever-greater amounts of infrastructure and technology which require ever-quickening “flows of energy for its maintenance metabolism”64.

The conditions we inhabit are enabled by us drawing down the carbon battery 10 million times faster than it was charged65, a reality reflected no better than in the energetic intensity of our highly mechanised (energy intensive) agricultural food system. Each calorie of our food currently takes around 10 calories of energy to produce66, accounting for the supply chain of fertilisers (14% energy), processing and packaging (25%), food storage (from warehouses to cafés, 29%) as well as individual families’ shopping, cooking and refrigeration (28%), and transportation; the most optimised link in the chain using only around 4% of our food’s embodied energy67. The very industry that relies on the stability of the holocene’s conditions is derailing itself.

In the context of the natural world, “organisms that require more energy to find food than the food contains, will die”68, with further worrying factors of this absurd system including a predicted “doubling of the volatility of grains in the mid-latitudes...the breadbasket of the world”69 by 2050 which will likely destabilise an increasingly costly70 agricultural system, with no geographic alternative to replenish food demand due to the comparatively lower quality of soils in latitudes further north which will also be subject to increasingly disruptive levels of polar amplification71.

“The decisive mistake of traditional economics...is the disregard for energy as a factor of production.”72 - Hans Christoph Binswanger, 1974

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Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 165 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Schramski, John R., David K. Gattie, and James H. Brown, ‘Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112.31 (2015), 9511 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1508353112 Bradford, J, ‘The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification (Post Carbon Institute)’, 2019, p. 10 https://www.postcarbon.org/ publications/the-future-is-rural/ Bradford, J, ‘The Future Is Rural’, 2019, p. 10 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 6 Battisti, David. S., and Rosamond L. Naylor, ‘Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat’, Science, 323.5911 (2009), 240 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1164363 Hall, Charles AS, and Kent A. Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations (Springer, 2011) Ecochard, Kristyn, “NASA - What’s Causing The Poles To Warm Faster Than The Rest Of Earth?”, Nasa.Gov, 2021 https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warmingpoles.html [Accessed 31 January 2021] Binswanger, Hans Christoph, & Ledergerber, E, quoted in Hall, Charles, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kümmel, Timm Kroeger, and Wolfgang Eichhorn, ‘The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics: Neoclassical Economics, the Dominant Form of Economics Today, Has at Least Three Fundamental Flaws from the Perspective of the Natural Sciences, but It Is Possible to Develop a Different, Biophysical Basis for Economics That Can Serve as a Supplement to, or a Replacement for, Neoclassical Economics’, BioScience, 51.8 (2001), p. 664 https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0663:TNTRTN]2.0.CO;2

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The key factor of our current socio-economic system, which relies on “huge armies of energy slaves to create our wealth”73 is the net energy74, namely the energy available once set up costs are extracted. The only reason our agricultural system can maintain a 1:10 negative net energy output is because of its reliance on a typically abundant, high quality oil supply; from the point of view of net energy analysis we consume hydrocarbons, not food. We have effectively “decoupled human demand from biological regeneration”75.

It is clear in view of the miraculous energy density of oil why we are so fundamentally addicted. A barrel of crude oil contains the equivalent energy of 11 years of human labour76. Though oil fueled mechanisation is typically far less efficient than skilled humans, it makes up for this in energy density and crucially a stable cost per kilowatt hour. The consideration of cost becomes an increasingly worrying factor in an ever more volatile energy market paired with a highly automated industrial sector, with the vast majority of mechanised production heavily reliant on very particular margins of energy price, with “a doubling or tripling of energy costs making previously high-profit industries with large energy input requirements unprofitable”77.

Nations are divided by the availability of domestic fuels; those with fuel typically develop widespread capital through factories and associated systems of production (reliant on the stable supply & cost of such fuels) and those lacking fuel deposits necessarily rely on imports paid for through “some kind of surplus economic activity”78. As energy prices of oil continue to rise so too must import-reliant nations’ product costs, or their production output will yield receding profits. This is leading to an increasing addiction to the growing expense of oil imports in many developing nations, driving further levels of international inequality; a key secondary driver of climate change with many suggesting “inequality increases the carbon intensity of well-being, particularly inequalities between countries”79.

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Hall, Charles, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kümmel, Timm Kroeger, and Wolfgang Eichhorn, ‘The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics: Neoclassical Economics, the Dominant Form of Economics Today, Has at Least Three Fundamental Flaws from the Perspective of the Natural Sciences, but It Is Possible to Develop a Different, Biophysical Basis for Economics That Can Serve as a Supplement to, or a Replacement for, Neoclassical Economics’, BioScience, 51.8 (2001), p. 667 https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0663:TNTRTN]2.0.CO;2 Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 165 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), p. 4 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 4 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 4 Lambert, Jessica G. et al, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, p .154 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168

The effects of climate change, caused by aformentioned fuel dependency further degrades the conditions for transitions to energy self-sufficiency with impacts “projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security and prolong existing and create new poverty traps”80.

Assessments highlighting the oversight of international aid programs’ failings to alleviate this dependency through lower energy-intensity systems of production and improving economic efficiencies raises the worryingly insidious suspicion that such approaches may have been intentionally ignored, though there are a handful of examples of developing nations pursuing programs of energetic self-sufficiency such as Haiti’s SREP81 (Scaling up renewable energy program) & Ethiopia’s CRGE82 (climate resilient green economy) strategy which has led Ethiopia to become a net exporter of domestic renewable energy83, trading power with their neighbours.

It is also critical that developed nations with high levels of energy use and material throughput such as Canada, which has an extremely high energy use per capita of 311 GJ (Denmark, 139 GJ/ capita)84, focus on lowering their energetic cost of living. Canada enjoys very high levels of material extraction and consumption (37 tonnes/capita/annum extraction, 38.3 tonnes/capita/annum consumption, compared to the UK at 6.6 tonnes/ capita/annum extraction & 23.4 tonnes/capita/annum consumption) as well as a relatively inefficient level of material productivity at $0.99/kg, close to half (54%) the efficiency levels of one of the best performing nations – Germany ($1.81/kg)85. Such conditions are worryingly susceptible to increasing global energy prices which incur greater living costs (amplified by energy use per capita), decrease the value of material production (due to inefficient, but very high levels of material throughput) and directly threaten well-being through the measured effect that “high quality energy appears to contribute to social well-being”86.

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IPCC, 2014: ‘Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 151 pp. p. 16 World Bank, ‘THE STRATEGIC CLIMATE FUND – SCALING UP RENEWABLE ENERGY IN LOW INCOME COUNTRIES PROGRAM (SREP)’, (Washington D.C : World Bank) available at: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/606711509156039620/pdf/Haiti-Renewable-Energy-for-All-Project-PAD-10052017.pdf Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, ‘Growth and Transformation Plan II’, (Addis Ababa : National Planning Commission), 2016 available at: https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/sites/default/files/downloads/policy-database/ETHIOPIA) Growth and Transformation Plan II%2C Vol I. (2015%2C162019%2C20).pdf Woldegebriel, E.G., “Ethiopia To Step Up Role As Regional Clean Power Exporter”, U.S., 2021 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-energy-idUSKBN0NY1EK20150513 [Accessed 31 January 2021] Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 162 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Data sourced from - “Country Profiles – Materialflows.Net”, Materialflows.Net, 2021 http://www.materialflows.net/visualisation-centre/country-profiles/ [Accessed 31 January 2021] Lambert, Jessica G. et al, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, p .153

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Assumptions that rising energy use & material consumption indefinitely increase well-being have been disproven with a “saturation point at which increases in per capita energy availability (greater than 150 GJ)…are not associated with further improvement to society”87.

The challenge of reaching a socio-economic system that can relieve us of a global metabolism of “110 billion barrels of oil”88 or the labour equivalent of 500 billion people per year, seems highly problematic within an economy in which everything is subsidised by our “energy slaves”89.

This was highlighted in scale by the negligible impact on resource use observed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, where global consumption, 70% above the biosphere’s regenerative capacity fell by just 14%90. Even without the worlds commutes, office energy costs and with a reduction in global GDP of $4.9 trillion91 (with accompanying mass unemployment reaching 14.7% in the US in April 202092) our global ecological degradation continued largely unfazed.

87 88 89

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Lambert, Jessica G. et al, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, p .153 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, p. 4 Hall, Charles, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kümmel, Timm Kroeger, and Wolfgang Eichhorn, ‘The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics: Neoclassical Economics, the Dominant Form of Economics Today, Has at Least Three Fundamental Flaws from the Perspective of the Natural Sciences, but It Is Possible to Develop a Different, Biophysical Basis for Economics That Can Serve as a Supplement to, or a Replacement for, Neoclassical Economics’, BioScience, 51.8 (2001), p. 667 https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0663:TNTRTN]2.0.CO;2 Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), p. 9 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419 Slater, Adam, “The Scars Of Covid-19”, Blog.Oxfordeconomics.Com, 2021 https://blog.oxfordeconomics.com/coronavirus/the-scars-of-covid-19 [Accessed 31 January 2021] Rushe, Dominic, and Michael Sainato, “Year Ends On Low Note As 787,000 More Americans File For Unemployment”, The Guardian, 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/31/us-unemployment-december-coronavirus [Accessed 31 January 2021]

An Inevitable Outcome The current economic system & its subsequent ecological damages are in part the fault of our focus on GDP and economic growth as a consistent measure of societal betterment. Such a focus is relatively recent with “hardly a trace of interest in economic growth as a policy objective in the official or professional literature of western countries before 1950”93. Our emphasis on economic growth is largely an outcome of the persuasive arguments popularised by J.M Keynes in the aftermath of the Second World War. Observations of how “government spending could be used to prime economic pump and simulate job creation”94, as had occurred throughout the conflict, negating unemployment almost entirely, were interpreted as economic growth naturally improving the populace’s well-being. By the 1960’s economic growth was a core policy objective of developed economies, clearly outlined in article 1 of the OECD Charter signed in Paris, 1960 that “the aims of the OECD shall be to promote policies designed to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth, employment and rising standard of living in member countries”95. The intrinsic bond between physical materials and global GDP equates to around $2 per kg96. The UN’s sustainable development goal 8 on economic growth has a target of 3% per year97, which at a global scale would require the equivalent consumption of energy & materials over the next “30 years as we did cumulatively in the past 10,000”98.

Multiple studies on the correlations between well-being and energy use (which shares a linear relationship to GDP and material consumption) have shown that the “drastic increases in societies’ energy use seen in recent decades have, beyond a certain point, had no benefit for the well-being of their populations”99. Beyond this “saturation point”100 of around 150GJ/Capita relations between measures such as HDI (Human Development Index, containing metrics for life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, combined educational enrolment etc.), GII (Gender Inequality Index) and access to clean water each reach high levels, with many countries with significantly lower levels of GDP per capita achieving comparable happiness, such as the Philippines, where energy use is around 5% of the US yielding equivalent levels of life satisfaction101.

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Arndt, Heinz W, The Rise And Fall Of Economic Growth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 30 Auth, Katie, G Gardner, Lisa Mastny, Tom Prugh, Michael Renner, and Peter. A Victor and others, Confronting Hidden Threats To Sustainability (Washington D.C: Island Press, 2015), pp. 37-50 “Convention On The Organisation For Economic Co-Operation And Development - OECD”, Oecd.Org, 2021 https://www.oecd.org/general/conventionontheorganisationforeconomicco-operationanddevelopment.htm [Accessed 1 February 2021] Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 11 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 11 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 1 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), p. 2 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168 Lambert, Jessica G., Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, Ajay Gupta, and Michelle Arnold, ‘Energy, EROI and Quality of Life’, Energy Policy, 64 (2014), p. 153 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.001 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 8 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520

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Predominant in developed countries predicated on growth, the hedonic pursuit of increasing wellbeing, “characterised by the presence of positive emotions, rather than negative emotions”102, and sought through greater consumption, has conversely been outlined as a set of behaviours driven by the need for perceived social status103 and as a symptom of “intensive and locked in social practices; employment related stress and poor mental health”104. The parallel approach of eudaimonic wellbeing, “with a focus on resources and strengths and on life meaning, authenticity, and purposefulness”105 seeks increased wellbeing through motivation driven by necessity, and meaningful pursuits, negating much of the hedonic urge for “positional consumption and insatiable desires”106, and thus is likely to be more congruent with our global need of a lower energy way of life.

The IPCC (UN panel on climate change) outline in their AR5 report that “economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion...the contribution of economic growth has risen sharply”107 presenting an ultimatum, that if we are to divert our planet from a post 2100 world in which “atmospheric CO2 could exceed 1400 ppm...which will certainly have catastrophic consequences for all life on earth”108, we must engage with the idea, popularised as Degrowth, defined as “an equitable downscaling of economic production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term”109.

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Di Fabio, Annamaria, and Letizia Palazzeschi, ‘Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being: The Role of Resilience beyond Fluid Intelligence and Personality Traits’, Frontiers in Psychology, 6 (2015), p. 1 1367 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01367 Katikireddi, Srinivasa Vittal, Elise Whitley, Jim Lewsey, Linsay Gray, and Alastair H Leyland, ‘Socioeconomic Status as an Effect Modifier of Alcohol Consumption and Harm: Analysis of Linked Cohort Data’, The Lancet Public Health, 2.6 (2017), p. 267 https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30078-6 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), p. 3 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168 Di Fabio, Annamaria et al, ‘Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being’, p. 1 Millward-Hopkins, et al, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), p. 2 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168 IPCC, 2014: ‘Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 151 pp. p. 5 Gowdy, John, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, Futures, 115 (2020), p. 4 102488 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488 Schneider, François, Giorgos Kallis, and Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘Crisis or Opportunity? Economic Degrowth for Social Equity and Ecological Sustainability.

Introduction to This Special Issue’, Growth, Recession or Degrowth for Sustainability and Equity?, 18.6 (2010), p. 511 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.014

To be clear, degrowth should not be seen as synonymous with decline or societal collapse, but as a set of ideas that re-centre the finite nature of our biosphere’s material resources110, a traditional economic principle sidelined by neoclassical economics, which placed an increasing reliance on high levels of debt articulated in the current $55 trillion of credit necessary to maintain China’s $13 trillion economy (the 2008 crisis was based on just $800 billion of debt)111. Our current model, can be likened to an animal that takes in “low entropy, organised, structured matter”112 further processes it into commodities which are used and in time, are then gradually expelled back into the environment as high entropy waste.

The perpetual growth of this process has led to a situation in which the extraction of raw materials like copper, essential to our offshore wind turbines’ asynchronous generators and cabling(expected to consume 5.5Mt in the next 10 years)113, uses close to double the amount of energy relative to yield than it needed 20 years ago114. Aside from asteroid mining scenarios115, perpetual growth in demand is incongruous to a resource base which is fundamentally finite.

A commonly touted solution to the outlined relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation is to decouple our economies from material throughput by: improving “progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production”116 (target 8.4 of the UN SDG’s), and shifting production, as the UK has to a significant degree, “from goods to services”117. A distinction is made between ‘relative’ decoupling, which is the reduction in material throughput per dollar of GDP and ‘absolute decoupling’, when total throughput declines whilst GDP increases118.

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Daly, Herman, “Herman Daly On The Economy & The Environment”, Youtube, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mcKCjfKrUA [Accessed 1 February 2021] Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 12 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520 Daly, Herman, “Herman Daly On The Economy & The Environment” “Global Wind Turbine Fleet To Consume Over 5.5Mt Of Copper By 2028”, Woodmac.Com, 2021 https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/global-wind-turbine-fleet-to-consume-over-5.5mt-of-copper-by-2028/ [Accessed 1 February 2021] Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 7 Hein, Andreas M., Robert Matheson, and Dan Fries, ‘A Techno-Economic Analysis of Asteroid Mining’, Acta Astronautica, 168 (2020), 104–15 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.05.009 Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, Sustainable Development, 27.5 (2019), p. 875 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947 Auth, Katie, G Gardner, Lisa Mastny, Tom Prugh, Michael Renner, and Peter. A Victor and others, Confronting Hidden Threats To Sustainability (Washington D.C: Island Press, 2015), p. 41 Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 9

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Though there are clearly potential improvements in material productivity(relative decoupling), reaching levels of, for example, the German economy, which produces $1.81/KG of material (China achieves just $0.20/KG of material)119, which could be reached throughout the world; such gains in industrial efficiency typically lower operating costs which induce increases in consumption120. This phenomena, coined through a survey of operating improvements in the Victorian coal industry, led WS Jevons to the conclusion that “it is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is truth”121.

It is true the UK has lowered its domestic material extraction from a peak of 14.2 tonnes/capita in 1989 to 6.6 tonnes/capita in 2013122. However, this cannot be considered as a true decoupling of material throughput from GDP, as it represents merely “a shift in the location of where materials enter the interconnected economies of the global economic system”123, an artefact of accounting conventions124 made clearer by the consideration that over that same time period global domestic extraction per capita has risen by 43%125 with “the material efficiency of the world economy worsening in the 21st-century not improving”126.

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Data sourced from - “Country Profiles – Materialflows.Net”, Materialflows.Net, 2021 http://www.materialflows.net/visualisation-centre/country-profiles/ [Accessed 31 January 2021] Peter. A Victor et al, Confronting Hidden Threats To Sustainability (Washington D.C: Island Press, 2015), p. 43 Jevons, W., The coal question ; an inquiry concerning the progress of the nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines.’

(London: Macmillan and Co. 1866), p. 61 “Country Profiles – Materialflows.Net” Peter. A Victor et al, Confronting Hidden Threats To Sustainability (Washington D.C: Island Press, 2015), p. 44 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), p. 1 102168 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168 “Country Profiles – Materialflows.Net” Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, Sustainable Development, 27.5 (2019), p. 875 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947

The UN’s sustainable development goals of 3% annual growth whilst staying below 2° C warming are likely to be problematic, presenting a situation in which to achieve the necessary absolute decoupling/ economic decarbonisation to negate greater material extraction, we would have to reach a decarbonisation rate “3 to 6 times faster than has ever been achieved in history”127, a prospect dampened further by the point that although carbon efficiency improved by 1.28% per year from 1960 to 2000128, since 2000 the World Bank indicates there has been “zero improvement in global carbon efficiency”129. Multiple economic models which aimed to reduce material throughput (currently at around 92 billion tonnes)130 through measures such as increasing carbon taxes and optimistic material efficiency improvement rates (Schandl et al 2016 at $236131 per tonne with rates improving from 1.5 to 4.5% per year, UNEP132 at $573 per tonne, a resource extraction tax and “rapid improvements in resource efficiency”133) concluded that “while some relative decoupling can be achieved in some scenarios, none would lead to an absolute reduction in materials footprint”134 (Schandl et al 2016, reached a level of 95 billion tons in 2050) and that “there are market and organisational failures and hidden costs that prevent increases in resource efficiency, even when they seem to be cost effective”135 (UNEP, reached a level of 132 billion tonnes in 2050). Another study (Hatfield Dodds, 2015) also experienced the efficiency counter-effects that “resource efficiency improvements eventually approach physical limits, after which growth drives the resources back up”136.

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, Sustainable Development, 27.5 (2019), p. 876 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947 Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, p. 877 Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, p. 877 Data sourced from - “Country Profiles – Materialflows.Net”, Materialflows.Net, 2021 http://www.materialflows.net/visualisation-centre/country-profiles/ [Accessed 31 January 2021] Schandl, Heinz, Steve Hatfield-Dodds, Thomas Wiedmann, Arne Geschke, Yiyong Cai, James West, and others, ‘Decoupling Global Environmental Pressure and Economic Growth: Scenarios for Energy Use, Materials Use and Carbon Emissions’, Absolute Reductions in Material Throughput, Energy Use and Emissions, 132 (2016), 45–56 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.06.100 UNEP (2017) Resource Efficiency: Potential and Economic Implications. A report of the International Resource Panel. Ekins, P., Hughes, N., et al.

Hickel, Jason, ‘The Contradiction of the Sustainable Development Goals: Growth versus Ecology on a Finite Planet’, p. 876 Schandl, Heinz et al. ‘Decoupling Global Environmental Pressure and Economic Growth: Scenarios for Energy Use, Materials Use and Carbon Emissions’, p. 45 UNEP (2017) Resource Efficiency: Potential and Economic Implications.

Hatfield-Dodds, Steve, Heinz Schandl, Philip D. Adams, Timothy M. Baynes, Thomas S. Brinsmead, Brett A. Bryan, and others, ‘Australia Is “Free to Choose” Economic Growth and Falling Environmental Pressures’, Nature, 527.7576 (2015), p. 49 https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16065

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In the absence of decoupling & efficiency improvements as a solution to the ecological degradations of economic growth, we are left with the need to stop and lower the size of our economy, shifting societal focus from increasing output to improving the fairness of economic distribution, a point made clearly by the classical economist John Stewart Mill who outlined “in the most advanced countries, what is economically needed is better distribution”137, within a chapter describing his concept for a “stationary state”. A system summarised clearly by Herman Daly as “not static, people are born, people die, new things are invented, there’s new production and there’s also balanced depreciation, the stock of capital remains constant and the population of people remains constant, although they are always being renewed by birth and death, production and equal depreciation, but the whole system is not growing, it’s not expanding, further and further into the biosphere incurring greater costs in the displacement of the very services that we depend on”138.

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system” - Ilya Progogine139 “The answers now are at least as much social as they are technical”140 “Human behaviour can protect or destroy the environmental conditions and resources that support life on Earth”141

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Stewart-Mill, John, ‘Principles of Political Economy’ (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 2009), p. 593 eBook [accessed 2nd February 2021] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30107/30107-pdf.pdf Daly, Herman, “Herman Daly On The Economy & The Environment”, Youtube, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mcKCjfKrUA [Accessed 1 February 2021] Ilya Progogine, quoted in, Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 13 106520 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520, Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 14 Geller, E., 2001. Handbook of environmental psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, p.525.

Motivations In An Entangled World The direct connections of our neurological, social, institutional and economic systems to the emergent crisis of climate change, far from confirming unavoidable hell scenarios of “scarification and population exodus”142; provide the opportunity to leverage humanity’s “pervasive, obligatory sociality”143. To highlight and strengthen our capacities to mediate our world’s fate through the redefining of biosphere and civilisation as a story of “entangled agents”144, reflective, open ended system approaches and an understanding of the “evidence-based literature proposing ways to change human behaviour for the benefit of all extant life”145.

Our motivations influence our actions directly, indirectly, unconsciously and generatively across all scales of human society. The recognition, identification and prediction of others’ behaviours “play an integral role in human social interactions”146. The core nature of human motivation requires a highly differentiated approach, considering “different types of valued outcomes and different reasons for pursuing them”147. Such a breadth of approach has led to the development of a rich psychological literature with a range of theoretical frameworks.

Rosenstock’s Health Belief Model (HBM)148 outlines the importance of “decisional balance: the relative weight of perceived benefits as compared to perceived barriers to engage in a target behaviour”149, which may have a corollary with the previously outlined pursuit of hedonic wellbeing, predicated on maximising positive and minimising negative emotion150.

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizzard, ‘Planet B’ from ‘Infest the Rats’ Nest’, Flightless Records, Melbourne (2019) Dunfield, Kristen A., ‘A Construct Divided: Prosocial Behaviour as Helping, Sharing, and Comforting Subtypes’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (2014), 958 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00958 p. 1 Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45.1 (2014), p. 14 Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, and others, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1 (2021), 9 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419 p. 6 Dunfield, Kristen A., ‘A Construct Divided: Prosocial Behaviour as Helping, Sharing, and Comforting Subtypes’, p. 2 Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 167 Rosenstock, I. M., ‘The health belief model: Explaining health behaviour through expectancies.’, Health behaviour and health education, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco (1990) 33-62 Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020), 102449 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449, p. 2 Di Fabio, Annamaria, and Letizia Palazzeschi, ‘Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being: The Role of Resilience beyond Fluid Intelligence and Personality Traits’, Frontiers in Psychology, 6 (2015), 1367 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01367

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Locke’s Goal-setting Theory emphasises the development of an “action-plan”151, a structured, exterior totem which helps outlined “intentions regulate choice behaviour...intentions as mediators of the effects of incentives on task-performance”152, a system not dissimilar to the common gameful fitness app feature of pre-commitments, which use the “voluntary imposition of constraints (that are costly to overcome) on one’s future choices in a strategic attempt to resist future temptations”153.

Each of these theories focuses on observable behaviour, however Rapp noted the importance of also assessing the internal aspects of behavioural change, highlighting “the importance of each individual’s agency and internal resources...the intentionality of change”154. Shifts in behaviour can also occur in a relatively unconscious manner through observations of one’s own overt behaviour155 as is the case in Bem’s Self Perception Theory.

SPT is highlighted clearly through a 1959 study by Festinger and Carlsmith156 which paid university students high ($20) and low ($1) amounts to tell other students an ostensibly boring task was fun. Those paid highly failed to credibly align their reflection and behaviour, whilst those who received low compensation “developed a self-perception consistent with their behaviour”157, assuming through their overt actions that they really must have enjoyed the task since it was hardly worth lying about. This highlights a seemingly universal rule of rewards - they must be “strong enough to get behaviour started but not powerful enough to provide justification for the effort”158.

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Locke, Edwin A., ‘Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives’, Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance, 3.2 (1968), p. 157 https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(68)90004-4 Locke, Edwin A., ‘Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives’, p. 157 Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020), 102449 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449, p. 19 Rapp, Amon, Maurizio Tirassa, and Lia Tirabeni, ‘Rethinking Technologies for Behaviour Change: A View from the Inside of Human Change’, ACM Trans. Comput.Hum. Interact., 26.4 (2019) p. 8 https://doi.org/10.1145/3318142 Bem, D. J., ‘ Self-perception theory’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 6, Academic Press, New York (1972), p. 2 Festinger, Leon, and Carlsmith, James M., ‘Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 58, (1959), 203-210 Geller, E., 2001. Handbook of environmental psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, p.536.

Geller, E., 2001. Handbook of environmental psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, p.537.

Critics of many of these theories have outlined that motivation is considered unitary, “undifferentiated for types, qualities, or orientations”159 and as such, makes discerning between the vagaries of external and internal affordances, contingencies, temperaments and a range of other factors difficult and limiting.

The most prevalent theoretical framework occurring throughout the field of persuasive sustainability and motivational psychology is SelfDetermination Theory. SDT highlights a range of continuums that behavioural motivations can be mapped along, principally outlining the difference between extrinsic motivation, “controlled by demands or contingencies external to the person”160, and intrinsic motivation, in which individuals “experience a sense of volition – a sense of unpressured willingness to engage in the action”161.

Behaviours are not inherently bound to one or the other based on one’s given personality traits, but are influenced by conditions that facilitate the transformation of “external regulatory processes into internal regulatory processes”162, a continuum defined as internalisation. To reach true self regulatory behaviour, these underlying processes must be “reciprocally simulated with one’s self”163, a further continuum of ‘integration’, more associated with one’s perceived volition of an activity. This ranges from :external regulation, characteristic of the extrinsic (being paid or forced into an action you have no interest in) ;introjected regulation, involving actions “motivated by internal problems and pressures such as threats of guilt or self-esteem”164, exemplified by egoistic presumptions of social worth; identified regulation, characteristic of behaviour chosen based on being perceived as personally important, and fully integrated regulation involving the “reciprocal assimilation of identified values and regulations into one’s coherent sense of self”165. The clear quality to identify a behaviour’s position along this spectrum is the degree to which the “perceived locus of causality”166is external or internal.

159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020), p. 2, 102449 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449 Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 168 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 165 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167

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Differentiating between a highly identified behaviour and a truly integrated one can be discerned by whether one would undertake the activity solely for the interesting quality of the behaviour(integrated) or for an instrumental outcome(identified)167.

The clear value in self-determined behaviours is that they are associated with “greater conceptual understanding”, “greater curiosity”, “proactive coping with failures”, “higher self-esteem” with people “more likely to internalise the values that are endorsed within the learning context”168.

With extrinsic behaviours commonly associated with the inverse qualities of alienation, amotivation, “anxiety”169, “maladaptive coping with failures”170 and a feeling of coercion.

Though self-determination is a volitional, deliberative condition, there are of course a myriad of unconscious, automatic mechanisms of behaviour171 which lead to the formation of habits which may guide either intrinsic or extrinsic conditions of motivation; much in the same way external actors, contingencies and social hierarchies do.

It has been inferred that these two behavioural continuums, perpendicular to one another form a spectrum172 denoting the motivational conditions of behaviour with the explicit and implicit skewing “autonomous vs. heteronomous”173 motivation. However, in the case of fully integrated behaviours, such considerations become largely irrelevant as one finds the task inherently enjoyable, with “the reflective and impulsive systems of the mind”174 fully aligned.

Enabling self-determined behaviour requires contextual conditions which “satisfy three basic psychological needs, Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness”175. These conditions are interdependent, meaning although one may be able to achieve “personal control over outcomes”176, through a solitary nomadic life, this will not lead to the fulfilment of autonomous regulation in the absence of feelings of competence or a degree of social relatedness.

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Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020), 102449 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449, p. 2 Deci, Edward L., Ryan et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Villalobos-Zúñiga, ‘Apps That Motivate’, p. 5 Villalobos-Zúñiga, ‘Apps That Motivate’, p. 3 Villalobos-Zúñiga, ‘Apps That Motivate’, p. 5 Villalobos-Zúñiga, ‘Apps That Motivate’, p. 5 Villalobos-Zúñiga, ‘Apps That Motivate’, p. 4 Deci, Edward L., et al, ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 177

Achieving autonomy, the feeling of “willingness and volition with respect to human behaviour”177 requires a careful mediation of an activity’s “perceived locus of causality”178, namely where the impetus for action is discerned to be. The factors which impact the “self endorsement and ownership”179 of one’s actions are predominantly the mechanisms of feedback (e.g. data, grades and rewards) surrounding an activity.

The affordance of rewards can both strengthen and diminish human self-determined motivation; though rewards are commonly perceived as positive, under a breadth of behavioural analysis they have been noted to decrease intrinsic motivation, with people often “feeling like pawns to their extrinsic controls”180. Such adverse perceptions can however be influenced through the tone and language framing the affordance, with more positive outcomes achieved in the absence of controlling language such as “’you should’ or ‘you have to’”181, reinforcing the reality that it is the perceived locus of causality that is significant, regardless of an action’s absolute cause. The tangibility and scale of a reward can also mediate its “tendency to trivialise”182 with small contingencies like achievements, medals and badges being more effective than monetary reward. Contingencies that engage public display have also been shown as effective in motivating behavioural change with one study of an American hauliers showing “a decrease in vehicular miles of travel after publicly displaying the VMT of individuals in a workgroup with increased mpg among short run and long haul truck drivers with a public display of each employees mpg”183. Such mechanics of display engage the capacity of social conformism predicated on the psychological reality that “our place relative to others matters to us”184.

177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184

Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020), p. 4, 102449 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449 Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 173 Villalobos-Zúñiga, et al., ‘Apps That Motivate’, 2020, p. 12 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, 1996, p. 173 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, 1996, p. 173 Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1022 <https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Geller, E, Scott, ‘The Challenge of Increasing Proenvironmental Behaviour’, in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Electronic Edition (New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), p. 531 Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021), p. 44 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf>

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One can also differentiate between controlling and supportive databased feedback, with educational studies showing that a “more autonomy-supportive approach with emphasis on informative feedback and self direction”185 resulted in a host of superior learning outcomes in contrast to a more controlling, test and grading-heavy approach which led to students relaying lower levels of interest in what they were taught as well as rating themselves as “less competent”186.

The pursuit of autonomy, at its core, seeks to recapture that “intrinsic tendency to explore, understand, and assimilate”187 aspects of our world; a tendency we see inherent in the patterns of play of young children and other mammals. Such is the deep-rooted nature of play that its behaviours have been observed to occur largely in the absence of later-evolved areas of the brain like the neocortex which is typically assumed as the “substrate of our unique cognitive abilities”188. Studies by Panksepp on the impact of decortication in rats led to the discovery that sub-cortical regions of the brain were not only the neurodevelopmental seat of play systems in all mammals but also play a key role in the organisation and development of the neocortex itself189; an area which when damaged or maldeveloped is strongly aligned with occurrences of ADHD and other mental disorders which lead to further disbenefit in cognitive development and social cohesion.

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Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, 1996, p. 175 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, 1996, p. 176 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, 1996, p. 179 Rakic, Pasko, ‘Evolution of the Neocortex: A Perspective from Developmental Biology’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10.10 (2009), p. 724 <https://doi. org/10.1038/nrn2719> Davis, Kenneth L., and Christian Montag, ‘Selected Principles of Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience’, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12 (2019), 1025 <https://doi. org/10.3389/fnins.2018.01025>

The binary of approaches to learning through controlling and open-ended means recalls the divergent nature of finite games (based on clear win or loss, with a predominance to showcase past successes) and infinite games (entered in for a sense of curiosity and the continuation of play)190.

One can consider situations of repeatability such as a highly organised American football play, a structured dental assessment or a streamlined system of planned forestry as finite games. However as Carse notes, “to be prepared against surprise is to be trained (finite game), to be prepared for surprise is to be educated (infinite game)”191, and it is in that notion of adaptation, or lack thereof, to unknowns, that approaches predicated on autonomy and openness serve better.

An exemplary critique of the shortcoming of top-down approaches, predicated on the controlled, narrowing of vision which “brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality”192 lies in accounts of optimised forestry in 18th century Germany. Scott recounts how “the great simplification of the forest into a ‘one-commodity machine’”193 laid the foundations for both the rise of German codified forestry as a rigorous discipline, dominant throughout Europe, with its streamlined ‘monocropped’ forests maximising shortterm yields of species most profitable (predominantly conifers); but in just two generations gave way to a secondary field of study known as Waldsterben or ‘Forest Death’. The very framing of the perceived variables of the forest leaving a whole world of “soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals and flora”194 outside the brackets of consideration.

Within the context of complex systems the necessity of a more reflexive, holistic approach is paramount, and perhaps in the shadow of a global economy operating far outside the long-term boundaries of the biosphere, being able to give awareness to how one’s actions as an individual can bring about positive change would be useful, a point made plainly by Dasgupta that “neither the rule of law nor the dictates of social norms are sufficient to make us account for Nature in our daily practices...we will have to rely on self-enforcement, that is, be our own judge and jury”195.

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Schell, Jesse, D.I.C.E. 2010: ‘Design Outside the Box’ Presentation (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: D.I.C.E., 2010) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_PbHVW5cQ> Carse, James P., Finite and Infinite Games, 2013 edn (New York, NY, USA: Free Press, 1986) p. 19 Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 951 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539> Scott, J.C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Veritas Paperbacks (Yale University Press, 2020) p. 44 <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qe_RDwAAQBAJ> Scott, J.C., Seeing Like a State, 2020, p. 45 Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021), p. 79 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf>

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The preference for a “synoptic view of a selective reality”196 on the part of those in authority is of course understandable, operating within systems in which quantitative deliverables between parties operating largely in the short-term (an emergent outcome of cognitive temporal bias197) are an essential fixture in “forecasting economic trajectories, evaluating options and designing policy”198. Models and metrics tend to further their use through perceived effectiveness over time, following patterns of “path dependence”199 which in turn shape pursued strategies and our conception of future possibilities. These models are further amplified in their prevalence by the cognitive ‘time bias’ that spending time on something unconsciously reaffirms its worth200.

Self-determinant behaviour is also predicated on “feeling effective in one’s interaction with the social environment”201, a quality of competence that occurs only when the difficulty of an activity is “optimally discrepant with one’s skill level”202. This condition is reached naturally through selfdirected pursuits in which people tend “to select activities that are just slightly beyond their current competencies”203. Again feedback plays a delicate role with “controlling locution”204 typically undermining intrinsic motivation whereas constructive feedback, even when it is negative, can enhance motivation when “administered in a non-critical, autonomy supportive way”205.

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Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 951 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539> Hagens, N.J., ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020) p. 3, 106520 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ecolecon.2019.106520> Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021), p. 3 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021, p. 4 Schell, Jesse, D.I.C.E. 2010: ‘Design Outside the Box’ Presentation (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: D.I.C.E., 2010) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_PbHVW5cQ> Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020) p. 4, 102449 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449> Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 176 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’,1996, p. 177 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’,1996, p. 177 Deci, Edward L., et al., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’,1996, p. 177

Competence is a state in which we experience “the ability to control outcomes and the feeling that one is competent in interacting with one’s environment”206, a condition seldom experienced within the context of addressing the climate crisis due to the reality that “mobility, invisibility, and silence are pervasive features”207 of the natural world’s processes, negating any recognisable semblance of feedback in the short term.

One could argue that providing a breadth of ecological metrics which aggregate data into a more holistic model of feedback would help mediate the disconnect between our actions and our environmental impact; but that is to assume that “people are rational actors seeking to optimize activity based on what they know”208 when in fact our actions are overwhelmingly shaped and constrained by our physical and social contexts; with common examples of thoughtfully minded renters having “little control over their appliances, heating, and other major factors in their electricity use”209, hamstrung by their lack of preferable alternatives. The pervasive influence of social conformism can be seen in modes of reproductive behaviour with household sizes in developing nations commonly “characterised by high fertility and stagnant living standards, even when there is another potentially self-sustaining mode of behaviour that is characterised by low fertility and rising living standards and which is preferred by all”210. It has been noted that “the social world can be as powerful a carrier of externalities as the material environment”211 and that by further integrating our innate sociality with a clearly defined attitude of care for the natural world we may begin to reframe and interrogate the actions of ourselves, others and the groups and businesses we interact with, leveraging our own social capital in recognition that “reputation matters to firms, and that can be exploited by citizens”212.

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Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 177 Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p.39 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 952 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539> Brynjarsdottir, H., et al., ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded’, 2012, p. 952 Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021, p. 44 Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021, p. 43 Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021, p. 77

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The primacy of our social nature is reflected in the SDT quality of relatedness, defined as “both experiencing others as responsive and sensitive”213 and being able to reciprocate those behaviours. The innate need and benefits of this social condition are inherent in our earliest developmental stages, observed in studies of children’s exploratory behaviour where interpersonal relationships and closeness act as a “secure base from which to explore”214 with patterns of novel, exploratory behaviour notably absent without such an attachment base.

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Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020) p. 4, 102449 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449> Ainsworth, M. D.S., M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Wall, Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation, e-Book Edition (New York, NY, USA: Psychology Press, 2014) p. 256

Dissecting the Gameful On the predication that the responsibility of remediating our current ecological crisis is shared fairly between each of us and given the ephemeral difficulty of discerning “who is responsible for a particular harm being often neither observable nor verifiable”215 one naturally looks to systems which have been able to distil a clear rationale of measurement, progression and sociality in fields comparable in their universal scale of challenge. Gameful systems offer a breadth of approach, technique and analytical literature which has grown substantially over the past 20 years, based on their ability as systems to fulfil the sense of progress, clear feedback, curiosity satisfaction and social relatedness216 which can often be severely lacking throughout much of everyday life. Following a saturation period in the 2010’s in which notions of the Gamepocalypse - when every aspect of one’s daily life was expected to become gamified - characterised by virtual plants rewarding good morals217 & Webkinz mixed reality stuffed animals218 (subsequently subject to a mass culling in 2019), we have now reached a useful stage in this field where much of the hysteria of the initial phase of gamification has fallen away providing a dearth of examples of the features and strategies endure.

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Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 5 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Schell, Jesse, D.I.C.E. 2010: ‘Design Outside the Box’ Presentation (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: D.I.C.E., 2010) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_PbHVW5cQ> Takahashi, Dean, ‘Mindbloom Life Game Teaches You How to Live Better’, VentureBeat (San Francisco, California, USA, 26 September 2011) <https://venturebeat. com/2011/09/26/mindbloom-life-game-teaches-you-how-to-live-better/> Kelly, Makena, ‘Webkinz Prepares to Kill off Dormant Pets Starting next Week’, The Verge, 24 September 2019 <https://www.theverge. com/2019/9/24/20882024/webkinz-virtual-pets-kill-deadline-world>

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An exemplary platform with a user base of over 70 million active members219 (as of 2020) and a growth rate of 2 million users per month is Strava. The San Francisco based company have masterfully integrated exercise into a gameful social platform. The app enhances intrinsic motivation, progression and esteem through a number of carefully mediated features such as “activity feedback”220 which is both specific to the user, emphasising their autonomy and competence on the completion of an activity, and contextual in that it provides “task-inherent information that can help the user connect their performance of the activity with its outcomes”221 which may otherwise feel more intangible; achieving a sense of overarching purposefulness “providing information on both past and current states”222. The feedback is also goal-orientated in that a completed run is fed into progression towards a self selected goal, which engages a parallel sense of volition.

Concurrent results create a timeline enabling users to “know themselves and how their personal circumstances might influence the behaviour their aim to change”223 this can encourage self-reflection which in looking across activities over time can engender a feeling of ‘Epic Meaning’; a common motivational trope in video games where players feel “the need to be something much bigger and better than themselves”224. The platform offers a range of clearly defined challenges that users’ activities can contribute towards, optimally mapped to the proficiency of the user such that the challenge can stimulate the motivational condition of the “flow channel”225 in which an experience is neither too difficult (provoking excess anxiety) or too facile as to create a sense of boredom and complacency. Optimal challenge in part mirrors a quality of ‘timeless’ urban form described by Alexander as where “the layout of paths will seem right and comfortable...compatible with the process of walking”226.

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Etherington, Darrell, ‘Strava Raises $110 Million, Touts Growth Rate of 2 Million New Users per Month in 2020’, TechCrunch, 16 November 2020 <https:// techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/strava-raises-110-million-touts-growth-rate-of-2-million-new-users-per-month-in-2020/> Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020) p.14 , 102449 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449> Villalobos-Zúñiga, G., ‘Apps That Motivate’, 2020, p. 19 Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1016 <https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Villalobos-Zúñiga, G., ‘Apps That Motivate’, 2020, p. 14 Schonfeld, Erick, ‘SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck’, TechCrunch, 25 August 2010 <https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/> Schell, Jesse, The Nature of Order in Game Narrative, 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qnXNUSUMA> Alexander, C., P.D.A.C. Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, Center for Environmental Structure, and others, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Center for Environmental Structure Berkeley, Calif: Center for Environmental Structure Series (OUP USA, 1977) p. 586 <https://books. google.co.uk/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC>

Challenges can often be broken down into individual contingencies such as completing a certain distance and elevation gain at a stated pace, with multiple prerequisites forming a series of contingencies referred to as a “chain schedule”227 which can establish a clear path of action to completing the challenge. One could argue that top-down challenges with clearly distant causality loci such as a Strava challenge sponsored by The North Face, seeking to promote engagement with their products through reward vouchers, could damage the sense of volition in one’s actions; denying the ability to set one’s own autonomous goals and instead engaging commercially minded ‘experts’ as “ultimately responsible for deciding what constitutes desirable behaviour”228.

Nonetheless, it should also be noted that other Strava features engage a more user-led approach to challenge such as the ‘segment’, which denotes a section of a recorded activity (along an arduously steep road for example). These routes can only be defined by users and once created map each person’s attempts along them, allowing users to transform the landscape around them into a racetrack tailored to their own personal routes and goals. Bottom-up approaches akin to these have been highlighted across the field of community psychology as examples of “participatory design as a method for engaging community members in the design process for persuasive systems”229 with the ability to minimise “the implicit influence of current socio-political configurations”230 such that the “open-ended system can lead users to considerations of what it actually means to be healthy and how health is defined”231, inspiring a sense of curiosity, an ever present feeling of volitional exploration.

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Schonfeld, Erick, ‘SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck’, TechCrunch, 25 August 2010 <https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/> Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 948 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539> Brynjarsdottir, H., et al., ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded’, 2012, p. 953 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020) p. 3, 102168 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168> Brynjarsdottir, H., et al., ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded’, 2012, p. 954

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Strava also acts as a social showcase between users of their activities allowing people to “exchange experiences, provide and receive support to others, and experience a sense of belonging”232. Such interaction can amplify positive emotions associated with accomplishment with psychological studies noting that “when a positive attitude is linked to one’s changing behaviour, the probability that the desired behaviour will become a social norm increases”233. However, platforms of social interaction also inspire comparison and competitiveness which although can support one’s motivation allowing “users to assess the impact of their actions on others and feel more effective”234; can also engender “downward comparison”235 from users who feel a sense of inadequacy against their peers. Dasgupta notes that “the way choices are framed influences what we choose”236 and one could argue the same logic of how data and options of interaction are displayed provides a means of moderating the negative effects of comparison against those who are simply further along their own distinct paths of progression; a point that also resonates with the commonly employed game mechanic of ‘cascading information theory’ in which information is highly context specific, “released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative”237.

Another gameful motivational trope strongly articulated by Strava which speaks to the aformentioned mechanic of ‘epic meaning’ is the app’s ability to visually articulate the actions of its users into a global heatmap of movement data. This allows users to discern the popularity of different paths, informing their creation of unique routes in areas they may have never physically visited prior to exercising in them. The data has also been leveraged into a powerful urban analysis tool - Strava Metro - which helps inform local authorities on where their constituents walk and cycle regularly, allowing them to discern where to improve aspects of public realm and urban permeability; an alternative to millennia of top-down urban planning with often unforeseen and adverse human consequences on the ground.

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Villalobos-Zúñiga, Gabriela, and Mauro Cherubini, ‘Apps That Motivate: A Taxonomy of App Features Based on Self-Determination Theory’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 140 (2020) p. 15, 102449 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102449> Geller, E, Scott, ‘The Challenge of Increasing Proenvironmental Behaviour’, in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Electronic Edition (New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), p. 531 Villalobos-Zúñiga, G., ‘Apps That Motivate’, 2020, p. 16 Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1024 <https:// doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 45 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Schonfeld, Erick, ‘SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck’, TechCrunch, 25 August 2010 <https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/>

It should be noted that a common critique of gameful platforms seeking to engender behavioural change is that they are largely undifferentiated in their features and structure to the divergent ways in which people think and their emotional variance, failing to recognise that “people’s personality traits play a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies”238. This may in part be due to the infancy of gameful applications as within the more established realm of video games and sport, role differentiation is a mature and commonplace feature in which players often choose distinct classes or positions in a game, with each favouring alternate goals and attributes such that direct comparison makes little sense.

A well established method of delineating “variance in individual’s behaviours, thoughts, feelings and actions”239 is the Big Five Factor Model. Personality trait models came to prominence in the psychological discourse during the first half of the 20th century with Cattell’s Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire published in 1949 and noted for its enduring proficiency holding “remarkably well across radically different samples of people”240. Such models are predicated largely on the lexical hypothesis which posits that “fundamental traits of human personality have, over time, become encoded in language”241 with the practice of personality psychologists being to discern behavioural disposition through the distilling of language descriptions. Cattell’s test provided a method for the mapping of one’s emotional variance through a breadth of 171 descriptors including how reserved or friendly (introversion/ extroversion), unsentimental or sensitive (receptivity) or how trusting or vigilant (anxiety scale) responses to questions were242.

238 239 240 241 242

Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1015 <https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Orji, R, et al., ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1017 Hofer, Scott M., John L. Horn, and Herbert W. Eber, ‘A Robust Five-Factor Structure of the 16PF: Strong Evidence from Independent Rotation and Confirmatory Factorial Invariance Procedures’, Personality and Individual Differences, 23.2 (1997), p. 266 <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(97)00025-1> Grice, James W., ‘Five-Factor Model of Personality’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 January 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/science/five-factor-model-ofpersonality> [accessed 10 April 2021] Boyle, G.J., G. Matthews, and D.H. Saklofske, The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment: Personality Measurement and Testing (Volume 2), v. 2 (SAGE Publications, 2008) <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NOeann4wvo4C>

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Building on the research of Cattell et al. in the 1980’s Lewis Goldberg and others refined a model based on 5 overarching traits one could map human personality along based on extroversion - “to be outgoing, expressiveness, seek out new opportunities, and ambitious”243, openness - “to be curious, imaginative, hold unconventional values, and creative”244, neuroticism - “to be nervous, fearful, sensitive, distrustful, and emotionally unstable”245, conscientiousness - “to be self disciplined, actively plan, goal oriented, dependable”246 and agreeableness “to be considerate, cooperative, tolerant, friendly, caring, and helpful”247. The robust proficiency of this model has been highlighted by its ability to perform across a number of divergent languages and cultures with research indicating “the structure of individual differences in personality is uniform across several cultures and may in fact be universal”248.

A large scale study (660 participants) on persuasive gameful systems relating personality trait differentiation to typical features of gamified platforms indicated that “personalising game experience by tailoring strategies based on users’ personality is highly desirable”249. Levels of extroversion, agreeableness and openness were outlined as the predominant factors influencing the effectiveness of gameful features with conclusions highlighting; the difference in preference for personalisation over customisation; the challenge of engaging individuals high in neuroticism and the mediation of how one can sensitively leverage social pressures.

243

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244 245 246 247 248 249

Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1017 <https:// doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1017 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1017 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1017 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1017 McCrae, Robert R., and Paul T. Costa Jr., ‘Personality Trait Structure as a Human Universal’, American Psychologist, 52.5 (1997), p. 509 <https://doi. org/10.1037/0003-066x.52.5.509> Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1023

System personalisation, that is the ability of the system to automatically “tailor content and functionality”250 to particular needs was highlighted as the most persuasive of all strategies and the sole feature “perceived as positive for people who are very open to experience”251; the feature also indicated a clear divergence between those “threatened by losing control and...conscious about privacy”252 (low openness, preference for user controlled customisation) and those who see personalisation as a means to explore the breadth and shifting range of features rather than selecting a narrow subset as is predominantly the alternate preference of those low in openness (predominantly preferring a greater degree of system relevance and a deeper connection to their own tailored system).

Orji et al. investigated a broad range of gameful features seeking to engage those high in neuroticism, but the trait consistently showed “no significant relation with any of the strategies”253 which may highlight the reality that “for neuroticisms, persuasion may not be an effective approach for motivating behaviour change”254.

Though persuasive features engaging social pressures such as competition, comparison and cooperation have become widespread in gameful systems based on “their ability to leverage the power of social influence to motivate behaviour change”255, Orji et al. highlighted how such features can be experienced as “invasive, less privacy preserving and with a high potential of harming friendship”256; with the caveat that “designers should include mechanisms that allow users to hide their identity”257 leveraging anonymity in order to negate the adverse reactions of those who are otherwise demotivated and feel exposed by social features. Engaging features of cooperation were shown to motivate those high in agreeableness and extroversion but were highlighted by the highly conscientious as problematic for the “tendency of cooperation to create unnecessary tension and to possibly jeopardise relationships and privacy”258.

250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258

Orji, Rita, Lennart E. Nacke, and Chrysanne Di Marco, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), p. 1023 <https:// doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025577> Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1023 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1023 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1022 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1023 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1023 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1024 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1024 Orji, R., et al, ‘Towards Personality-Driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems’, 2017, p. 1021

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The context of an ecological emergency has highlighted the agency of individuals “not only in the construction of facts, but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document”259.

Every action we take has the potential to further destabilise the ground on which we stand. Such a reciprocal condition where “human action is visible everywhere”260 does not, contrary to our psychological tendencies261, disempower the individual that recognises “reconnecting with the natural world makes us more human, not less”262; it now being within our capacity to “share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy”263.

Though this is not to say that “the framing of users as individual”264 is the only scale at which we must operate, but to say “sustainability interventions tend to assume that individuals have a greater capacity for action than they actually do in practice”265 is to belittle the potentials of our “pervasive, obligatory sociality”266. It is through the understanding that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”267 that we can culture an awareness of the chains of beings and materials truly necessary to sustain us.

Self-determination recognises people as “active agents whose engagement with the world leads to an ever more elaborated and refined set of internal processes and structures”268, with the predominance to “internalise values and behavioural regulations that are extant in their social world and to make those values their own”269. Such a process of internalisation provides the opportunity and the downfall of facilitating ecologically minded behaviours, but through systems that engender new ways of collaborating, sharing knowledge and articulating the impacts and understanding of our individual actions, one may achieve a greater sense of purpose “associated with involvement in activities which contribute to something larger than the self”270 recognising that a life “committed to nothing larger than itself is a meagre life indeed...beings require a context of meaning and hope”271.

259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270

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271

Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45.1 (2014), p. 2 Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, p. 5 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, Ecological Economics, 169 (2020), p. 12, 106520 Gowdy, John, ‘Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization’, Futures, 115 (2020), 102488 Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, p. 5 Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 952 https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539 Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, p. 952 Dunfield, Kristen A., ‘A Construct Divided: Prosocial Behaviour as Helping, Sharing, and Comforting Subtypes’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (2014), 958 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00958 p. 1 Hagens, ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’, p. 1 Deci, Edward L., Ryan, Richard M., Williams, Geoffrey C., ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, Learning and Individual Differences, Vol 8, Number 3 (1996), p. 167 Deci, Edward L. et al, ‘Need Satisfaction and the Self-Regulation of Learning’, p. 167 Jones, Christian, Laura Scholes, Daniel Johnson, Mary Katsikitis, and Michelle Carras, ‘Gaming Well: Links between Videogames and Flourishing Mental Health’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (2014), p. 5, 260 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00260> Seligman, Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Kindle Edition (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2018), p. 700

Considering a Gameful Ecology Platform A recent review commissioned by HM Treasury on the economics of biodiversity thoroughly outlines the challenges, opportunities and realities of aligning our economic systems within the bounded nature of our biosphere.

The critical difficulty within our current economic system is that whilst it considers “produced capital (roads, machines, buildings, factories, and ports) and what we today call human capital (health and education)”272 and fastidiously pursues their continued accumulation, it does so in absence of considering the limits of what we define as natural capital, its benefits, value and therefore the current losses experienced through environmental degradation. The difficulty of framing the value of natural capital lies in the aformentioned reality that “many of the processes that shape our natural world are silent and invisible”273 making the discernment of who is directly responsible for their harm near impossible. The widespread prevalence of direct subsidies for environmentally damaging industries and practices shows the scale of our economic blindness to the benefits we’re actively stripping away with estimates of such subsidies amounting to “around $4 - $6 trillion per year”274.

Environmental Externalities, defined as the “unaccounted-for consequences for others, including future people, of actions taken by one or more persons”275 are the mechanism by which we can outline and value the outcomes, both positive and negative, of our interactions with the biosphere. The articulation of such externalities provides the basis for; a government to map and dictate reductions in the annual CO2 output of companies, as is beginning under the SECR (Streamlined energy and carbon reporting) framework276; the investment in rewilding schemes as a means of negating further future emissions tied to the inherent processes of industrial agriculture277 & the valuation of benefits to our physical and mental health through the active restoration of our natural systems278. However, the quality of how well these externalities are understood within a complex web of natural processes will dictate how effective such an approach can be.

272 273 274 275 276 277 278

Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 3 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021 p. 5 Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021 p. 32 Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021 p. 39 Gov.uk, ‘Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) Guidance’ (Education & Skills Funding Agency, 2021) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ academy-trust-financial-management-good-practice-guides/streamlined-energy-and-carbon-reporting> [accessed 24 January 2021] Rewilding Britain, ‘Why We Need Rewilding’, Rewilding Britain <https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/explore-rewilding/what-is-rewilding/why-we-need-rewilding> [accessed 5 April 2021] White, Matthew P., Ian Alcock, James Grellier, Benedict W. Wheeler, Terry Hartig, Sara L. Warber, and others, ‘Spending at Least 120 Minutes a Week in Nature Is Associated with Good Health and Wellbeing’, Scientific Reports, 9.1 (2019), 7730 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3>

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Indeed, the eager but short-sighted tendency of companies to try and engage public favour through environmental improvement programs was highlighted in Marks and Spencer’s recent ‘farming for nature’ scheme, which through the release of 30 million honeybees into the UK countryside sought to improve the health of our ecosystems. Instead Gill Perkins of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust outlined the approach as “greenwashing or beewashing at its most blatant”279 due to the potential damage to struggling indigenous bee variants such as bumblebees being overwhelmed by an influx wave of dominant honeybees, with studies outlining their potential for adverse effects to non-native ecosystems such as “interfering with local pollinators for the pollination of local flora, increasing seed sets of exotic weeds, and competing with other organisms (e.g., bees, birds, mammals) for nesting cavities”280.

Investment in conservation efforts of “afforestation, parkland expansion, and restoration of rural ecosystems”281 have been highlighted as a key means of economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the gradual expansion of protected areas to 30% of the world’s land area estimated at an annual cost of “$103 - $178 billion”282 which equates to just 0.16% of global GDP. Such efforts are bolstered in their potential by their low training requirements, “minimal planning and procurement requirements”283, alignment to social distancing norms and congruence with pre-existing international mandates to meet the climate emergency284. Further to the immediate needs of meeting the impacts of the pandemic on employment and the primacy of the climate crisis, such investment and employment opportunities in natural capital schemes may prove a necessary reaction to the upending of existing human capital through increasing automation, which would align the effects of increased wellbeing and life satisfaction of employment (employment wellbeing) with the health benefits of spending time in nature, observed to lower the risk of a host of health complications including “cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, asthma hospitalisation, mental distress, and ultimately mortality”285.

279 280 281 282 283

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284 285

Weston, Phoebe, ‘M&S Faces Backlash over Plan to Release 30m Honeybees’, The Guardian (London, 16 April 2021) <https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2021/apr/16/marks-spencer-honeybee-project-threat-biodiversity-conservationists-aoe> [accessed 16 April 2021] Alaux, Cedric, Yves Le Conte, and Axel Decourtye, ‘Pitting Wild Bees Against Managed Honey Bees in Their Native Range, a Losing Strategy for the Conservation of Honey Bee Biodiversity’, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7 (2019) p. 1, 60 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00060> Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 72 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Waldron, Anthony, et al., Protecting 30% of the Planet for Nature: Costs, Benefits and Economic Implications (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, July 2020) p. 6 <https://www.conservation.cam.ac.uk/files/waldron_report_30_by_30_publish.pdf> [accessed 25 March 2021] Hepburn, Cameron, Brian O’Callaghan, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, and Dimitri Zenghelis, ‘Will COVID-19 Fiscal Recovery Packages Accelerate or Retard Progress on Climate Change?’ (University of Oxford, 2020) p. 9 <https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/publications/wpapers/workingpaper20-02.pdf> [accessed 20 March 2021] Hepburn, C. et al., ‘Will COVID-19 Fiscal Recovery Packages Accelerate or Retard Progress on Climate Change?’, 2020, p. 9 White, Matthew P., Ian Alcock, James Grellier, Benedict W. Wheeler, Terry Hartig, Sara L. Warber, and others, ‘Spending at Least 120 Minutes a Week in Nature Is Associated with Good Health and Wellbeing’, Scientific Reports, 9.1 (2019), 7730 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3>

Growth in the prevalence of natural capital schemes would provide a societal basis to address the fundamental critique raised by the Dasgupta Report of contemporary society’s abstraction and distancing of the world’s natural processes and the need to foster a refound “appreciation of nature’s workings”286. Though one could argue that establishing positive attitudes towards the natural world may not be the predominant challenge (based on the inherent feelings of wellbeing observed in human interaction with nature) in fostering a societal shift of increased natural care; with a larger challenge being in how to inform people with a holistic view of the world’s natural processes. Comments

by MP Sally Ann Hart during the parliamentary debate on the ‘Path to Zero Carbon, Climate Assembly Report’ held on January 6th 2021, highlighted the ever-surprising complexities within the field of ecology with comments describing the potential of sea grasses as a robust carbon sink, absorbing rich levels of 240 kg carbon per acre per year with the ability of a football pitch of sea grass supporting over 50,000 fish and over 700,000 vertebrates287. Comments by MP Jerome Mayhew also highlighted the report’s awareness of the need to engage public support through the climate assembly, noting that “public acceptance of the huge changes required will be critical to their success, if we don’t bring the public with us, then the best laid plans will be doomed to failure”288.

286 287 288

Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 5 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Hart, Sally Ann, ‘Path to Net Zero Carbon Debate’ (House of Commons, 2020) Mayhew, Jerome, ‘Path to Net Zero Carbon Debate’ (House of Commons, 2020)

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A gameful platform based on correctly mapped environmental externalities would provide the basis for a nature-based system of value and investment, dispelling the typical vagaries of ecological processes and our interactions with them into a “formal procedure for collecting, reviewing, and using behavioural results needed to support the accountability system and enable continuous improvement”289 supporting the integration of individual action; that leverages the power of social capital through “insisting that financiers invest our money sustainably, and that firms disclose environmental conditions along their supply chains”290; engaging context-specific education of the natural processes one is interlinked to through locality, investments and individual consumption patterns; highlighting the mental, financial and social benefits of active natural restoration, and enhancing how individuals gather their efforts “to address the imbalance between our demands for the biosphere’s provisioning services on the one hand and for its regulating, maintenance and cultural services on the other”291.

The establishment of restorative, growing bodies of natural capital could act as the basis of collective community investment, in which coordinated individual action is supported by the mental benefits of social interaction and engagement with the natural world, the financial benefits offered through investment by enterprise and individuals in order to address their negative environmental externalities and the psychological benefits of aligning one’s actions with a broad collective goal. That is not to say that such programs should be dictated by the state or by enterprise investors, but following the rationale of reflexive bottom-up systems should be led by the diverse potentials of differentiated individual action. One could envisage a breadth of different approaches to the greening of a typical pedestrianised street, through banks of wildflowers catalysing growth in local pollinators, through new community allotments naturally policed by nearby housing or perhaps the establishment of a range of native trees which gradually become a linear rewilding forest.

289

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290 291

Geller, E, Scott, ‘The Challenge of Increasing Proenvironmental Behaviour’, in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Electronic Edition (New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), p. 527 Dasgupta, Partha, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version (London: HM Treasury, 2021) p. 77 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957292/Dasgupta_Review_-_Abridged_Version.pdf> Dasgupta, P., The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021, p. 19

Applications seeking to nudge individual actions in a more eco-friendly direction typically limit their potential changes to incremental adjustment “oriented towards a specific change which users are intended to make”292, likely in accordance with HCI systems’ implicit preference for fostering awareness over action because providing information “is easier to aim toward and evaluate, lends itself to HCI’s existing strengths in information display, and may be a better fit to a user-centred design philosophy by avoiding to the appearance of aiming to control user behaviour”293. Another pitfall of typical persuasive platforms, growing from the medium’s implicit tendency for contained, rigid goals is that focusing on shifting one specific behaviour can lead to the rapid outdating of the system due to inherent assumptions “that relationships between social outcomes and ecological impacts remain broadly similar to those currently existing”294 and that the outlined behaviour changes are appropriate to the user’s actionable context in the long term; whereas by centring and reacting to users actions and fostering social interaction between users one could instead shift the focus towards supporting novel “representations of desirable behaviour results rather than references to specific behaviour”295. A more reflexive, user-defined approach to sustainable actions would enable the continued redefining of what the application elicits and as such could also engage greater volition on the part of the user, resonating with the conclusions of studies on fostering sustainable behaviour in a corporate context that “when you empower people to analyse behaviour from a systems perspective and to implement interventions to improve behaviour, you will indirectly improve their attitude, commitment and internal motivation”296, rather than dictating ill-explained, inappropriate changes they have to make.

292 293 294 295 296

Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), p. 952 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208539> Brynjarsdottir, H. et al., ‘Sustainably Unpersuaded’, 2012, p. 952 Millward-Hopkins, Joel, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, and Yannick Oswald, ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy: A Global Scenario’, Global Environmental Change, 65 (2020), p. 3, 102168 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168> Geller, E, Scott, ‘The Challenge of Increasing Proenvironmental Behaviour’, in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Electronic Edition (New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), p. 527 Geller, E, Scott, ‘The Challenge of Increasing Proenvironmental Behaviour’, 2002, p. 528

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Though the full resolution of the kind of reflexive, gameful system I have posited is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it is hoped that the conditions, realities and ideas raised through this piece of writing will provide something of a theoretical toolkit for the beginnings of such a system; outlining the necessity to consider the role of behavioural and motivational psychology in the theatre of sustainability, such that one can go some way to avoiding the pitfalls and recognising the challenges likely present throughout any platform seeking to foster a holistic shift towards a sustainable mode of life, across the scale of the individual, community and society as a whole.

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