I'm not sure I believe in any particular fixed human nature. There do exist some radically different conceptions of ownership out there, such as the demand shar

I'm not sure I believe in any particular fixed human nature. There do exist some radically different conceptions of ownership out there, such as the demand sharing of certain tribes in Namibia. That is to me somewhat hopeful. The "system change" I would hope for is that a lot of people individually change what they choose to do. Top-down mandates could help. Making consumers pay the full costs of their actions rather than subsidizing damaging ones like fossil fuels or meat would be a reasonable start. The trouble with blaming colonization is it coincides (roughly) with the arrival of the ability to grow like we do now. People have been greedy for as far back as our written records illuminate. But before factory methods, mechanization, theories of management, institutions like the limited liability corporation, etc. there was only so much scale that any society's production could achieve. To stop increasing the scale of human production while so much of the world is still so poor seems cruel to me. It wouldn't if I thought redistribution was politically feasible, but I don't. I don't know, it's a hard problem. > will require us to end the incentive of superexponential growth which I don't believe is some kind of law of physics that we can't change If it were a law of physics at least we could pinpoint it. There's no single incentive for exponential growth, any more than one process could be blamed for Moore's Law while it held. There's just a lot of individuals facing a lot of distinct incentives, and they all want to do better than they did last year, and want their kids to do better than them, and they measure "better" in terms of things like how many calories they consume, how many miles they're able to travel, etc ...