Human beings do not easily let go of their paradigms, and scholars are no exception. A paradigm serves to make sense of the world, or at least a segment of it, and when a paradigm is challenged, its holders react defensively. Not surprisingly, this defensiveness on the part of the individual has corollaries in groups of individuals. One such group-level corollary is inertia: Just as defensiveness characterizes an individual, social inertia characterizes a group. For a paradigm that is currently out of the mainstream, both individual defensiveness and group inertia act as obstacles that impede acceptance of the paradigm, and may completely defeat it. Individual defensiveness and group inertia can do so by creating self-reinforcing cycles that ward off novel paradigms that have begun to attract attention. Paradigms change slowly, therefore, and only after they have overcome not-inconsiderable resistance.

Individual defensiveness and social inertia are relevant to the topic of the instant book, because as is obvious in the preceding chapters, the book questions the utility of any paradigm, in scholarship or elsewhere, that denies the serious and negative effects on the biosphere emanating from the present numerical size and continued numerical growth of the human population. Importantly, this paradigm is dominant today in environmental studies, an undertaking that is essentially a subject-matter focus rather than a separate academic discipline. Many disciplines share an interest in environmental studies and hence employ a paradigm that lacks a concern with human-population size and growth. At its core, then, the present book is about the defensiveness of a wide range of individual scholars, and the inertia of a wide range of groups of scholars, who devote themselves to studying the biosphere.

6.1 Baseball and the environmentalist's paradigm

Readers who are familiar with the sport of baseball will understand this quoted metaphor. Its meaning will hopefully be absorbed, too, by readers who are not familiar with the sport, because the metaphor drives home the point that the biosphere will in the end win every time that it is opposed by the human species. Humans, therefore, need to avoid conflict with the biosphere because they cannot match the power of their opponent.