Checked and Unchecked Resourcefulness: A Structural Theory of Sustainable Human Systems

AbstractContemporary sustainability challenges—including climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution—are often framed as problems of excess scale or mismanagement. Beyond these considerations, this paper argues that they also reflect a structural divergence between human systems and wild ecosystems. It develops a cross-disciplinary evolutionary systems framework centered on resourcefulness: the adaptive capacity of a system to exploit available energy over time. Part 1 characterizes wild ecosystems as exhibiting checked resourcefulness, in which adaptation remains tightly coupled to ecological feedback through genetic inheritance, trophic structure, and energetic constraint. Part 2 argues that human gene–culture coevolution generated a distinct regime of unchecked resourcefulness, where cumulative cultural adaptation allows strategies to compound faster than ecological feedback can regulate them. This decoupling enabled unprecedented expansion while introducing delayed systemic risk. Part 3 derives a structural model of circular resourcefulness, in which rapid cultural adaptation is re-embedded within recovery-dominant material and energetic constraints. The framework redrafts sustainability as a problem of system architecture rather than self-limitation, clarifying why technological fixes or incremental efficiency gains are insufficient in isolation. By showing the structural conditions under which human adaptive power can persist without destabilizing its ecological foundations, it offers a unified theoretical lens for evaluating energy systems, material cycles, and land use in the context of planetary stability. Keywords: sustainability theory; systems ecology; socio-ecological systems; gene–culture coevolution; planetary boundaries; circular economy; circular resourcefulness; feedback dominance This record contains three documents related to the framework of checked and unchecked resourcefulness: The full preprint manuscript A two-page executive summary A one-page infographic designed for general audiences Suggested citation: Steermann, R. J. (2026). Checked and Unchecked Resourcefulness: A Structural Theory of Sustainable Human Systems (Preprint, v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18856793