Once in motion, the human empowerment process has proven enormously successful in a double sense. For one, human empowerment gives room to people’s quest for emancipation, which creates more happiness among people-powered societies. Thus, the process creates its own basis of legitimacy. Next, societies that progress in human empowerment mobilize intellectual creativity at an unprecedented level. For this reason, people-powered societies move to higher levels of technological advancement than do societies that delimit people power. As a consequence, people-powered societies dominate the global order.

But there is a paradox. The very success of human empowerment threatens to destroy its own basis. Continuing human empowerment incurs a degree of ecological destruction that challenges the sustainability of this process. As we will see, human empowerment is indeed strongly associated with a larger ecological footprint: people-powered societies put a heavy burden on the environment.