Arizona of the southern U.S. During the billions of years it took to lay down these layers of canyon rock, Earth’s biomes have evolved and changed. This is the basis of biodiversity. But only during the past 10,000 years of the Holocene have ecosystems stabilized in a way that benefits our species. It was also during this epoch that we invented agriculture.
Previous image, page18: Forests like this one in the Oasi Zegna nature sanctuary in northern Italy are often called the lungs of Earth. Just as human lungs rid our blood of carbon dioxide and enrich it with oxygen, so green plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Forests also capture and store carbon and thus play a role in the struggle against climate change.
WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Our current predicament may come as a surprise to some, but it’s certainly not news to those who have followed scientific reports on the status of our planet. The evidence has been clear for some time about what’s at stake—simply the world as we know it. We humans, Anthropos in ancient Greek, have become such a
driving force of global environmental change that we now constitute a major, possibly even the largest, geological force on the planet,2
even more extensive than volcanic eruptions, plate
tectonics, and erosion. With reckless abandon, we have created our own geological epoch, the Anthropocene.3 During the past 10,000 years, our geological epoch known as the Holocene, humanity has enjoyed near-perfect living con- ditions, which has allowed the development of world civilizations.
Our remarkable journey from a few million hunters and gatherers to seven billion people populating the entire globe was made possible by this warm and extraordinarily stable interglacial era. The Holocene has been the perfect planetary state for modern human evolution. But now we are pushing ourselves out of these favorable condi-
tions. By putting so much pressure on the entire Earth system— by hitting the ceiling of its hard-wired physical and ecological processes—we threaten the integrity of the way the world functions. Humanity must now accept that it has reached a »satura- tion point« with respect to our human pressures on the planet. Herein lie two great paradoxes. The first is that the planet
still appears to be »all right,« when in fact it is not. Economic growth is generally perceived to be unaffected by ecological
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THE HUMAN QU EST – PROSP E R ITY WITH IN PLAN ETARY BO U N DAR I ES