Algemeen

The grand challenge of our time: to achieve the transition to a -global- economy that supports a just society within ecological boundaries. The transition implies redefining economic and financial logic to preserve, regenerate, and enhance our renewable resources, ecosystems, and their biodiversity and related ecosystem dynamics. It is now increasingly understood that continuing along development pathways based on global, linear, fossil-based and GDP-oriented economic progress is literally unrealistic to expect this model to continue forever. There is also clear evidence that the increase in global GDP over the past few decades has not led to significant economic progress for most:…

It is not my objective to present a fatalist perspective, because there are many examples of successful interventions to prevent extinctions, restore ecosystems, and encourage more sustainable economic activity at both local and regional scales. I am hopeful, but fear that the momentum for change might slip away …. we are in a race against time — and we are losing. With each passing year, it becomes clearer just how far behind we have fallen, how fast the situation is deteriorating, and how tragic the results can be. But … Life in the -near- future reflects on a number of…

The Earth system is an incredibly complex system, with many processes interacting with each other, from the small and local scale up to the planetary scale. With human activity playing an increasing role, it appears that the system becomes even more complex. This may seem to make the Earth a highly unpredictable and chaotic system, with arbitrary evolutionary directions and outcomes. The Earth system describes the interconnected complex system at the surface of the planet that sustains life. It is comprised of multiple subsystems (or spheres), including the cryosphere (ice-related systems, including ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers and permafrost), biosphere…

The ecological era we find ourselves in — whether we like it or not, and whether we recognize it or not — makes it necessary to rethink and revaluate our relationship with nature and technology. The world has entered a new era of rapid and major change. Significant shifts are occurring in global economic power, technology, urban growth and through Earth System changes that pose existential threats to humanity, and our relationship with nature on which human life depends. Given current trajectories, transformation of human societies in some form is inevitable. It is, however, not clear whether global transformations can…

The more we destabilize the processes and systems that maintain the stability and resilience of our planet, the more our civilization is at risk. For millions of years temperatures on Earth have changed, significantly, there have been extinction events, but the planet it still here. During those millions of years, it’s our civilization that wasn’t there. Our world as we know it, including all of its history, goes back only about 12000 years. And this period has been characterized by a miraculously stable climate, that has allowed for the development of the agriculture, cities, economies and human societies that we…

ENTANGLED HABITATION, COHABITATION IN THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN CITY Landing in the Anthropocene, where our actions are leaving traces on the very rooted fabric of the planet, we are called to the challenge of moving towards a postanthropocentric paradigm. The anthropocentrism that our species has imposed on all others has unbalanced our position within nature, founded on what we often see as an evolutionary success: intrinsically human-centered, acting and developing as a continuous transformation of matter into products and processes, in a steady flow of supply and exploitation and extermination of animals and plants. But the effects of this imbalance are becoming…

When The Limits to Growth was first published in 1972, most economists, along with many industrialists, politicians, and Third World advocates raised their voices in outrage at the suggestion that population growth and material consumption need to be reduced by deliberate means. Over the years, Limits was attacked by many who didn’t understand or misrepresented its assertions, dismissing it as Malthusian hyperbole. But nothing that has happened in the last 50 years has invalidated the book’s warnings. We are experiencing the symptoms of a world in overshoot, where we are drawing on the world’s resources faster than they can be restored, and we…

It is increasingly apparent that superficially separate global crises are synchronizing—occurring at the same time or in quick succession. Their combined impacts are both greater than and different from the sum of the harms they would create in isolation, were they not so deeply interconnected. Yet the causal mechanisms that produce this synchronization remain opaque and underexplored. A confluence of ecological, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting These unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude. Today’s crises simultaneously span ecological, natural, political, economic and technological systems, with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and…

Novel entities are defined as new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms, including chemicals and other new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by anthropogenic activities. Novel means new in the geological sense, that is, created, introduced, or recirculated by humans. The entities are intentionally and unintentionally manufactured chemicals, engineered materials, and their transformation products, that have the potential to cause effects on vital Earth System processes as well as naturally occurring elements and materials mobilized in new…

Oceans are a crucial regulator of the climate, absorbing large amounts of the additional planet-warming carbon that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the mid-1800s, as well as more than 90 percent of the increased heat. Sea surface temperatures have risen significantly—hitting new records earlier this year—while warming is also melting ice sheets in polar regions, spilling huge quantities of freshwater into the ocean. The ocean covers 71 percent of the planet and holds 97 percent of its water, making the ocean a key factor in the storage and transfer of heat energy across the globe. The movement of…