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By Root 706 0

on for much longer. Instead, I suggest that since nature can no longer tame us, then we must tame ourselves. Recognizing that we are now in charge—whether for good or ill—we need to make conscious and collective decisions about how far we interfere with the planet’s natural cycles and how we manage our global-scale impacts. This is not for aesthetic reasons, or because I mourn the loss of the natural age. It is too late for that now, and—as my uncle always says—one must move with the times. Instead, the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests that we are fast approaching the point where our interference in the planet’s great biogeochemical cycles is threatening to endanger the Earth system itself, and hence our own survival as a species. To avert this increasing danger, we must begin to take responsibility for our actions at a planetary scale. Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here.

This book aims to demonstrate how our new task of consciously managing the planet, by far the most important effort ever undertaken by humankind, can be tackled. The idea for it came to me in a moment of revelation two years ago in Sweden, during a conference in the pretty lakeside village of Tällberg. I was invited to join a group of scientists meeting in closed session to discuss the concept of “planetary boundaries,” a term coined by the Swedish director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Professor Johan Rockström. The scientists—all world experts in their fields—were trying to nail down which parts of the Earth system were being most affected by humans, and what the implied limits might be to human activities in these areas. Some, like climate change and biodiversity loss, were familiar and obvious contenders for top-level concern. Others, like ocean acidification and the accumulation of environmental toxics, were newer and less well-understood additions to the stable.

During hours of debate, and with much scribbling of numbers and spider diagrams on flip-chart paper, humanity’s innumerable list of ecological challenges was reduced to just nine. I left the room late that afternoon certain that something radical had just happened, but not quite sure what it was. It wasn’t until later in the evening—in the shower of all places—that I understood in a flash just how important the planetary boundaries concept could be. I realized that scientists studying the Earth system were now in a position to define what mattered at a planetary level, and that this knowledge could and should be the organizing basis for a new kind of environmental movement—one that left behind some of the outdated concerns of the past to focus instead on protecting the planet in the ways that really counted. Of course all knowledge is tentative, but here was something very tangible: For the first time, world experts were not just listing our problems, but putting numbers on how we should approach and solve them. I tracked down Johan Rockström and we shared a beer in the hotel lobby. He was encouraging, and we agreed that my job as a writer and as an environmentalist should be to do what the scientists could not: get this scientific knowledge out into the mainstream and demand that people—campaigners, governments, everyone—act on it. Hence this book.

The planetary boundaries concept of course builds on past work conducted by experts in many different fields, from geochemistry to marine biology. But its global approach is actually very new and potentially quite revolutionary. Unlike, say, the 1972 Limits to Growth report produced by the Club of Rome, the planetary boundaries concept does not necessarily imply any limit to human economic growth or productivity. Instead, it seeks to identify a safe space in the planetary system within which humans can operate and flourish indefinitely in whatever way they choose. Certainly this will require limiting our disturbance to key Earth-system processes—from the carbon cycle to the circulation of fresh water—but in my view this need constrain neither humanity’s potential nor its ambition.