The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.
Conditions on Earth may be moving outside the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity, according to dozens of scientists
Human activities have breached safe levels for six of these boundaries and are pushing the world outside a “safe operating space” for humanity, according to the report, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Ancient flood myths were a warning: heed the power of water
While the world must continue to adapt to worsening heat, increasingly intense wildfires, the acidification and warming of the oceans, and other climate threats, this year’s flooding is a wake-up call to focus on water.
Prefixing the world
by Jonathan Rowson in Perspectiva…The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
Keep humanity’s future in sight and integrate the polycrisis lens
from transformphilanthropy.wingsweb.org….The climate crisis is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. However, only a tiny fraction of global philanthropic funding is dedicated to combating climate change effects, with some estimates as low as 2%. Most philanthropic funders already dedicated to other social issues do not feel they can divert resources at this stage.
RISD’s center for complexity developing design manual for maintaining life on earth
by Tim Maly on RISD.org…RISD’s Center for Complexity (CfC) has served as a think tank bringing together transdisciplinary experts and academics with real-world practitioners and policy makers. This summer the group is expanding its nuclear security research to include other threats to the planet and human civilization. Here CfC Senior Lead Tim Maly discusses the insights they have uncovered.
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Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences
Apologies to the Grandchildren by William Ophuls is a collection of essays that throw light on questions of ecological collapse, the connection between the ecological crisis and the breakdown of liberal democracy, and what society will look like when we exhaust solar...
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophesies of doom, which play to our psychological biases.
On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
Renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems
Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in...