What is a "human world?"
A message from Earth & Sky.
In 2004, as story after story about environmental degradation crossed our desks, and as the environmental movement contemplated its own death, Earth & Sky was engaged in deep discussions about the state of the Earth and our reporting on it.
Around that time, we began speaking to each other of a “human world.”
At first, we weren’t sure exactly what we meant by those words. This idea is so new that you might not have heard of it yet either. It’s the idea that we humans and our Earth are linked, and always have been.
Now before you say that’s obvious, hear me out. I’m not saying that humans affect Earth. I’m saying that humans and Earth affect each other.
People don’t just live on Earth. We are linked to nature in a way that is very profound.
While trying to comprehend this new paradigm, we found an article by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, suggesting that the current geologic epoch be renamed the Anthropocene, due to humans’ pervasive influence. But the idea of an Anthropocene – a world affected by a large human population – is not the whole story.
Scientific studies have revealed a multitude of ways in which Earth and humanity are linked. Scientists now call this a coupled human–environment system. Here’s just one example, of millions. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina initiated a tragic illustration of a coupled human–environment system along the Gulf Coast. What began as a natural event, a hurricane, became a human disaster as levees broke and New Orleans flooded. Afterwards, contaminated water from the city had to be pumped back into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, as environmental experts warned of devastating effects to surrounding wetlands. The secondary damage caused by polluted flood waters then impacted humans again, economically. And so the human and natural impacts cycled back and forth, dependent on each other: coupled.
We and the Earth are part of a single system. This is what many scientists today are studying, trying to understand.
As scientists have begun to understand this reality, they’ve also struggled to express it to you. That struggle has resulted in the concept of ecosystem services, for example. These are nature’s services on which humanity depends for its very survival: air, water, food, sunshine, and so much more.
In story after story in the media today, you hear of the harmful consequences of the degradation of ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned that this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years, and, if so, humanity will suffer.
Over the past decade, quietly, a science of sustainability has been emerging.
It is a way of using the tools of science to understand our place in relationship to the world and thus, in the years ahead, to grow enough food for all of us, supply enough fresh water, find and use new energy sources, withstand global health crises, anticipate and survive large–scale natural disasters and so on.
The science of sustainability grew in part from workshops, beginning around the mid–1990s, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. It grew in part from the meeting in 1995 of a diverse international group, which used scientific thinking to examine the prospects for the world of the 21st century. The group synthesized its findings in an amazing and very readable document called Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead. It outlines possible futures for human society on Earth in this century. Some possibilities are frightening, but some are sustainable and even beautiful.
From this early work, an online forum on sustainability was initiated at Harvard University. Now housed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, sustainabilityscience.org now enables scientists from around the globe to talk with each other about solutions to global problems. Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences has established an online sustainability gateway.
There are six billion of us on Earth now, with the population expected to continue to increase and finally begin to stabilize at nine billion around the middle of this century. With so many people on the planet, great challenges lie ahead of us.
Science has some important tools that can help humanity understand and cope with the challenges.
What is a human world? When the first images of Earth were returned from space, we all realized suddenly that we live on a water planet. Today the fact that our planet’s surface is mostly ocean isn’t its dominant feature. Today, we live on a planet of humans, and we and the planet are linked. It’s a human world.
Earth & Sky wants to help illustrate the ways in which our human activities affect the world, while the world is affecting us. We want to share what many scientists have told us: although we dominate Earth’s land surface and critically influence the oceans and the air, we humans do not control nature. Earth & Sky wants to help the scientists who have been speaking to each other about a sustainable world speak to the world at large. That is Earth & Sky’s mission: to be a clear voice for science.
We believe in this mission, because we so powerfully believe that the success or failure of humanity’s ability to recognize our intimate link to nature will dictate the success or failure of humanity in the coming centuries.
At Earth & Sky, we see the human world as daunting, but also positive, empowering and hopeful. There are billions of humans on Earth today. That fact changes the way we need to live on Earth. But people have always traded ideas, and as human population and the complexity of human problems both have increased, so there’s been a major leap forward in humans’ ability to share visions and collectively solve problems.
Earth & Sky has been asking scientists to share their perspective on what it means to live in a human world in the 21st century. You’ll find a link to the essays of 50 scientists below. These scientists generously contributed their time, insights and ideas … and we thank them.
Fifty scientists describe the human world
Radio shows and articles about the human world.
Earth & Sky’s human world image gallery
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Dear Colleagues,
What concerns me now is the unexpected realization that scientists are not serving science, but rather allowing themselves to be coopted by the self-proclaimed masters of the universe who believe in “living without limits,” “endless economic growth,” and the attainment of nirvana. Such leadership, that wishfully and unrealistically intends to actually defy biophysical reality, could be pursuing a fool’s errand.
Comments are welcome. Thanks for your consideration of this point of view.
Dear Colleagues,
Please accept this apology for my “realization” above that scientists are not serving science. The sweeping statement does not apply to many scientists but to scientists with expertise in a field of study who ignore relevant and unchallenged good scientific data.
For example, take the study of human population dynamics. Demographic Transition Theory and data derived from its application have completely dominated scientific inquiry during my entire lifetime. In 2001, unwelcome and apparently unforeseen evidence regarding human population dynamics was presented to the professional community of concerned scientists by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel. This and subsequent research exposes fundamental flaws in the Theory of Demographic Transition and identifies the theory as a preternatural one.
Perhaps the new data from Hopfenberg and Pimentel provide humankind with a more adequate and more reality-oriented understanding of the population dynamics of the human species.
But where are the professional discussions of the research by Dr. Hopfenberg and Dr. Pimentel? The silence from population scientists over the past five years has been deafening.
With thanks for interpretations/critiques by population scientists of the science from Hopfenberg and Pimentel,
Steve
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the finest organization of scientists I know. There are probably many other excellent, similarly situated science organizations.
Perhaps great scientific organizations such as AAAS will take up the challenge of examining good scientific evidence regarding certain activities of the human species that are occurring virtually everywhere in the world in Century XXI. As examples, please consider that the seemingly endless expansion of economic globalization on a small planet and the unrestrained increase of per human consumption by conspicuous hoarders of wealth could have profound implications for life as we know it on Earth. When evidence of the potential impacts of unbridled “bigger is better” business activity and unchecked per-capita consumption increase are considered alongside demographic data of the determinable growth of absolute global human population numbers to 9 billion people between now and 2050, we can see that huge challenges could soon be posed to humanity by UNREGULATED production, consumption and propagation activities of the human population now overspreading the surface of Earth.
Thanks for your consideration.
Steve