Anthropocene — The Age of Mankind
We teach our children boundaries. We don’t let them play on busy streets, we tell them to stay away from strangers. We accept boundaries as a crucial part of our daily life, but overlook the fact that they also exist in the planetary scale. When a planetary boundary is crossed, not just one or two lifeforms well-being is threatened. Whole ecosystems, life cycles and geographies will be drastically altered in order to preserve the balance.
Mother nature kept herself balanced for eons, pulled through thousands of radical climate changes in the span of millions of years.
That is, until the humans caused such great changes on the planet that a new age, the ‘age of mankind’ had to be classified.
An uncertain future lies ahead. Our actions in the next 50 years will determine the next 10000 years of the planet.
Scientific and technological improvements in the last few deacades surpassed millions of years of collective human knowledge. This sudden impact of industrialization already began taking its toll on the planet, manifesting itself in many different ways.
The Planetary Boundaries concept identifies nine global priorities. Four of these nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed: Climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen). Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these core boundaries would drive the Earth System into a new state. Is it too late to avert an inevitable crisis? Or will our newly-acquired technology and knowledge carry the Earth to its golden age, an epoch of sustainability? We are the determinants of that.
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