As astro-biologist David Grinspoon puts it,
We suddenly find ourselves sort of running a planet—a role we never anticipated or sought—without knowing how it should be done. We’re at the controls, but we’re not in control.1
This is, in fact, an unprecedented existential challenge for our species. Viewed through the lens of evolutionary history, we have to choose a future that is optimized for all of the life we are a part of, or else likely perish along with 99% of past species—hopefully to give rise to something more conscious, more responsible, and more effective at repairing the Earth than ravaging it. “However we got here,” Grinspoon writes, “we find ourselves dominating many of our world’s systems and needing to learn, under duress, how to handle that.”
One hundred million years from now, what will our time have been? A brief climate spasm that Earth shrugged off and largely forgot, leaving a thin layer infused with bizarre plastic objects? Or the beginning of a lasting new phase when the biosphere finally woke up and adjusted its grip on the planet?2
My goal in this book is to explore the nature of this challenge, envision possibilities worth living into, identify opportunities, and then discuss the actions we need to take to ensure that we have a future.
My belief is that we will rise to the opportunity that this crisis presents us with, and create a new economy that serves the needs of the Earth to thrive and provides us with what we need to thrive alongside it.
This will in my view also enlarge our understanding of our place in the universe, our role in this unfolding process, and our responsibility for the care of our Living Planet. It’s the only one immediately available to us, the only one intimately attuned to our needs, the one biodynamic environment, subsisting in the emptiness of space, that sustains life and is sustained by it.
A large part of what we need to understand about the planet we live on requires us to take the long view. We need to go back in geological time, and understand how the planet has evolved, especially over the past 3.5 billion years since the emergence of life on the planet, and over the past 2.5 million since hominids first appeared.
When we do, we realize that the current epoch in the Earth’s history is different: it’s become the Anthropocene, the era in which humans have begun to shape the Earth. We’re still in the early days, and most of our impacts on the Earth are what Grinspoon calls “inadvertent.”
1Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future, 2016
2Ibid.