Toward An Earth-Human Ecosystem

A Momentous Challenge

In a 1950 BBC Radio lecture series, “The Nature of the Universe,” the University of Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle began: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension . . . let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain for every man whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose . . . And I think this not so distant development may well be for good, as it must increasingly have the effect of exposing the futility of nationalistic strife.” Sadly, these visionary projections soon became mostly idealistic.

After her groundbreaking 1962 book “Silent Spring,” the American environmentalist Rachel Carson issued a grave appeal: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” The 1969 technology-minded “giant leap for mankind” declaration from the Moon by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Apollo 11 astronaut with an estimated worldwide audience of 600 million was followed in 1970 by the first Earth Day demonstration in the United States with an estimated 20 million participants distressed about environmental deterioration.

An explosion on board NASA’s 1970 Apollo 13 mission to the Moon became a reminder of the need in a mission-driven organization to resolve a severe challenge to its viability. Across society, “Mission control, we have a problem!” became a popular saying. In search of a balanced approach to crises already plaguing the planet, the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as “meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In the same vein in 1994, British entrepreneur John Elkington urged corporations to embrace a planet, people, and profit triple bottom line approach in pursuing environmental, social and financial sustainability.

In 2015, the Rockefeller Foundation—Lancet Commission on Planetary Health warned: “By unsustainably exploiting nature’s resources, human civilization has flourished, but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature’s life support systems in the future.” Undaunted, the United Nations (UN) unanimously embraced a 2015-2030 plan with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a response to the global challenges of poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, a former UN official opined in The New York Times that civilization had become estranged from nature. In fact, many of the Earth System’s dire problems — such as human-caused sea level rise and extinctions of other life forms — are ineffectively tackled by baseline notions of sustainable development. In 2023 the UN Secretary General declared that the siloed efforts comprising the 2015-2030 vision are imperiled, and he called upon the General Assembly to formulate a rescue plan. Although the 2024 Summit of the Future and its primary outcome document, the Pact for the Future, did not result in a new plan for 2030 and beyond, an integrated SDGs approach, already in preparation, was announced that will focus on “synergies and trade-offs, nature-based solutions, and just transitions toward a sustainable future.”

A Cohesive Approach

The term Anthropocene was introduced at the dawn of the 21st century by the Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. He anticipated that it would become shorthand for the crucial relationship between nature and humankind. In 2016, Simon Dalby, a Canadian political economist surmised: “The Anthropocene is a key theme in contemporary speculations about the meaning of the present, and the possibilities for the future . . . How the Anthropocene is interpreted, and who gets to invoke which framing of the new human age . . . matters greatly for both the planet and for particular parts of humanity.” In 2017, Yadvinder Mahli, an ecosystem scientist at the University of Oxford observed: “The Anthropocene has spilled out of its natural sciences origins to become a cultural zeitgeist… about how to understand and respond to human domination of the Earth.” And in 2019, Stephen Jackson, an American climate adaptation specialist highlighted observations of the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt centuries earlier: “Nature would persist in the absence of humanity, but humanity cannot exist without nature . . . the fusion of science and humanism can address contemporary challenges.”

In 2019, Dictionary.com defined existential as “grappling with a sense of survival of our planet, loved ones, our ways of life.” By early 2020, in addition to growing outbreaks of violence, the pandemic-struck world was anxious about climate warming, glaciers and ice sheets melting, oceans rising, and ecosystems dwindling. Not only are the Earth’s enveloping shells of air, water, ice, land, soil, and life interconnected, they form an unbreakable continuum. These demonstrable facts underscore why climate change should not be described or interpreted as being in isolation from other natural dynamics.

Between 2009 and 2019, when the pure-to-applied transformation of geoscience was underway, the Anthropocene Working Group, a constituent body of the International Union of Geological Sciences might have framed a purpose that was mindful of humanity’s intensifying disruptions throughout the Earth System. In March 2024, it became world-wide news that the umbrella body had rejected the Group’s proposal that the Anthropocene be denoted as a new epoch beginning with mid-20th century atmospheric atomic bomb tests. Instead, more meaningfully, a gradational approach beginning about 12,000 years ago as the last Ice Age ended encompasses humanity’s intensifying impacts on the Earth’s natural functioning. Attracting wide scholarly interest as well as public attention, the Anthropocene positions geoscience to make a significant holistic contribution to Earth governance. And more meaningful as a socio-scientific term than the “Earth System,” the “Earth-Human Ecosystem” conveys our planetary reality in an ongoing Anthropocene context with its need for an ecological mindset.

In 2023, the UN Secretary General declared: “If ever there was an illumination of the short sightedness of our prevailing economic and political systems, it is the ratcheting up of the war on nature… the potential for science, technology and innovation to be applied to the SDGs is vastly untapped and institutional.” Increasingly, scientific insights are relegated by powerbrokers not only to a back seat but scorned. The UN, non-governmental organizations, cultural and religious institutions, the private sector, and especially the sciences and humanities, must together confront the problems that have emerged from disassociating culture and nature. The following big-picture definitions, assembled from professional and public sources, clarify that the natural world and human nature are intertwined.

This term encompasses the Earth’s evolved landscapes, biodiversity, ecosystems and natural forces in air, land and sea environments. During its 4.6-billion-year history, the Earth has undergone five mass extinction events of natural causes with a sixth one underway because of humanity’s selective consumption of animals and plants, depletion of habitats, and altered food chains. Of the 2.2 million species so far described, about 6,500 are mammals and of these about 6% are primates. As many as 20 human species used to exist including Homo neanderthalensis until about 40,000 years ago. With Homo sapiens moving, mixing and diversifying since adventurous subgroups left Africa 50,000-70,000 years ago and settled in isolated regions of other continents, the biological difference between any two humans today is only 0.1% of their DNA, making race a social, not biological, construct. Geology, biology, botany, zoology, and anthropology comprise the natural sciences with their growing focus on transdisciplinary understanding of environmental disruption over human history. The shorthand for these cumulative impacts is the Anthropocene.

his term spans the evolved and learned characteristics of Homo sapiens, most conspicuously a large and complex brain, an ability to make tools, and capacities for sentience, languages, art, and innovation. Indigenous peoples represent subgroups who settled where their journeys ended, out of Africa beyond ice sheets and ocean barriers. Isolated from other evolving cultures and societies, these First Nations developed and sustained unique traditions, intergenerational communications, and environmentally sensitive lifestyles. Today’s culturally diverse Indigenous peoples total some 470 million people in over 90 countries. As non-indigenous societies evolved, so too did their technologies, cultural practices and social mores become distinct. Through adventurism and colonialism, Old World societies sought to subjugate indigenous peoples for the purpose of exploiting new sources of wealth. The cultural and social impacts on Indigenous communities globally have been significant, and frequently ruinous. Across today’s fractious world with 8.2 billion people, diasporas are scattered subsets of residual initial populations. Social anthropology, sociology, and the humanities are focused on evolving characteristics with surging interests in injustice and traditional ways of knowing. The heritage, behaviors, artifacts, norms, rituals, ceremonies, and institutions of Indigenous and Western peoples comprise the mosaic of humanity in a global Anthropocene context.

Another “Giant Leap” Opportunity

In 1994, the American astronomer Carl Sagan emotively recalled in “Cosmos”: “When Voyager 1 was about four billion miles away as the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the Solar System, it turned around for one last look at its home planet . . . Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

According to NASA’s current timeline, a second human landing on the Moon is expected before the end of this decade. Surely, its ‘giant leap’ declaration should emphasize stewardship of the Earth 2.5 times more populous than when Apollo landed in 1969. Next time, we must demand that all stakeholders embrace the holistic platform of the Earth-Human Ecosystem approach. The time is right, because we are increasingly familiar with the Anthropocene as shorthand for the existential threats to our survival. Anthropocene realities underscore the necessity of a global rescue plan which blurs the traditional boundaries of disciplines and understands the interconnections between the Earth’s sub-systems.

Such reasoning is not new. Ahead of this century and an ocean apart, the prescient minds of Aldo Leopold and James Lovelock emphasized humanity’s need for environmental ethics and an understanding of the Earth as a singular self-regulating ecosystem. We can no longer afford to ignore their outlook, nor the science that brought it to our attention.

Mondial is published by the Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS) and World Federalist Movement — Canada (WFM-Canada), non-profit, non-partisan, and non-governmental Member Organizations of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Government Policy (WFM-IGP). Mondial seeks to provide a forum for diverse voices and opinions on topics related to democratic world federation. The views expressed by contributing authors herein do not necessarily reflect the organizational positions of CGS or WFM-Canada, or those of the Masthead membership.