Humans Degrading the Systems That Sustain Them Science 2.0
go to original January 23, 2015

A new paper says that human civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity that put humanity in a "safe operating space."

The four that are already beyond that point-of-no-return are climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. That makes us 44 percent of the way on the path to doom.

It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that "we're running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist," says co-author Steve Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology.

For the last 11,700 years until roughly 100 years ago, Earth had been in a "remarkably stable state," says Carpenter. During this time, known as the Holocene epoch, "everything important to civilization" has occurred. From the development of agriculture, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the Industrial Revolution, the Holocene has been a good time for human endeavors.

But over the last century, some of the parameters that made the Holocene so hospitable have changed.

Read the rest at Science 2.0

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