Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I have organized an event each year for our community around Earth Day for the last ten years. This year I was able to do a live event with an all-star lineup, so I decided to dress it up and make it into a documentary so it could hopefully be more alluring to people new to this line of thought.
In essence, GPL, in the first instance, is based upon the fundamental necessity for an international legal order that ensures the self-preservation of nations and nature in the Anthropocene.
A brilliant and searching probe into power in all its forms, this book shows how our species’ pursuit, overuse and abuse of power is plunging us ever deeper into existential crisis.
Now that we have glimpsed for the first time a planet-wide threat to all that lives and breathes, we might acknowledge at long last that we have been poorly served by a mode of understanding that must turn everything into the same kind of lock – the same mechanism – before it can proceed.
The transition from hunting and gathering to grain agriculture was a monumental change in our social/economic evolution where the structure and dynamic of economic life became something distinctively different.
The Anthropocene concept advances the stunning proposition that human activity has catapulted Earth out of the relatively benign Holocene into a hostile new geological epoch.
It is these commons-based transformations that allow overshooting systems to find new ways to work within the biocapacity of their own regions.
It may be helpful to outline some important recent developments in Anthropocene science in the two main fields involved: geology, and Earth System science.
The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices.
Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch.
Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.
In the basic conception of the Anthropocene, there are two actors: mankind and the environment. This sweeping and seemingly compelling divide at once highlights the separation of the two categories and collapses it: if humans are geologic force, we can no longer imagine ourselves outside of nature.
But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
