Human Impacts at a Planetary Scale: Why System Change Is Essential

As humans, we have remarkable capacity to collaborate, building global infrastructure that connects financial, political and social systems. However, having scaled our infrastructure globally, planetary boundaries have been exceeded in multiple directions. To protect Earth, we now face a task to transition both philosophically and technologically to lifestyles that seek to restore critical functions of natural ecosystems so that we, and other species on the planet, can survive. This is a mammoth challenge that will require changes in the jobs of hundreds of millions of people and a shift in ethic and legislation toward ecological protection and restoration. This book explores the motivations of human society, our global infrastructure and legislation. It highlights various systems and challenges that are contributing to ecosystem and species loss, and documents some of the solutions being offered. The interconnectivity of all these things is evident given the overlapping themes throughout the various sections, and the book serves to collectively highlight some of these major challenges and the locked-in nature of our systems so that we can address them.