Introduction

Abstract

Over a time span of just a century and a half, humanity has become a formidable geological force of change in its own right, altering the Earth’s atmosphere and natural landscape in ways that are unprecedented. For the first time, the outer limits of Nature’s capacities to adapt to the destruction of its natural cycles of carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen are in sight (see Rockstrӧm et al. 2009). The overall rate of temperature increase has nearly doubled (NASA Earth Observatory 2015) in the last 50 years. Global average surface temperatures have risen to 0.9 degrees Celsius while in the oceans, warming has occurred from the surface to a depth of roughly 2300 feet where most marine life dwells (National Geographic 2016), causing sea levels to rise. On land, global net yields of stable food crops are declining steadily in direct proportion to temperature increases (see International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, March 2009). According to the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 Working Group II Report on Food Security and Food Production Systems (2014b), there is a critical climatic threshold beyond which point essential food crops will not grow. If the current pace in global warming is not decelerated, the likelihood is that climate change will eventually overpower our capacities to adapt and large-scale humanitarian disaster will ensue.¹ So grave are these dangers that many scientists believe humanity has entered a new geological age known as the Anthropocene (Oldfield 2015). The core idea of the Anthropocene is that the climate risks we face today are essentially our own doing. The human species in effect has overtaken other forces of nature to become the most significant driver of destruction of the Earth’s biosphere. Knowledge of this event forces a compelling reframing of more traditional assumptions regarding the relationship between humanity and nature in favour of a cognitive framework that assigns a determining role to humanity in shaping the direction of future changes in the biophysical and biological systems of planet Earth. Humanity is tasked with deciding how the future of this planet will unfold. Not only must an objectivist account of nature’s outer limits and a complementary scientific understanding of its biological, chemical, and physical substance, be mastered, but humanity now must also begin to reflexively engage in a hermeneutic reconstruction of how it has arrived at this point of destruction in its historical development (Strydom 2015)? As the most significant metanarrative of human development in the twenty-first century, the arrival of Anthropocene forces us to think again about how human interests are best defined and the political will found to forge a better system of planetary stewardship for the future (Berkhout 2014: 1).