Ecology

We may be entering an entirely new phase of the Earth’s history. In February 2008, British researchers theorized that human industry over the last two centuries has led to the end of the ‘Holocene’ epoch and that we are now entering the ‘Anthropocene‘ epoch, shaped by human activity.

While this may sound fetching to radical technocrats, or to those who think that humanism is not about a wholecloth betterment of the human condition, it means effectively that we have botched our relationship with nature, and will now face a bewildering array of consequences.

The science is bearing this out on a number of fronts, and everything from deteriorating ecosystems, oceanic ‘dead zones’, the crumbling of Antarctic ice shelves, to intensified storm seasons (intensifying beyond the outlier values for periodic fluctuation), shows we are facing forces that we can hardly grapple with head on: i.e. geological forces.

The early 21st century, due as much to delay as to a now global resource culture of plunder and pay later, is a time that will define our relationship to the natural resources on which we depend for survival. We are forced by circumstance now to take a very far-ahead gaze at what that relationship should be, and our decision will be fateful, one way or another.

There are vital statistics and studies of unprecedented detail emerging that can help us to find a better way forward, what ecologist and researcher Lester Brown refers to as ‘Plan B‘, an ecologically-minded overhaul of the global economy.

Scientific research and new technologies will play a major role in our common awareness of this problem, its effects, and of what sudden sense of urgency may arise, depending on circumstance. Much of what we now know about the natural environment transcends anything that we could have presumed just decades ago, therefore…

Much of what we will now need to learn, in order to apply the ecological knowledge we have gained, in order to develop the solutions we will need, and which are both sustainable and economical, will have to break free from conventional thinking, shatter the status quo in technology and industry-related thought.

Our conceptions of energy, and how it works, of health, and what it is really, of our place in the world, and our responsibilities, of how to work with matter to make the manipulation of matter a less perilous enterprise, will all be tied to major changes in the way we conceive both the problems and the solutions.

• Earth Policy Institute
• Crisis Policy Forum, on Climate Change
• Sentido.tv Environment & Ecology
• Sentido.tv Water Crisis Report
• Sentido.tv Eco-Económica, en español

admin @ February 8, 2008