In the 1960s, while the first images of the earth from space were being beamed across the globe, revealing the exquisite beauty of this blue-green jewel, earthbound scientists were already beginning to see signs of the increasing fragility of our planetary home. Some symp-toms of the ecological crisis had already become evident. Industrial pollution, urban smog, and acid deposition were becoming common.
Many ecosystems were under strain from the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers that modern agriculture had introduced. Some species were already on the verge of extinction, and the planet’s life arteries were beginning to choke. It was clear that not all was well with the common home of the earth, in which the common family of humanity dwells along with millions of other species.
The present chapter explores the extent to which our common home has been imperilled. We begin with a survey of authoritative warnings on the contemporary ecological crisis from the scientific community—especially from the major scientific academies of the world like the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, among others. This is followed by a more detailed analysis of three studies in particular. The first explains that the planetary boundaries are about to be transgressed or have already been crossed, with regard to some of the fundamental geochemical and biological processes that sustain life on Earth. The second deals with the fast depletion of the natural resources of the planet, as calculated by the mechanism of the ecological footprint analysis. The third is about the disquieting predic-tions on future climate change by the Fourth Assessment of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and updates thereafter. A constant preoccupation of the scientific community with regard to the contemporary ecological crisis, especially in recent years, has been about the danger of crossing crucial thresholds in tampering with the earth’s climate and its natural processes. The concept of tip-ping points is analysed here. We then demonstrate the conspicuously
anthropogenic character of the contemporary ecological crisis—how human activities have, in a relatively short period of time, caused ir-reparable damage to our common home. The impact of humanity on the planet appears to have reached such proportions that it may be justified to speak of the dawn of a new geological epoch, informally termed the Anthropocene (human) era, about which discussion has already begun among Earth scientists. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the ethical and religious implications of eco-cide, human-ity’s destruction of its common home.
the gravity of the Contemporary ecological Crisis:
Warnings from the scientific Community
It has been the singular merit of the scientific community to have perceived the signs of the impending ecological crisis and to have warned humanity of the serious threats to our common home. The scientific community has sought to present the crisis with remarkable objectivity, courage, and foresight, in spite of being met with derision and vilification at times, especially from some quarters of corporate industry, politics, and media guided by vested interests. From Rachel Carson to NASA’s James Hansen, individuals and institutions of the scientific community have not shied away from their vocation to be prophets and seers, warning humanity of the serious threats to our common home.
One of the first scientists to alert humanity to the ecological crisis was Rachel Carson in her short but seminal 1962 Silent Spring, which dealt with pollution.1 In this work Carson described the ecological consequences and health hazards involved in the introduction into the biosphere of thousands of toxic substances by industry and modern agriculture. She showed, for example, how a pesticide like DDT, which was widely used at that time, made its way into the food chain and eventually even into mothers’ breast milk. Apart from such specific concerns, Carson was ultimately raising some fundamental questions about humankind’s impact on the physical world and the rest of the biosphere.2
1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
2 Significantly, as Mark Hamilton Lytle notes, Silent Spring actually went through a number of working titles, including Man Against nature, the control of nature, and how to Balance nature, none of which satisfied Carson or her literary agent, Marie Rodell. See Mark Hamilton Lytle, the gentle Subversive:
rachel carson, Silent Spring, and the rise of the environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11.
The awareness regarding the crisis facing the earth and those dwelling in it was further deepened in a number of publications that followed in the successive decades, including the Population Bomb, the closing circle, A Blueprint for Survival, fundamentals of ecology, the limits to growth, only one earth, the global 2000 report to the President, and our common future.3
These early warnings from the scientific community spearheaded the spread of public awareness about the ecological crisis and created campaign movements, especially in the West, for the stewardship of the planet. Earth Day was celebrated for the first time in 1970, and the United Nations organized an important conference on the theme of ecological stewardship that was held in Stockholm in 1972. The Pre-amble to its declaration stated: “A point has been reached in history when we must shape our actions throughout the world with a more prudent care for their environmental consequences. Through ignorance or indifference we can do massive and irreversible harm to the earthly environment on which our life and well-being depend.”4 A number of regional and international meetings have since been organized under the auspices of the United Nations, the most prominent among them the Earth Summits held every decade (1992 in Rio de Janeiro, 2002 in Johannesburg, and 2012 in Rio de Janeiro).
The United Nations also took the lead in establishing international bodies for the stewardship of the planet. In the field of climate change the IPCC was jointly established by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988,
3 Paul Ehrlich, the Population Bomb (New York: Sierra Club/Ballentine Books, 1968); Barry Commoner, the closing circle: confronting the environ-mental crisis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971); Edward Goldsmith et al., A Blue-print for Survival (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Eugene P. Odum, fundamentals of ecology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1971); Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, the limits to growth: A report for the club of rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (London: Earth Island Limited, 1972); Barbara Ward and René Dubos, only one earth: the care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972); the global 2000 report to the President: entering the twenty-first century: A report Prepared by the council on environmental Quality and the department of State (London: Penguin Book, 1982); The World Commission on Environment and Development, our common future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For an evaluation of the literature in this initial period see W. H.
Baarschers, eco-facts and eco-fiction: understanding the environmental debate (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–8; Peter Hay, A companion to environmental thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 31–36.
4 Preamble to the Declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environ-ment, Stockholm (June 5–16, 1972), item 6.
while the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into existence in 1994. In the area of biodiversity conservation, the Convention on Biological Diversity was set up in 1993. The most recent development in the field of biodiversity has been the setting up in 2011 of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Bio-diversity and Ecosystem Services, conceived on parallel lines to the IPCC. In other areas, there has been the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in 1996. In the meantime, several regional and national bodies and organizations have also been set up in various parts of the world for the protection of the home planet.
The scientific community has continued to alert humanity to the ecological crisis with greater urgency. In the last few decades a num-ber of international scientific associations and institutions have is-sued direct warnings to humanity about the contemporary ecological crisis. One of the earliest admonitions came in 1992 and was titled the World Scientists’ Warning to humanity. It was signed by nearly seventeen hundred of Earth’s leading scientists, including 104 Nobel laureates—more than half of the living recipients in the sciences. This declaration was not only a serious warning to humanity but also a clarion call for immediate action in order to avert disaster.
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.
Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. . . .
We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.5
More recently, the warnings from the scientific community have been centered around the threat of global warming and associated cli-mate change, one of the most conspicuous facets of the contemporary
5 “The World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” in Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and reason: how Anti-environmental rhetoric threatens our future (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), 242, 244. For the text of the declaration and for an abridged list of the signatories, see ibid., 241–50.
ecological crisis. An important document in this regard was the joint statement issued by the presidents of the National Science Academies of eleven major nations (the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the UK) on June 9, 2005. In this report the presidents acknowledge that “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action” and warn that “action taken now to reduce significantly the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lessen the magnitude and rate of climate change.”6
In the United States a group of 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences in May 2010 took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter to the US Congress in which they cautioned their political leaders: “Society has two choices: We can ignore the sci-ence and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively.”7 Apart from climate change one may recall the statement of the Inter-Academy Panel on ocean acidification in June 2009, which was endorsed by as many as seventy of the world’s leading national academies of science.8
Momentum has indeed been building in the scientific community, and scientists have continued to warn humanity about the risk of underestimating the challenges posed by the contemporary ecological crisis. Significantly, in recent years some of the most prestigious scien-tific institutions of the world, including major scienscien-tific academies and joint studies, have taken a clear and unambiguous stand on climate change and related ecological challenges.
In September 2010, the Royal Society, the oldest scientific acad-emy in continuous existence, published an important document titled climate change: A Summary of the Science. The study aims to summarize the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, aware that “changes in climate have significant implications for present lives, for future generations and for ecosystems on which humanity depends.”9 A month later the French Academy of Sciences
6 “Joint Science Academies’ Statement: Global Response to Climate Change,”
available at http://nationalacademies.org.
7 P. H. Gleick et al., “Climate Change and the Integrity of Science,” Science 328 (2010): 689–90.
8 Inter-Academy Panel, “Statement on Ocean Acidification” (Trieste: The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, 2009).
9 The Royal Society, “Introduction,” climate change: A Summary of the Sci-ence (September 30, 2010), para. 1.
published a similar document on the problem of climate change.10 The most comprehensive document on climate change by any sci-ence academy to date was published by the US National Academies of Sciences, also in 2010, titled Advancing the Science of climate change. It states, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems.”11 In May 2011, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences published a report on mountain glaciers. The Opening Declaration of this report states:
We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollut-ants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses . . . aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life. We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. (emphasis added)12
We may also mention in this regard the April 2012 report from the Royal Society titled People and the Planet, which states that “the 21st century is a critical period for people and the planet” and that
“human impact on the earth raises serious concerns.”13
the alarming state of our Common Home
From the avalanche of warnings from the scientific community regarding the disquieting state of our planetary home in recent years, we now pick up three recent and authoritative ones. All of these
10 See Institut de France, Académie des sciences, le changement climatique (October 26, 2010).
11 The National Academy of Sciences, Advancing the Science of climate change (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010), 3.
12 Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, fate of Mountain glaciers in the Anthropo-cene: A report by the Working group commissioned by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (May 5, 2011), 2, 15.
13 The Royal Society, People and the Planet (April 2012), 7.
studies point to how the capacity of the earth to be a common home for humans and other living beings is increasingly jeopardized.
The first important study was carried out by twenty-eight schol-ars associated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre, among them prominent earth scientists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen and James Hansen of NASA.14 The study seeks to identify and quantify the “planetary boundaries” that must not be transgressed in order to avoid irreversible ecological damage. In other words, the proposed planetary boundaries define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the earth and its associated biophysical subsystems.
The authors identify planetary boundaries in nine key areas: climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, global fresh-water use, change in land use, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading.
According to the study humanity may soon be approaching the boundaries for global fresh-water use, change in land use, ocean acidification and interference with the global phosphorous cycle.
The most alarming conclusion of the report is that with regard to the areas of climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and interference with the nitrogen cycle, humanity has already transgressed the limits.
With regard to climate change, some of Earth’s subsystems appear to be moving outside their stable Holocene state, for example, the rapid retreat of the summer sea ice in the Arctic ocean, the retreat of mountain glaciers around the world, and the accelerating rise in sea levels during the past ten to fifteen years. As for the rate of biodiver-sity loss, where the transgression appears to be most flagrant, species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass-extinction event. As for the nitrogen cycle, it appears that industrialized agriculture has already poured more chemicals into the land and oceans than the planet can process.15
14 J. Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” nature 461 (2009): 472–75. For a more detailed version of the same study, see idem, “Plan-etary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” ecology and Society 14/2 (2009): 32ff.
15 Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” 472–73. See also O. M. Johannessen, “Decreasing Arctic Sea Ice Mirrors Increasing CO2 on Decadal Time Scale,” Atmospheric and oceanic Science letters, institute of Atmospheric Physics, chinese Academy of Sciences 1/1 (2008): 51–56; J. A. Church and N. J.
White, “A 20th Century Acceleration in Global Sea Level Rise,” geophysical re-search letters 33 (2006): 1602; G. Mace et al., “Biodiversity,” in ecosystems and human Wellbeing: current State and trends, ed. H. Hassan et al. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 79–115; J. N. Galloway and E. B. Cowling, “Reactive
The study on planetary boundaries conveys a very important mes-sage, namely, that it is the entire common home of humanity that is threatened. The contemporary ecological crisis is unique in the sense that it is not about a single environmental problem, like cli-mate change, for example. Up to now, attempts at conceptualizing a global approach to managing humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world have tended to focus on individual subsystems or processes in isolation, like climate, biodiversity, stratospheric ozone, or others. Such a simple cause-effect approach also guides many approaches to manipulate the earth system deliberately, as in geo-engineering proposals.16 The concept of planetary boundaries instead demonstrates how the earth system is a single, integrated, complex system, with many interrelated and interdependent subsystems. The study also demonstrates that the current ecological crisis is not about a local or transitory phenomenon. It is the earth that is in peril. The contemporary ecological crisis in this regard is unparalleled in the geological history of the planet. It is the first time that humanity’s own dwelling has been threatened.
A second authoritative indicator from the scientific community about the alarming state of our common home concerns the con-sumption of natural resources. A yardstick called ecological footprint anaylsis, pioneered by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, is be-ing increasbe-ingly used to measure human impact on the planet.17 It is widely considered to be the most comprehensive aggregate pointer of human pressure on ecosystems to date.
Authors Jason Venetoulis and John Talberth write:
Ecological footprints measure a population’s demands on nature in a single metric: area of global biocapacity. By comparing hu-manity’s ecological footprint with the Earth’s available biological capacity, ecological footprint analysis (EFA) suggests whether or not our use of crop lands, forest lands, pasture lands, fisheries, built space, and energy lands can be sustained.18
Nitrogen and the World: Two Hundred Years of Change,” AMBio: A Journal of the human environment 31 (2002): 64–71.
16 Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical
16 Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical