Look in the Mirror: Self-Induced Systemic Crises
In the Chapter 1, we explored a few of today’s problematic social conditions as they have been shaped by technology and prevailing ideas about what economies and societies are all about. The idea that frames this book is to develop an emerging socioeconomic perspective that is more relational/connected, holistic, dignity-based, and affirmatively life-giving, not just for humans, rather for all living beings and the planet as a whole. Such a perspective serves as the basis of a vision of societies with their embedded economies and associated business practices that are life-(not wealth-) centric, and that foster dignity, well-being in a just and flourishing world for all. Transformation towards these ideas, which for succinctness will be called flourishing for all, is the focus of this book.
Shifting towards flourishing for all involves a process of transformational system change, sooner rather than later given the ecological imperatives outlined below. Some have called this goal of flourishing creating collective value absent dignity violations.1 In contrast, today’s economic and business systems are oriented almost wholly towards economic growth or financial wealth, with much of that wealth going to the already well off. This chapter briefly examines how today’s dominant economic system came to be. Understanding that development should help define the kind of transformation needed to shift towards goals of life-affirming well-being, justice, and dignity for all. Later chapters will explore how concepts of transformational system change can help in the change processes sorely needed to deal with the many crises outlined here.
Flourishing or well-being are encompassing terms that provide for human dignity, and the dignity of other living beings and even the earth itself, conceived as the living system Gaia. Well-being also can include the idea of flourishing societies in which all living entities have places in the natural ecosystems that support those societies. Flourishing ensures that all people have a place where they belong—in homes, communities, organizations, and associations of various types, and societies, where all can live up to their own potential. Where all can earn a decent living and support their families in appropriate ways. Where all experience desired freedoms and where rights that are important are upheld. Where all can exhibit their creativity, integrity, and wholeness, as well as experience an intimate connection with nature. Where all can, in return for what they have been gifted, do their own bit to leave the world a better place for their grandchildren’s grandchildren.
Flourishing for all also ensures the health and dignity of other living creatures, ecosystems, and the whole of Gaia, the name given to earth conceived as a living system. Dignity, well-being, and flourishing provide the capability for people to live up to their potential and desires as well as being an inherently life-giving activity. Moving in the direction of flourishing for all requires recognition of our interconnectedness with each other and with nature.
A Brief Excursion into Today’s Systemic Risks
In some ways, the whole socioeconomic system that we in the developed world have come to know is at risk today. The collapse accompanying the Covid-19 pandemic in health care systems economies, businesses, restaurants, and social supports, to name only a few, and the growing climate emergency demonstrate clearly the fragility of the system that has been built in the so-called developed world in the years following World War II. Simultaneously, many people in developing nations still struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis, especially when their traditional lifestyles and living arrangements have been taken away from them. Particularly important—and threatening—to global well-being are ecological risks that are becoming increasingly well known.
Climate Change and Planetary Boundaries
American scientist Jared Diamond argued in his book Collapse that two factors threaten civilizational collapse: pushing ecological resources beyond their capacity to support the relevant population and growing gaps between rich and poor.2 One other relevant factor related to civilizational collapse identified by Diamond is dysfunctional political and cultural practices. Dysfunctional practices fail to take into account the well-being of all—including nature and her creatures in the interests of the few. Unfortunately, humanity as a whole—and industrial societies in particular—and for the first time on a global scale—now faces all three of these issues.
Both inequality and ecological sustainability are truly global problems at a scope and scale that humanity has never confronted before. For a long time, it was easy to believe that we humans were separate from each other, and from nature. That belief made exploitation—of other people and of nature, the process that many observers call colonialization—easier to tolerate. If “man” is dominant over nature, then practices that strip nature of resources are more justifiable.3 If some humans are “superior” to others because they have wealth or power, then dehumanizing others who look, act, or live differently becomes easier to do.
These inequitable practices create the instability that can result in serious social unrest. Many places in the world experienced this reality in late 2019, when severe and long-lasting protests emerged in numerous nations of the world against social inequalities. Protests fueled by anger at inequality, lack of voice/democracy, and climate change erupted in places as far apart and distinct as Paris, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Chile, Hong Kong, and Lebanon. Further, the potential for climate change causing collapsing human civilization fueled activities like those of young climate activist Greta Thunberg4 and groups like Extinction Rebellion’s5 efforts to bring attention to that civilizational threat.
The global pandemic triggered by rapid spread of Covid-19 infections across the world, the impending global climate change disaster, and all of the social inequalities highlighted by protests, if nothing else, showed how interconnected the world really is. It took only a matter of weeks for the virus to spread around the world, affecting every nation in numerous ways. While in the past various populations in different smaller regions have experienced the types of collapses Diamond studied, this combination of factors highlights the true fragility of today’s socioeconomic systems, with their inability to provide broad-based support for the flourishing of all. At scale, humans in the past have had neither the capability nor sufficient numbers, as they now do, to affect the health of the entire planet. Now we do.
Consider: never before in human history has humanity’s footprint had the wherewithal to affect climate. Yet that is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in consensus documents with which about 97–98 percent of climate scientists concur, agrees is now happening.6 In a 2014 report that should have been frightening to all but the most ardent climate change deniers, the IPCC argues that “Human influence on the climate system is clear. Recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate change has already had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”7
Stating that human influence on global warming is “unequivocal,” the IPCC notes that since the inception of the industrial era oceans and atmospheres are warming, and many frightening shifts have taken place. While snow and ice (whose albedo effects reflect heat and therefore are cooling influences) are lessening, oceans are acidifying and salinity is shifting, with unprecedented increases in greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Extreme weather events have increased as climate change continues, with fewer cold extremes, increases in droughts and extreme heat events, as well as heavy precipitation events, all of which are predicted to intensify over the 21st century. Among other impacts are a reduction in food security, global marine species redistribution, flooding of coastal areas as oceans rise, harm to coral reefs and polar ecosystems, exacerbation of existing human health problems, water shortages, to name a few expected impacts.8
Importantly and often unrecognized, not all of the effects of today’s GHG emissions are experienced in the near term. As author Bruce Johansen has pointed out, “Global warming is a deceptively backhanded crisis in which thermal inertia delivers results a half-century or more after our burning of fossil fuels provokes them.”9 In other words, as Johansen notes, the GHG effects of fossil fuels we are burning today will take at least 50 years to evidence themselves in the atmosphere and as much as 150 years in the oceans. The implication is stunning for climate change: even if humanity stopped producing excess GHGs today, the effects would be being felt for many decades.10
Further, as the IPCC noted and Pope Francis discussed in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ “Our Common Home,”11 the poor and the disadvantaged are far more dramatically and negatively affected than more advantaged people. Importantly, humans are not the only living beings affected by climate change and the various sustainability crises facing the planet. The IPCC notes that “a large fraction of species faces increased extinction risk due to climate change.”12 The risk of extinction due to climate change exacerbates an ongoing process of mass extinction that scientists call the sixth great extinction, which threatens as much as three-quarters of the planet’s species.13
In 2018, the IPCC issued an, if anything, more compelling report that addressed the implications of global warming above 1.5ºC, which the IPCC claims as a likely global temperature rise between 2030 and 2052 if significant systemic changes are not made.14 A key point outlined in this latter report is that such anthropogenic (human-induced) warming will most likely persist for a very long time—the IPCC estimates between centuries to even millennia—wreaking further havoc on humankind. If warming is controlled below 1.5°C, according to the IPCC, that level will be much safer for humanity than a rise to 2.0°C, but will still make human life riskier than we are now experiencing.
Since the 2018 IPCC report, other reports have indicated the serious issues in other aspects of the natural environment (beyond human civilizations), including the ongoing extinction of up to a million species report in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.15 Further, more than 10,000 scientists signed a “warning” to humanity about what they labeled the climate emergency in 2019,16 a language echoed by activists like Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg.
The problem is that keeping planetary warming to or below 1.5°C means making significant shifts in emissions in all economic sectors. That reduction needs to be accomplished sooner rather than later. Achieving that goal means decreasing demand for energy and simultaneously lowering emissions from energy and fully “decarbonizing” the electricity sector, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It means fostering renewables as the key energy source, while balancing land-use practices, bioenergy production, and carbon storage. The key to IPCC is that time is running short before irreversible negative impacts on nature and its biodiversity will occur.
It is clear from the Covid-19 pandemic that other sustainability crises, in addition to climate change, are facing the planet. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has developed what is called the planetary boundaries framework, which identifies nine planetary boundaries that scientists there believe cannot be breached without significant negative consequences to humanity. These boundaries include stratospheric ozone, biodiversity, chemical pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, freshwater consumption, land system change, nitrogen and phosphorus flows in the biosphere and oceans, and atmospheric aerosol loading. Scientists at the Centre believe that four of these boundaries have already been crossed (one of two of the biosphere integrity indicators, deforestation, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus), with several others close to being transgressed.17 As the many scientists involved in the project note, “Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-to planetary-scale systems.”18
Although Resilience Centre scientists initially framed their study as preliminary, their findings have been updated and are now widely recognized as offering important benchmarks for “new thinking on global sustainability.”19 The scientists claim that there is an “urgent need for a new paradigm that integrates the continued development of human societies and the maintenance of the earth system (ES) in a resilient and accommodating state,” as a 2015 update puts it.20
Ecological/Sustainability Crises
To think that climate change is the only existential crisis facing humanity that results from both the growth in population of human beings on the planet (projected by the United Nations to reach approximately 8.6 billion people by 2030 and 9.8 billion by 2050, assuming no disastrous collapse) would be to be seriously mistaken. Humanity’s growth and exploitative practices are already pressuring many ecosystems as a result of what is called the Great Acceleration, which has pushed our climate into a new era known as the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene or era of human activity influencing climate and the natural environment, so labeled by Paul Crutzen,21 places human activity right in the center of climatic changes. Such changes have become markedly more apparent since about 1950 through a serious of charts (hockey stick–shaped charts) that show rapid acceleration in problematic socioeconomic and earth systems arenas. On the socioeconomic side are trends in global population, real gross domestic product (GDP), energy use, fertilizer consumption, and urban population, among others. The earth system trends show significant, negatively impactful, changes in a broad array of areas including increased carbon dioxide (associated with global warming), nitrous oxide, methane, stratospheric ozone, surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss, and domesticated land, among others.22 (Note: These charts can be found at The Anthropocene website: http://anthropocene.info/great-acceleration.php).
In 2018, the World Wildlife Organization (WWF) published a stunning report that details the many ways in which the natural systems that support and give life to human systems are endangered. Except where noted, this section draws from that report, which urgently calls for a “new global deal for nature and people” that would reflect more life-affirming approaches than the current system provides.23 The WWF report pointed out that the “services,” sometimes called ecosystem services, provided by nature are estimated to be as much as $125 trillion annually. The 2020 Future Earth Report similarly highlighted the many crises facing humanity if business as usual continues without needed transformation in arenas as sweeping as the climate, politics, ocean management, migration, biodiversity, finance, food, and digital innovation.24
One major threat to the future health of the planet, and of humans, is biodiversity loss. The world is now said to be undergoing what is known as the sixth great extinction, with massive losses of biodiversity annually, caused (as is climate change) by human activities.25 WWF points out graphically that “All our economic activity ultimately depends on nature,” and that the Living Planet Index documents a species population decline of 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.26
Biodiversity, according to the WWF, is threatened by a number of human activities, including excessive consumption of natural resources, growth of use of products associated with deforestation. Deforestation in turn threatens wildlife, conversion of land to agricultural uses, which disrupts habitats and pollution. Reductions in the number of bees and other pollinators, which account for pollinating about 87 percent of flowering plants, and degradation of topsoil, particularly what is known as “living soil,” or soil rich with life forms, which is at major risk globally, are also significant problems. Importantly, a 2019 report on species extinction indicates that as many as a million species are now at risk because of human activities.27
Biodiversity loss is only one of many ecological threats. Others include invasive species invasions, overexploitation resulting from deforestation and agricultural practices, which themselves are associated with what WWF calls “runaway consumption,” which is eroding the planet’s biocapacity. And, of course, we all learned with the pandemic in 2020 about the transfer of uncontrollable diseases from animals to humans. Biocapacity is the ability of a biological system to regenerate and renew itself, as well as absorb wastes. When biocapacity is exceeded the human ecological footprint is more than the renewal ability of a given ecosystem. The result is an unsustainable ecosystem. WWF notes that although bio-capacity has actually increased, it has fallen behind human populations’ ecological footprint.
WWF highlights steep declines in ocean habitats that are important to human welfare, including coral reefs, which support about a fourth of marine life and have already been diminished by about half, and mangroves, which both sequester carbon and provide a home for many ocean species, are also greatly deteriorated, along with other important ocean ecosystems. Similarly, global fisheries are being overexploited, with the result that annual fish catch is decreasing rapidly. Ocean health is also threatened by growing concentrations of plastic waste, especially from single-use plastics, used once and discarded only to end up in massive oceanic swirls along with other human debris. Such waste is particularly problematic because ocean animals eat it—thinking it is food, or get trapped in plastic bags or other remnants that end up in oceanic waters. Many fisheries are also at risk of collapse because of overly zealous fishing practices.
Forests are another important area of concern, because of their capacity for storing carbon and producing oxygen. Forests also provide numerous so-called ecosystem services, as WWF points out, including protecting watersheds, reducing erosion, providing shelter and habitats for animals, insects, and other living beings, and helping to mitigate climate change.
Topsoil and land suited to agriculture have been degraded by industrial farming practices and overuse, with accompanying significant reductions in the population of bees and other insects that pollinate plants. The importance of life in the dirt or soil is often overlooked, yet as much as a quarter of all of the Earth’s living beings can be found in soil. Studies reported by WWF suggest that there is a clear link between human population and activity (like agriculture, urbanization, pollution) and degraded life in soils, including decreasing insect populations. The reason that biodiversity in soils is important is that living organisms in the soil are foundational to ecosystem processes like carbon and other greenhouse gas sequestration, and nutrient uptake by plants, not to mention specific uses by humans of the variety of organisms in the soil.
The 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES) mentioned earlier puts the biodiversity situation in ever more stark terms.28 As noted above, IPBES warned of unprecedented and accelerating levels of species extinction, with up to a million species at risk of extinction. The report called for transformative changes in human systems so that natural systems can be protected and restored to health. IPBES found that land-based habitats have fallen by about 20 percent since 1900, and that as much as 40 percent of amphibian and 33 percent of reef-forming coral species are at risk. And that is the tip of the iceberg: insect populations, vertebrate species, and even domesticated animals are all threatened. As one of the authors of the report, Prof. Joseph Settele, put it, “Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. The loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”29
Dysfunctional Political and Cultural Practices
As to the third civilizational threat identified by Diamond, dysfunctional political and cultural practices, one needs only to look at the dysfunction caused by the Brexit vote in the UK. Or the divisiveness created by the election of populist leaders in numerous countries around the globe (including the United States), and the inequality generated by today’s economic system. Or the total disruption of what was thought to be normal by the Covid-19 pandemic. Protests by citizens around the world, many triggered in 2019, are evidence of growing unease with today’s approaches to societies and economies and problem solving within them. Protests, which were tamped down by the Covid-19 outbreak, also speak to the lack of progress in many places on huge issues like inequality, climate change, jobs and meaningful work, and poverty, problems greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.
Lack of trust in major institutions in society—like governments and businesses—has grown rapidly in the 21st century, particularly with the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and in its aftermath, when too little seemed to change. Angry citizens have often voted against their own self-interest in the name of change for change’s sake. Politicians seem unable to cooperate or collaborate around important public issues or in the public interest, instead (in the United States, anyway) being bought out by major donors through political action committees that contribute without restrictions—or consequences. In the United States, there are now periodic government shutdowns or partial shutdowns because no agreement can be reached on budgets—or for other, more political and equally dysfunctional—reasons. Uprisings and migrations from abusive, hostile situations have created a global crisis around migration, as people flee from their homes in the hope of finding a better life, only to find that there are few places for them to go. Such migration and the presence of refugees living marginal lives will only worsen if climate change proceeds unabated, as about 40 percent of people globally now live in coastal urban areas most threatened by rising seas.
The annual trust survey (called a barometer) by Edelman 2019 indicated that only 20 percent of people globally believed that the system was working for them.30 Additionally, that survey found that people now trusted their employers (75 percent) to do what is right more than NGOs (57 percent), businesses (56 percent), or the media (47 percent).31 Trust in business rose in 2019 despite the reality that the same survey reveals that the majority of employees fear job loss resulting from lack of training and skills for the jobs available, automation, and international conflicts about trade and tariffs, with the fears being highest for employees of multinational firms. Despite increases in trust for governments globally overall in 20 of 26 markets studied by Edelman, overall trust in government remained at 47 percent.32
The Edelman Trust Barometer in 2020 indicated that inequality—a sense of inequity in the system—was undermining trust in all of these societal institutions.33 The majority of people believed that today’s capitalism did more harm than good in the world (56 percent) and that the vast majority of employees feared losing their jobs (83 percent). At this writing, it is too soon to know how the fact that governments all around the world were forced to intervene strongly during the pandemic—and provide (or fail to provide) social supports will impact peoples’ views of government for the long term. Certainly, the disruptions caused by the pandemic create a situation in which many people are forced to recognize that continually stripping governments of their ability to provide some sort of social safety net—and has happened since the 1980s under the banner of neoliberalism—may not always be the best strategy.
There is plenty of other evidence of dysfunctional practices and cultures, including overconsumption patterns, food “products” with high salt, fat, and sugar contents that contribute to a growing obesity crisis globally, excessive focus on financial wealth to the exclusion of values that matter, poor distribution of the world’s food, which leaves many people hungry and malnourished, and many others. Add in the impact of social media, both for good in connecting people, and for problematic reasons, in putting forward unrealistic standards. Sometimes social media (inadvertently?) foments messaging that undermines democratic processes and generates more divisiveness and other problems. One could also note falling trust in the fourth estate (the press), as noted by the Edelman 2019 survey, some parts of which are failing to maintain their legitimate role as arbiter of the truth. Failing infrastructure in many nations is also a manifestation of dysfunction, as highways and public transportation systems erode, bridges collapse, and other aspects of the infrastructure necessary for modern societies to function well weaken.
Growing inequality also poses a significant set of risks. The Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org website highlights the fact that inequality has been growing globally decades with the world’s richest 1 percent of the population now holding some 45 percent of global wealth. In that same context, the “ultra-rich” (i.e., individuals who hold more than $30 million) hold some 11.3 percent of total wealth as of 2019 but are 0.0003 percent of global population. Oxfam’s 2019 report indicated that 26 billionaires held as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.34 Since Jared Diamond in his book Collapse cited growing gaps between rich and poor as one of the significant civilizational destabilizers, clearly this situation is untenable over the long term—and perhaps even over the shorter term, given the notable protests of 2019.
Off a Cliff?
The situation described above has complicated causes, of course, and many other important issues might be raised. The key point is that the trajectory for humanity, according to climate scientists in particular, is not good. As Diamond’s work points out, sustainability issues, climate change, and growing inequality, along with dysfunctional practices, pose civilization-threatening risks to humanity. Add in the political divisiveness of the current era, terrorism, the refugee crisis, issues around cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the Covid-19 pandemic and the potential for others, and privacy issues associated with what scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”35 Consider also growing civil unrest and an apparent deterioration of democracy, the potential for collapsing ecosystems, massive swirls of plastic waste in our oceans, extreme weather events, and on and on, to include other factors too numerous to detail without creating the impression that little can be done to move forward towards a better world. Elected officials in many places seem overwhelmed by all of these (and other) problems—and unable to come together around an agenda for moving the system to a better place.
The growing reality is that humanity is about to drive itself off a socioecological cliff—in the interests of continued economic “growth” that satisfies mostly the already wealthy. That is why we all need new pathways to flourishing—to a better future. In the next chapter, we look at some of the roots of today’s systemic crises. Then we will begin thinking about how systems as complex as our socioecological and socioeconomic systems might be able to transform. The idea is to try to determine how both the human project and other life on the planet can potentially cope with some of today’s challenges and learn how to thrive well into the future.
1 Donaldson, T., and J.P. Walsh. 2015. “Toward a Theory of Business.” Research in Organizational Behavior 35, pp. 181–207.
2 Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York, NY: Penguin.
3 Riane Eisler lays out the history of what she calls “dominator cultures” in her masterpiece, Eisler, R. 1988. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
4 See Thunberg, G., Wikipedia. 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg (accessed April 14, 2020).
5 Extinction Rebellion Website. 2020. https://rebellion.earth/ (accessed April 14, 2020).
6 IPCC. 2014. “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Field, C.B., Barros, V.R., Dokken, D.J., Mach, K.J., Mastrandrea, M.D., Bilir, T.E., Chatterjee, M., Ebi, K.L., Estrada, Y.O., Genova, R.C., Girma, B., Kissel, E.S., Levy, A.N. MacCracken, S. Mastrandrea, P.R. and White, L.L, 1–3. Cambridge and New York,NY: Cambridge University Press.
7 IPCC, Summary, p. 2.
8 IPCC, Summary.
9 Johansen, B.E. 2016. “Trump’s Climate-Change Denial Makes a Miserable Future more Likely.” Newstimes, November 23, 2016. http://newstimes.com/opinion/article/Bruce-E-Johansen-Trump-s-climate-change-10630865.php, and talk at the Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous Knowhow for Global Flourishing conference, University of Notre Dame, September 11–15, 2016.
10 Also IPCC, Summary, p. 16.
11 Holy Father Pope Francis. 2015. “Encyclical Letter.” Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Rome/The Vatican: The Holy See http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf
12 IPCC, Summary, p. 13.
13 See, for example, Larsen, J. 2004. “The Sixth Great Extinction: Status Report.” Humanist-Buffalo 64, no. 6, p. 6; Leakey, R., and R. Lewin. 1996. The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival. London: Anchor: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1996. And Barnosky, A.D., N. Matzke, S. Tomiya, G.O. Wogan, B. Swartz, T.B. Quental, C. Marshall, J.L. McGuire, E.L., Linsey, K.C. Maguire, B. Mersey, B. and E.A. Ferrer. 2011. “Has the Earth/s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471, no. 7336, pp. 51–57.
14 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2018. Global Warming of 1.5°C: All Chapters. 2018. http://ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ (accessed April 20, 2020).
15 Diaz, S., J. Settele, and E. Brondizio. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/2020-02/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policymakers_en.pdf (accessed May 3, 2020).
16 Ripple, W.J., C. Wolf, T.M. Newsom, P. Barnard, W.R. Moomaw, and 11258 others. 2019. “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” Bioscience https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806?searchresult=1 (accessed April 13, 2020).
17 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Four of nine planetary boundaries now crossed. 2015. https://www.su.se/english/about/news-and-events/press/press-releases/four-of-nine-planetary-boundaries-now-crossed-1.218003 (accessed May 26, 2020).
18 J. Rockström, W.L. Steffen, K. Noone, A. Persson, F.S. Chapin III, E. Lambin, E., et al., 2009. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Ecology & Society 14, no. 2, 32, http://ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/
19 Rockström, et al., Planetary boundaries, abstract.
20 Steffen, W., K. Richardson, J. Rockström, S.E. Cornell, I. Fetzer, E.M. Bennett, R. Biggs, et al. 2015. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet.” Science 347, no. 6223, 1259855–10.
21 Crutzen, P.J. 2006. “Geology of Mankind—The Anthropocene.” Nature 415, p. 23; Crutzen, P.J. 2006. “The ‘Anthropocene,’” In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, 13–19. Springer: Berlin Heidelberg.
22 For the charts and background information, see Global IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Program) Change, URL: http://igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html (accessed May 2, 2019).
23 WWF, Living Planet Report—2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M., and R.E.A. Almond, eds. 2018. https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1187/files/original/LPR2018_Full_Report_Spreads.pdf
24 Scrutton, A., ed. 2020. “Our Future on Earth Report.” Future Earth, https://futureearth.org/publications/our-future-on-earth/ (accessed May 26, 2020).
25 Leakey, R.E., and R. Lewin. 1995. The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. New York, NY: Doubleday. Also Eldredge, N. 2001. “The Sixth Extinction, An Action Bioscience.org original article.” American Institute of Biological Sciences http://endangeredink.com/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/pdfs/Eldridge-6th-extinction.pdf (accessed May 26, 2020) and Larsen, J. 2004. “The Sixth Great Extinction: A Status Report.” The Humanist 64, no. 6, 6–6, http://earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2004/update35 (accessed May 26, 2020).
26 WWF, Living Planet Report, p. 10.
27 Diaz, S., J. Settele, and E. Brondizio. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” IPBES https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/2020-02/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policymakers_en.pdf
28 S. Diaz, J. Settele, and E. Brondizio, 2019. “Summary.”
29 Quoted in IPBES Media Release. 2019. “Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’ Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating,’” https://ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment (accessed May 26, 2020).
30 Edelman Trust Barometer. 2019. URL: https://edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019-03/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf?utm_source=website&utm_medium=global_report&utm_campaign=downloads (accessed May 26, 2020).
31 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 1.
32 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 1.
33 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer. 2020. URL: https://edelman.com/trustbarometer (accessed April 4, 2020).
34 Quackenbush, C. 2019. “The World’s Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8 Billion, Says Oxfam.” Time, January 21, 2019, https://time.com/5508393/global-wealth-inequality-widens-oxfam/ (accessed May 26, 2020).
35 Zuboff, S. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.