The pathways of development followed by today’s wealthy countries after the Second World War-built on plentiful, cheap fossil fuel energy resources, an abundance of other material resources, and large expanses of productive land to be developed-cannot be followed by the 75–80% of the human population who are now at various stages of their trajectories out of poverty, and are beginning to compete with today’s wealthy countries for increasingly scarce resources.Ī large fraction of our population of nearly 7000 million people needs more access to food, water and energy to improve their material standard of living, and the prospect of an additional 2000 million by 2050 intensifies the need for basic resources. Less well known is the potential shortage of the mineral phosphorus and the increasing competition for land-sometimes referred to as the “land grab” in relation to Africa-as the new economic giants of Asia move to secure food resources in non-Asian territories. The twin challenges of “peak oil”-decreasing petroleum resources and increasing demand-and climate change are redefining the pathways of human development in the twenty-first century (Sorrell et al. People and the Planet: Humanity at a Crossroads in the Twenty-First Century As we go further into the Anthropocene, we risk driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return. The need to achieve effective planetary stewardship is urgent. The Anthropocene is a reminder that the Holocene, during which complex human societies have developed, has been a stable, accommodating environment and is the only state of the Earth System that we know for sure can support contemporary society. Many approaches could be adopted, ranging from geo-engineering solutions that purposefully manipulate parts of the Earth System to becoming active stewards of our own life support system. The advent of the Anthropence, the time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit. This situation is novel in its speed, its global scale and its threat to the resilience of the Earth System. Equity issues remain stubbornly difficult to solve.
However, in the twenty-first century, we face scarcity in critical resources, the degradation of ecosystem services, and the erosion of the planet’s capability to absorb our wastes.
Over the past century, the total material wealth of humanity has been enhanced.
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