Humanity, the Ecosystem

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,

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Consider this for a moment: The ecosystem is the fundamental unit, the atomic building block of everything in our world. Each of us is an ecosystem, we are made up of ecosystems, and we are participants in ecosystems.

Humanity is at a crossroads, will we be hoarders or healers? There is every reason to argue that history proves either. System Change is needed to find our way to another way of living that is not fed by exploitation of each other and the ecology. The change needed is not in any of the institutions, for surely they are interdependent, the change is... See more

We’ve treated humans as separate groups for historically well-known reasons — all the instincts of tribes and tribalism — and yet we now can see clearly that thinking of ourselves as “humanity” — as all of us — is critical to solving the global problems we now face.

Reaching out to nature and history: The notion of community is a breathless affair when we imagine it as solely human.