The goal of one-planet thriving has been reinforced by a growing recognition that human beings are not separate from nature but an interdependent part of the living planetary whole.

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,