Sublime

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

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,

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite.

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”