Sublime

Rachel Carson in her book entitled Silent Spring, “As man proceeds towards his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.”

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or the publication of Limits to Growth marked quantum leaps in understanding our ecological impact on Earth.

Rachel Carson eloquently articulates in Silent Spring, “The whole problem of pesticide poisoning is enormously complicated by the fact that a human being, unlike a laboratory animal living under rigidly controlled conditions, is never exposed to one chemical alone.”

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,