Sublime

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,

were a storm as powerful as the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 to strike Key West today, they say, the 22,000-person island would likely be wiped as clean of life and property as the Matecumbes were years ago. Were such a storm to strike a major population center such as Miami, property damage would likely outstrip Andrew one hundred times over.)

That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally cate

scenarios, which we named Gray, Green, and Gaia. We crafted them as “news feeds from the future,” and included a guiding strategy document. Andrew: OK, let’s take it from the top. Gray? Gopal: Gray is more or less business as usual extrapolated out. It’s the mostly collapsitarian view of how the social and ecological implications of climate will pl

I take to heart Tim Garrett’s excellent work,7 indicating that only the collapse of industrial civilization will prevent runaway climate change. And there are many, many other good reasons to terminate this set of living arrangements. According to a United Nations report from August 2010, we’re driving to extinction 150 to 200 species every day. Th

misplaced sense of rightful dominion over local communities, landscapes and wildlife. Reading their proposal in the same

The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is twenty-three thousand acres in area, or roughly the size of the Bronx. Within its borders live twenty-six species that can be found nowhere else in the world. According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents “the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the