The signs are overwhelming: we are rapidly depleting earth’s capacity to support life. The increasingly extreme effects of climate change, rising rates of pollution-related illnesses and rapidly diminishing natural resources are all signs that we have been running on environmental credit for too long. While we have been able to temporarily overspend our means, the sustenance of future generations requires an end to the cycle.
To be sure, humans have applied various innovations to local environmental challenges and ‘tragedies of the commons’ in the past. Think of overgrazing of public lands or the sanitation challenges of early urban development. However, the effects of human-related environmental degradation are now so widespread1 that they require a radical shift in how we relate to earth’s natural systems. For too long we humans have viewed ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom and nature generally. Our enlightened longterm self-interest impels us to redesign our relationship with the rest of nature. This kind of shift is not unprecedented: just as our moral understanding of owning fellow humans (i.e. slavery) went through a transformation in the early and mid-nineteenth century,2 our understanding of our effect on the climate, and on the survival of other species – not to mention our own – is also changing.
