Superabundance is Coming - but Only if Humanity Commits to Protecting the Planet
You’ve heard of planetary boundaries? Those measures which tell us how we are disrupting the safe operating space that permits life on earth. The more we breach those boundaries, the more the safe operating space shrinks. We’ve now breached six out of nine of them. Vital signs of planetary health are flashing red, meaning we’re at risk of abrupt and irreversible changes to the Earth System that could erode and undermine the planet’s capacity to support life.
The planetary boundaries framework has provided us with one of the most powerful scientific lenses to understand the scale of the crisis facing humanity at a species-level today. This is a necessary picture of the grave symptoms of how the Human System is increasingly disrupting critical planetary life-support systems.
But a crucial feature of this moment is not captured by this picture. This feature is simple, but absolutely seminal, and it boils down to this: the looming obsolescence of the industrial order is part and parcel of a civilisational-scale metamorphosis in which a whole new Human System is emerging.
