Living On a New Earth

Humankind has fundamentally altered the planet. But new thinking and new actions can prevent us from destroying ourselves

By The Editors

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Forget banking and the automotive industry. Earth is the one system that is truly “too big to fail.” For centuries humans have used up the planet’s resources, saddled it with our waste and simply moved on when a wellspring dried up or the back forty became polluted. But now we’ve exhausted that strategy. Scientists, social thinkers and the global public are realizing that humankind has transformed the natural planet into an industrialized one, and we must transition again to a sustainable planet if we are to survive.

So what is the bailout plan? The first step is determining how close to “failure” the world is. Environmental scientist Jonathan Foley presents the results of a major international collaboration that calculated safe limits for pivotal environmental processes, such as climate change and ocean acidification, that could undermine sustainability if allowed to go too far. The numerical boundaries may need fine-tuning, but knowing which processes matter most tells us where to look for solutions. Scientific American invites eight experts to propose specific remedies.

Those fixes could slow environmental degradation but might not solve the underlying cause. That culprit, according to Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben, is the very driver of modern society: a relentless quest for economic growth. In an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming book, McKibben argues that we must give up growth and reorganize based on smart maintenance of resources. Critics say the idea is unrealistic; staff editor Mark Fischetti challenges him to respond.

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Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American