Showing results for "Future Evolution" in Environment

It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future. Taking listeners from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

The environmental crisis is advancing at an unprecedented pace and scale. It will outpace us if we don’t turn our attention to an even deeper concern regarding the future of humanity: We need to work together to create change. Our current approach to collaboration is outmoded. To transform our world, we must transform the way we lead. We collectively share the power and responsibility for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future. Leaders who hope to shape that future must develop the ability to embrace relationships as our most impactful, influential tool.

In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism.