What Future for the Earth?

• What are humans doing to our one and only planet?
• In an age of scepticism, division and rancour, whose claims and counter-claims about human impacts should we believe?
• What questions do we need to ask about global environmental change?
• How do we grope towards actionable answers in a disunited world?

The scale, scope and magnitude of human impacts on the Earth are unprecedented. Geoscientists warn of a perilous future in which the Earth System has been forced out its interglacial Holocene state. But geoscience can’t tell us what the root causes of anthropogenic planetary change are, nor how humanity should best respond to it. It’s for others to do this analytical and normative work.

What Future for the Earth? examines a growing landscape of thought ranged across the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Setting geoscience in its wider institutional and epistemological context, this multidisciplinary book addresses a set of key societal questions arising from escalating Earth System change. It offers an advanced introduction to concepts, arguments and propositions ventured by environmentally minded historians, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political theorists and many others. Placing capitalism and ‘strong anthropocentrism’ at the centre of analysis, What Future for the Earth? tackles a set of big issues, such as how we should think about time and future, about ‘environmental crisis’ and the moral status of the non-human world. The book lends shape to an urgent debate about the many profound implications of what people are doing to our one and only planet. Who gets to speak for the Earth and its inhabitants, how and to what ends? Who gets to identify causes, propose solutions and enact them? As the technological power of certain private firms and many national governments grows prodigiously, these questions focus our attention on how influential actors can be held accountable and a more just world be created.

University students and instructors across a wide range of disciplines will find this book of interest, as will general readers concerned about climate change, biodiversity loss and related problems. This book identifies issues of common concern and outlines ways of addressing them in a world riven by conflict and dissent yet in need of urgent, cooperative action among otherwise different peoples.