A Call to Engagement

Abstract

Sustainability is a socioecological problem. Although most of us never consider it, human society is embedded in, and completely dependent upon, the earth’s natural systems. Human economic activity takes place within the matrix of these systems, both influencing and being influenced by them. In general, for most of the two or three million years of our hominid history, our share of that influencing was minimal. But at some point in the not-too-distant past, we entered what has come to be called the Anthropocene period, a time in which the sheer number of human beings and the power of human activity to shape the biosphere have exploded and, in fact, have become the main drivers of deeply troubling planet-scale changes. These now-familiar trends—a warming atmosphere and oceans, accelerating species extinctions, and so on—threaten human welfare and perhaps even the viability of human civilization.