As Erle C. Ellis writes in a December 4, 2023 NYTimes guest essay:
As leaders around the world meet for the 28th time to address the climate crisis — this time in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s largest oil producers — they need to rethink this threat and some of the other central challenges of our times.
Those other challenges include devastating losses of biodiversity and plastic pollution so widespread, it is now found on the world’s tallest mountain, in its deepest ocean trench and in our veins. In the long history of this planet, our current time, the human age known as the Anthropocene, is the first in which a single species will so rapidly reshape the future of Earth’s climate and all the other conditions that make life as we know it livable.
These crises are not about the planet going haywire. They are crises caused by failures to assign and enforce social responsibilities. And the wealthiest, most powerful and most capable societies that have ever existed on this planet are behaving as if they owe nothing for what they have gained at the expense of imperiling life on Earth. Such behavior is not only unethical. It is precisely the opposite of what deep history tells us has enabled societies to avoid collapse in the face of severe environmental challenges.
Dr. Ellis, a visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School, is a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of “Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction.”