What Have We Done?

Abstract

Princeton professor Lynn White Jr. delivered the above diagnosis in a now famous lecture–‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’–at the Washington meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1966. More than half a century later, the nest of humanity is fouler still. Climate change is now the poster child of the environmental movement. Since 1988, its pace, causes, and consequences have been the subjects of intense study and lucid forecasting by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its mission has become one of the largest and most in-depth analyses of human impact on the planet ever organized, involving contributions from dozens of countries, hundreds of researchers and authors, and many thousands of peer reviewers. Each of its reports is more alarming than the previous one, and the most recent synthesis report (at the time of writing) (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/) is especially daunting, with increasingly certain predictions for dramatic and large-scale deterioration and loss of ecosystem services and human well-being over the course of this century (IPCC 2021).