Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet

8/30/2022

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet understands that it’s not the planet, but the human race that must be saved, and the only way to do that is to study how the planet works (know your enemy, perhaps?). As Swedish professor Johan Rockström says, “biodiversity is not something we need to protect due to some kind of moral responsibility of one species, humans, towards another species such as flora and fauna”, but because “it is the toolbox for the functioning of our societies.” Rockström is a proponent of Planetary Boundaries, a conceptual framework that assesses the state of nine processes fundamental to the stability of the Earth system, and suggests a series of thresholds for these processes that, if overcome, can endanger the habitability of the planet. These threshol