How can we establish and maintain a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of the living world?

This is without doubt the most important and challenging question that has ever faced our species.

Our present use of the planet is not sustainable. Achieving “a sustainable relationship between humans and the living world” will require a huge intellectual, scientific, technological and social effort.

Whatever sustainable means, maintaining the current number of humans is not an option, and we cannot continue to extract services from the natural world at the rate we do today. Stopping soil erosion is not enough; nor stopping climate change; nor is stopping the fragmentation of habitats or the damming of rivers. Sustainability is not just a matter of making sure that the rate of use does not exceed the rate of replenishment. We must reverse many trends, overhaul our organisations and the way we do things, and considerably improve the processes we use to grow and prepare food, clothes, and other material goods, and to transport them and us around the place.

If we are to meet this grand challenge one thing is essential: the contribution of science in all its many flavours.

Understanding how to establish and sustain a balanced relationship between humans and the rest of the living world will certainly need reductionist, rational, value-free and quantitative knowledge of the natural world and its interaction with our activities. But it will also require holistic, partly intuitive, ethical and qualitative knowledge, accumulated empirically over a long time and through learning by doing.

Let us direct every effort towards understanding, and increasing the capacity to understand, our living planet as a single, complex entity.

We need many more socio-ecologists out there doing anthro-geo-physiological fieldwork. We also need philosophers and communicators and people who delight in studying and understanding complex, interacting, self-regulating, far-from-equilibrium, self-organising, ambiguous, borderless systems.

Let us learn how to expect the unexpected.

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