This is the title of a presentation given by Will Steffen during a conference in Stockholm on Resilience, Adaptation, and Turbulent Times. They did a great job in putting together an impressive agenda and one could watch presentations online.
I only met professor Steffen once when he introduced himself as "Bob (my PhD advisor)'s friend." Now I understand why: not many ecologists did their research at global scale, and they are two of them.
Professor Steffen delivered two major points throughout his presentation:
1. There are three stages of anthropocene: Stage I--pre-industrial revolution, Stage II--rapid growth after WWII, and now we are at the critical Stage III: sustainability/collapse
2. Because we only have one earth, perhaps adaptive management is not a good idea at the global scale. We are much better off adapting precautionary principle.
He also mentioned a couple of interesting points from a recent paper he coauthored with his colleagues titled " Mind the sustainability gap" that hasn't reached my radar yet, including "sustainability hierarchy vs triple bottom line", and "short-term pragmatism." I'll have to check the paper out and report back.
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