4th Transition Convention

Most of the fundamental and dramatic changes during the more than 4 billion year history of the Earth resulted from the operation of natural geological forces, with intermittent cosmic disruptions in the form of meteor and comet collisions. Such naturally forged metamorphoses include the tectonic movements of continents and oceans, the genesis of life and the biosphere, the evolutionary development and extinction of millions of plant and animal species, and long-term shifts in climatic conditions and zones. The processes that gave rise to these transformations continue to act on the biosphere through continuing geological forces and comparatively more short-term changes in climate. The last major climatic shift (the Pleistocene-Holocene transition) inaugurated the ascent of our species as a significant presence in the Earth's biosphere.

 

Cultural evolution has allotted the human species progressively greater control over the Earth's environment and more complex utilization of its resources to the extent that human activities now match natural geological forces as a major agent of planetary transformation. For the past two centuries, advances in sanitation and our ability to control disease, and cheap fossil-fuel fertilizer (and miracle grains) have made possible an explosive increase in our numbers. Within the last 170 years the human population grew from about 1 billion in the 1830s to 2 billion in the 1930s, to 4 billion in 1975, and has recently surpassed 6 billion. The expansion of human populations during this period constitutes exponential growth, a process that not only characterizes our increasing numbers, but also represents our consumption of energy and resources.

 

The sources of energy available to human societies have played a major part in determining the activities that they can undertake and the way in which our societies are organized. For all but the last two hundred years the sources of energy were few and the total amount of energy our ancestors could access was limited. All the forms of energy used until then were renewable (although trees, one of the most important sources, were normally treated as non-renewable). The last two hundred years have, however, been characterized by a massive and continuing increase in energy consumption of non-renewable resources. The exploitation of fossil fuels have made it possible for Homo sapiens to release, in a short time, vast amounts of energy that accumulated long before our species appeared.

 

Biological species characteristically expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up. In wine making, for example, a population of yeast cells in freshly pressed grape juice grows exponentially until nutrients are exhausted or waste products become toxic. By exploiting fossil fuel energy to modify more and more of its environment to suit human needs, the human population effectively expanded its resource base beyond immediate requirements. This has allowed a population expansion similar to that of species introduced into extremely propitious new habitats, such as rabbits in Australia or Japanese beetles in the United States. While it took 10,000 lifetimes for the human population to reach 2 billion, today, during a single human lifetime, the population may soar from 2 billion to 8 billion. Reminiscent of the manner in which a micro-organism can proliferate when introduced into the nutrient layer of a petri dish, an exponentially expanding human population has colonized Earth's terrestrial biomes.

 

Similar patterns are present in our planet's loss of forests, topsoil, groundwater stocks, wildlife species, stratospheric ozone, and climate stability.

Most of the transformations wrought by humanity during the past 10,000 years have occurred in our lifetimes, as we've altered our environment in increasingly significant and diverse ways. Human-induced modifications to planetary processes, including biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles, have cascaded to a scale that rivals natural changes to the Earth.