2024-03-09 21:46:46
Last September, another scientific institution which studies social and environmental dynamics, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, recalled in an article published in the journal Science Advances that humanity has already crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries, which demarcate a safe space for our species. This unprecedented situation, outside of any consideration regarding the official or unofficial entry into a new geological epoch, plunges us, all of us, here and now, into indeterminacy, uncertainty, even perhaps an unprecedented powerlessness to choose and do what must be done to get the ship Earth out of these roaring forties and “bring regarding sustainably habitable worlds”.
The strong comeback of physics, previously kept at a distance by economicist thought
The geologists of the Anthropocene Working Group have decided: it is not possible, for the moment, to precisely date the entry into a new geological epoch. Perhaps, moreover, it never will be. Perhaps scientists will finally grant the Anthropocene the status of an “event” rather than a geological “epoch,” as several AWG members suggest.
Whatever the outcome of this debate, the fact remains that the crossing of 3 (in 2009, out of 7 evaluated), then 4 (in 2015), then 6 (in 2023, out of 9 evaluated) planetary limits sounds like a verdict that is increasingly difficult to contest: physics is in the game once more in the economic game and business strategies.
And if ultimately the planetary limits are indeed “ the strongest constraints to which businesses are subject “, it is then necessary to go beyond classical economic thinking, without physics, which permeates many decision-makers and their visions of the world.
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