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Several comprehensive, international reports released in 2018 confirmed the precarious state of the environment. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that Earth is headed toward a global air temperature increase that will reach 2 °C sometime after mid-century, unless drastic CO2 reductions start immediately. And according to last year’s Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund, vertebrate populations around the globe shrank by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014, with South and Central America suffering an even more dramatic 89 percent decline.
Nowadays, we understand these types of concerns as “environmental.” Yet this is not how the public viewed such facts in the past, even within the lifetimes of many alive today. Our predecessors did have an impact on nature, and they knew about it. But they lacked a galvanizing idea that could draw together the web of interconnection and consequence that ...
