Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Chapter 4 examines the role played by contemporary capitalism in both massively escalating emissions and creating structural, ideological, and psychological barriers to efforts to cut emissions.

The front matter to “Cities of Hydrocarbon,” the third of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet pivots from an interview with a rickshaw driver in Delhi about the effects of the city’s smoky air to announce the major themes of modern global urban history. These include the acceleration of growth due to the powerful new way of harnessing geo-solar energy, the growing turbulence of political life due to the rise of revolutionary movements in cities and their enlarged hinterlands, the emergence of a truly planetary city-dominated human habitat, as well as a vastly expanded realm of human impact. It finishes by reminding readers of the growing consequences we face as an urban species in command of the planet, in the form of increased pandemic disease and atmospheric heating.

This piece takes the reader on a virtual trip through the Earth System, using visualisations as a key tool to understand our home planet and our evolving knowledge about it. It begins and ends with trips between the Earth’s surface and space, experiencing the Earth System from above. In between, however, we take an historical tour of the planet, tracking the evolution of humanity’s growing understanding of the Earth and how it functions as a system. The tour wanders through the evolving scientific landscape, beginning with the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image of Earth taken by the Apollo 11spacecraft in 1972, continuing with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and John Schellnhuber’s second Copernican revolution, and finishing with Paul Crutzen’s confronting assertion that the Earth System is now in the Anthropocene, leaving humanity’s comfort zone of the Holocene as a receding memory.