Earth Stewardship, Climate Change, and Low Carbon Consciousness: Refl ections from Brazil and South America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 358

Science has identifi ed nine biophysical planetary boundaries that, when
trespassed, can lead to a systemic planetary disruption of Earth systems: climate
change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen/phosphorus cycle, stratospheric ozone depletion,
ocean acidifi cation, global freshwater use, change in land use, aerosol pollution, and
chemical contamination (Rockstrom et al. 2009 ). Three of the boundaries already
have been trespassed: fi rst, the nitrogenous cycle, due to the massive use of nitroge-
nized fertilizers since the 1950s; second, biodiversity loss, especially since the
1970s, when an expanded human population began impacting natural ecosystems
and other species to the point of exhausting them; third, climate stability, due to the
accumulation of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) in the atmosphere - currently, 400 part
per million (ppm), 1 when the safe boundary is 350 ppm. By trespassing these bound-
aries, human beings demonstrate that the modes of development adopted by the
majority of human groups during the last centuries have not taken into account their
effects on Earth's equilibrium: an anthropocentric ethics has dominated the human
mindset, 2 and even human survival in the long term is now threatened (North 1990 ).
Humanity is at a crossroads: contemporary issues require a new planetary con-
sciousness in order to be successfully tackled, yet policy making is stuck in an
outdated framework incapable of incorporating this new consciousness.
Take, for instance, climate change. From the nine planetary boundaries, climate
change is the broadest studied and understood by science, and yet tackling it is still
a great challenge, due to the nature of the issue (Rockstrom et al. 2009 ). It was
defi ned as a truly wicked or diabolical problem because its complexity defi es cur-
rent international problem solving (Prins et al. 2010 ; Jamieson 2011 ; Steffen 2011 ).
First, it is intrinsically global, once it is led by changes in the concentration of GHG
in the atmosphere. However, there are no institutions for direct global policy making:
human policy making is mostly carried out by nation states that only occasionally
cede sovereignty to international institutions. Second, climate change is not linear,
because vulnerabilities and responsibilities to the problem are skewed: the poorest
of every society are usually the ones that contribute the least to the problem, but also
the ones that mostly suffer their effects. Third, it operates in a time scale that is
beyond human daily experience, so the appeal of passing the burden to future gen-
erations is always present.
Tackling climate change requires the adoption of a low carbon development
model, a pattern in which GHG emissions are decoupled from economic growth.
1 The concentration of GHG in the atmosphere was 401.85 ppm in 12 Jun 2014 according to the
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. Data available at http://cdiac.ornl.gov , accessed 19
Jun 2014.
2 It is important to clarify that, whenever the article does not specify the population, it is referring
to the contemporary global society that encompasses most Western and many non-Western societ-
ies such as China, India, South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. However, societ-
ies that are very poor, such as many sub-Saharan African countries, so far have not impacted the
global equilibrium, neither did small subnational social systems in all societies that are guided by
values that consider the ecological equilibrium, local and planetary.