Mission
To help turn the Anthropocene into a self-regulating and self-limiting epoch — one that protects the living systems it depends on, and that prevents and halts ecocide.
The proposition
A geological epoch named after a single species is an odd thing. It is also, for the first time, an epoch whose principal force can read its own stratigraphy. Ice cores, satellite records, gene banks, and atmospheric measurements together form something no previous planetary force has ever had: a description of itself, in near real time, accurate enough to act on.
Complex-systems science supplies the grammar for that description. It explains why small causes sometimes produce enormous effects, why some damage is reversible and some is not, why a well-placed rule outperforms an enormous effort, and why diversity is not decoration but the material of adaptation. Seven fields, one shared language.
The stance
Pragmatic and optimistic, in that order. Pragmatic, because wishing has no mechanism and the physics does not negotiate. Optimistic, because the record of the last fifty years contains an ozone layer healing, a whale population recovering, a continent regreening a Sahel, solar energy falling below the price of coal, and rivers returning to life after dams came down. None of that was inevitable. All of it was done.
Eight billion people is the largest cooperative capacity that has ever existed. Every problem on this map is shared, which means that for the first time the number of people available to solve it is the same as the number of people causing it. Abundance of hands, abundance of minds, abundance of instruments. The arithmetic is not hopeless; it is unprecedented.
How to read this atlas
- The landing diagram holds seven domains. Each domain is a way of seeing whole systems.
- Every word inside a circle opens its own page — seventy-three in all.
- Each page gives a plain definition, its bearing on the Anthropocene, five places or people from different continents where the idea is already at work, and links onward: the encyclopedia entry first, then live feeds at journals and periodicals that keep supplying current reporting.
- Nothing here is a closed argument. Everything is an entry point.
Ecocide, plainly
Ecocide means the severe and either widespread or long-term damage of ecosystems. It is currently being defined in law — several states have adopted domestic statutes and an amendment to add it to the Rome Statute has been formally proposed. Naming a harm precisely is the step that precedes limiting it, exactly as it was for ozone-depleting substances, leaded fuel, and persistent organic pollutants. Each of those was once called impossible to restrict. Each is now restricted.
Dedication
This collection is dedicated to teachers. To everyone who stands in front of a class, a workshop, a field, or a kitchen table and hands on what they know to the generations who will inherit this world and have to manage their lives within it, and nurture nature while doing so. The whole of this atlas is only an argument that the knowledge is teachable and the work is doable.