From passengers to crew: introductory reflections

Abstract

It is only very recently that we humans have come to recognize our place on this Earth. As Marshall McLuhan once put it: “On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew” ([1], p. 50). While we have never been simply passengers, our status as crew has mattered little for almost all of human history; to paraphrase Harari [2] we have been decidedly “insignificant” crew members. This changed drastically with our capture of fossil fuels, or “ancient sunlight” as Hartmann [3] calls it, to drive the machine of successive industrial revolutions [4]. Thanks to these developments, the Earth has transitioned out of the Holocene and into what is now being termed the Anthropocene, an age in which our status as crew members is hugely significant. We have become “geological actors” [5] whose actions have shaped, and are reshaping, the systems that have kept Spaceship Earth on its course for some 10, 000 years. The consequences of this new era are both profoundly global and acutely local: with the pushing of our planetary boundaries, safe spaces for humans and other species are shrinking, giving way to less favourable and less stable planetary conditions for the lifeforms evolved in the previous Holocene era.