Global Planet Authority by Angus Forbes is a powerful book on how we can save the biosphere and today we have an exclusive snippet from the book on Mother Nature.
A word about Mother Nature
I like to think of Mother Nature as sitting in a control room, perhaps the size of a large room in a house. Just as in the cockpit of a plane, there are thousands of buttons everywhere. The occasional one flashes, but Mother Nature barely glances up as a positive or negative feedback loop, already designed by her, comes into play and corrects the system back to a balanced state.
She is pretty relaxed after four billion years of evolution and, frankly, a little smug at her latest creation: the micro-era, that is the Holocene – the last 11,000 years post the last ice age. It’s been 11,000 calm years of biophysical perfection.
However, everything changed 270 years ago and in particular in the last 70 years as the human race entered the control room. The first species to ever be there – not the dinosaurs, not some aliens on teh meteorite that hit 65 million years ago that caused the fifth mass extinction event in the planet’s history. We are the first. And like children let loose in a sweet shop, we have grabbed at things all over the place, pushed a lot of buttons and caused a lot of damage.
After 250 years of this violent action, our scientists looked at the health of the planet’s ecosystems and concluded:
“Human activities are the largest drivers of change at the planetary level.
All of Earth’s ecosystems are dramatically transformed via human actions.
15/24 ecosystem services are degraded…
Drivers of degradation in ecosystem services are growing in intensity.”
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005
The first two sentences say: we now run the biosphere. The third sentence says: we are doing a very bad job. And the last sentence: we’re getting even worse at it.
It is really, really important for us to grasp this and internalize the fact that we now run the biosphere, with Mother Nature.
This is no longer about a little bit of damage done here and there. We have to change our mindset and actually manage our overall impact on Earth’s systems and plan for the very long term. Most often, success can be achieved by simply getting out of Mother Nature’s way of course, due to her wonderful ability to rebalance and restore, but there will be areas where we have to actively intervene given the damage we have inflicted.
To find out what we can do to save the biosphere, continue reading.
Global Planet Authority by Angus Forbes
Global Planet Authority by Angus Forbes
About the book
The world is functioning outside the lines. The governance structures currently abided by are not supportive enough when it comes to fighting climate change and other environmental degradation. Perhaps it’s time to start anew. In his first book, Forbes advocates for global taxation and regulation to protect this global asset, the planet. Packed full of facts, data, statistics and figures, Forbes’ book offers a compelling argument to save the planet.
Angus Forbes has a long experience working at the coalface of capitalism, consumerism and capital allocation, and his passion for progressive governance and sound knowledge of environmental degradation have led him to advocate for quite a unique solution, the Global Planet Authority.
About the author
Angus Forbes is a former City banker turned environmentalist and a passionate advocate of global governance of the biosphere. Founder of both VoteGPA.com and the social enterprise, Bankers Without Boundaries, he was also the inaugural Project Director of the Prince’s Rainforest Project at Clarence House. Australian-born Angus lives in England.
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