Earth System Analysis for Sustainability

Abstract

Review: Earth System Analysis for Sustainability By Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Paul J. Crutzen, Wiliam C. Clark, Martin Claussen and Herman Held (Eds.) Reviewed by Elery Hamilton-Smith Charles Sturt University, Australia Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Paul J. Crutzen, Wiliam C. Clark, Martin Claussen and Herman Held (eds.) Earth System Analysis for Sustainability. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. with Dahlem University Press, Berlin. ISBN 0 262 19513 5. 454pp., RRP $(US) 38.00 This is the broadest examination of the factors shaping sustainability yet undertaken and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of global systems. At the same time, the book basically derives its understandings from an astro-biological (and so inevitably Eurocentric) perspective and gives minimal attention to the socio-political environments that shape the human response to sustainability issues. Obviously, to have dealt with these constraints would have demanded at least one further study on the same scale and would be unrealistic in the current context. So I am not criticizing those responsible but rather from my own social science perspective pointing to one of the many further research tasks in this very complex field. The book is based on one of the Dahlem workshops, a series of international and multi-disciplinary intellectual assemblies that focus on extending our understandings of major scientific questions. But they are certainly much more than the usual knowledge exchange and re-integration, being structured “ . . . to identify gaps in knowledge, to pose questions aimed at directing further inquiry, and to suggest innovative ways of approaching controversial issues. The overall goal is not necessarily to exact consensus but to search for new perspectives, for these will help direct the international research agenda.” (p. xiii) This volume opens by defining the global arena as the Anthropocene, as a geo-epoch in which human beings play a significant role in reshaping the planet. This perspective certainly serves to emphasize the importance of human understanding – but it leaves many of us deeply aware of the extent to which our political institutions are still unable to accept and respond to such a responsibility. But the current volume exemplifies the extent to which the scientific community is coming to grips with it. The Dahlem program, situated as it is at the epicenter of German intellectual action, is also demonstrating the power of the Wissenschaft concept – a perspective that is more comprehensive than the Anglophone concept of knowledge and