Environmental Impact: Concept, Consequences, Measurement

Environments on Earth are always changing, and living systems evolve within them. For most of their history, human beings did the same. But in the last two centuries, humans have become the planet’s dominant species, changing and often degrading Earth’s environments and living systems, including human cultures, in unprecedented ways. Contemporary worldviews that have severed ancient connections between people and the environments that shaped us – plus our consumption and population growth – deepened this degradation. Understanding, measuring, and managing today’s human environmental impacts – the most important consequence of which is the impoverishment of living systems – is humanity’s greatest challenge for the 21st century.