How Humankind Came to Rival Nature

Humankind is axiomatically tied to environmental change and was party to some forms of global-scale change reaching as far back as the Holocene. The capacity to induce environmental change, however, has increased throughout human history. This change follows a long-term, global-scale trajectory that tracks well with a logarithmic-logistic function describing human population growth. The model is applicable to technological and socioeconomic conditions as well. This review briefly describes the multiple steps of the resulting curve. Case-study examples illustrate the successive or stair-step changes in the human-environment condition. As these changes increase in variety, magnitude, pace, and spatial scale, they threaten the structure and function of the biosphere. Broad lessons are drawn from this history, with the caveat that the environmental changes underway today and the human-environment relationships precipitating them have no adequate analogues in the past.