Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet

Johan says that the actions of humans alone in the past 50 years are responsible for pushing humanity and the planet out of the 10,000-year Holocene and into the Anthropocene. So it seems astounding to me that the global human population was not included as a critical boundary to the destabilization of the planet.

The global human population was just 3 billion in 1960 and it now sits at 7.9 billion, a 160 % increase in less than a lifetime. Just as any farmland has a maximum capacity for the number of livestock, the planet must also have a maximum capacity for the number of humans that demands all of its resources.

Countries like Brazil have seen their populations tripled since 1960; there were 70 million Brazilians then and there are 210 million now. As draconian and inhumane as China's one-child policy was, their population would be 2 billion without it, instead of 1.5 billion, if they had the same population growth as Brazil. Human culture has to change because there is no evolutionary need for any family to have more than two children since most children will survive into adulthood.

It is definitely worth of your 1 hour 13 minutes time to watch this science-based documentary about how humanity has the dominant role, as Sir David Attenborough perfectly highlighted on his closing narrative, as the only Earth's conscience and brain, whether to lead the world and its ecosystems to the danger zones by continuously doing our business as usual, or to secure the future with a healthy and fresh air, clean water, stable climate, nutritious land, and resilient planet, by doing everything we can to not break the planetary boundaries.

David Attenborough is a hopeless optimist and in connection with the concept of Planetary Boundaries this gets to a point where it becomes nearly comical.

A major flaw of the film is that it is sometimes so unprecisein it's science that it verges on being incorrect. It insinuates, for example, that if we start living inside Planetary Boundaries today we cound somehow get all the toothpaste that has already left the tube back in. This is, especially for the climate boundary (and consequentially for the ocean acidification boundary, the connection of which is clearly explained in the film), simply not the case.

Another flaw is that the things we actually can do, right now, are given not very much space in the film. Especially the connection between a meat-centric diet an the bondaries land-use change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen/phosporous cycle are nor at all explained,

But what can I say? Johann Rockström on Netflix. All is not lost. This should receive a huge audience.

I also think that science is only one part of solving this puzzle. Mr. Rockstöm and Mr. Attenborough telling us that we can solve the crisis by cutting, as private citizens, our emissions in halfge every decade, is really, REALLY oversimplifying things. We as private citizens can rearrange the deckchairs but without politics steering the whole ship away from the iceberg this will not do, not by a long shot.

This is years of research, science-backed information being shared about what has happened due to current normalized daily practices and what will happen if we continue the same way without changing our approach of how we live on plant earth. We all have to take action now!

Great delivery, pertinent points, and astute observations.