Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

As geological epochs go, the Holocene has been our “Garden of Eden era,” added Rockström. In this Holocene we’ve maintained just the right amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, acidity in the oceans, coral in the sea, tropical forest cover along the equator, and ice at the two poles to store water and reflect the sun’s rays, to support human life and a steadily growing world population.

“We are threatening to push Earth out of this sweet spot,” said Rockström, and into a geological epoch that is not likely to be anywhere near as inviting and conducive for human life and civilization as the Holocene. That is what the current debate is all about.

We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.

“A no-analogue world”

simple: whether we know it or not, we have organized our societies, industries, and economies on the basis of the Holocene environment, and therefore if we breach the operating levels of the key environmental systems that have sustained it all these years, we could flip the planet into a new state that could make it impossible to maintain modern life as we’ve learned to enjoy it. It was the equivalent of imagining Mother Nature as a healthy person and then identifying the optimal range of weight, cholesterol, blood sugar, fat, oxygen intake, blood pressure, and muscle mass to ensure that she stayed healthy and could still run marathons.

So in the absence of Mother Nature being able to tell us how her most important systems are feeling, Rockström and Steffen and their planetary boundary team of scientists have attempted to make some educated estimates of where those tipping points reside, beyond which systems tip into a different state.

The first boundary is climate change

believes that we needed to stay below 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere if we wanted to stay comfortably below the 2 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperature since the Industrial Revolution—the

We are now at more than 400 parts per million of CO2

The second boundary, they argued, is biodiversity—which includes all the living species in the biosphere and all the nature covering the planet—that

The planetary boundaries team determined we should maintain 90 percent of biodiversity cover from preindustrial levels. We are already down to 84 percent in parts of Africa, and going down further.

it is impossible to regulate the climate without biodiversity. If you don’t have pollinators in the air and microorganisms in the soil and birds and other animals depositing seeds for new trees through their waste, you don’t have a forest. If you don’t have a forest, you don’t have trees to soak up the carbon. If you don’t have trees to soak up the carbon, it goes into the atmosphere and intensifies global warming or into the oceans and changes their composition.

breached—we are now losing somewhere between ten and one hundred species per million species per year. That is as close a proxy as you can get for how much we are losing biodiversity.

The third planetary boundary we have breached, said Rockström, is deforestation

The scientists estimate that we must maintain around 75 percent of the Earth’s original forests. We are now down to 62 percent, and some forests are showing signs of absorbing less carbon.

The fourth boundary that has already been breached is called biogeochemical flows. “We’re now adding way too much phosphorus, nitrogen, and other elements to the world’s crop systems, poisoning the Earth” with fertilizers and pesticides, said Rockström,

Another area the planetary boundaries team says we are still managing to stay barely just inside is freshwater use—the maximum amount of water we can remove from the world’s rivers and underground reservoirs, so our wetlands and rain forests can remain in their Holocene state and we can continue to engage in agriculture at scale.

A third boundary that we haven’t quite crossed is atmospheric aerosol loading. These are the microscopic particles we put into the atmosphere with conventional pollution from factories, power plants, and vehicles.

And the fourth area where we are still just inside the boundary is known as the introduction of novel entities, namely, our invention of chemicals, compounds, plastics, nuclear wastes, and the like that are alien to nature and seep into soils and water.

There is one boundary we have safely retreated from after breaching it in the past. This is the appropriate thickness of the stratospheric ozone layer that protects us against dangerous UV radiation that causes skin cancer.

Their redlines are educated estimates, beyond which we enter a “zone of uncertainty”—where no one can predict what might happen, because we have just not been there before as humans.

But if we keep breaching these planetary boundaries, “we might shift the planet from friend to foe.”

Already, many Earth scientists argue that it is no longer appropriate to describe our current geological epoch as the Holocene. They believe we’ve already left it behind and entered a new era that is being driven by … us. The name being given to this era is the “Anthropocene,” as in anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new.” It is a fancy scientific name for the power of many.

It is only beyond the mid-twentieth century that there is clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth System that are (1) beyond the range of variability of the Holocene, and (2) driven by human activities and not by natural variability.”

One of his traveling companions standing next to him told me he left twelve kids back home. This was not unusual—mothers in Niger have an average of seven kids each.

Even though in many other parts of the world, population growth has flattened out or even reversed, the planet’s total population will rise from about 7.2 billion today to about 9.7 billion by 2050, according to the latest United Nations report. That means in just over thirty years there will be another two billion people on the planet. Pause for a moment and think about that number: two billion more people.

“mortality and fertility rates remain relatively high, but mortality rates have fallen faster. As a consequence, population is rising, and in some cases, rapidly. At current rates of growth, nearly forty countries could double their population in the next thirty-five years

During 2015–2050, half of the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, United States of America (USA), Indonesia and Uganda …

But by 2022, the population of India is expected to surpass that of China.

With the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. During this period, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double.

While progress is not precluded, rapid population growth for these countries is a challenge multiplier.

It is not about a lack of contraceptives. It is about a lack of modern gender norms and persistent male religious opposition to birth control.

“From 1950 to 2050, Uganda’s population will have increased 20-fold, and Niger’s 30-fold.

The resulting high unemployment, particularly of young men, could foster political instability. The radical violence of ISIS has many roots, but the tripling of the population of North Africa and the Middle East over the last 50 years certainly is one of them

Tom Burke, chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, a green group in Britain, likes to reduce the problem to four numbers: 1, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5. Says Burke:

Today there are 1 billion who have arrived at middle class or above on the planet, with secure assets and high and secure incomes. There are 1.5 billion people who are in transition. They moved to the cities fifteen years ago in the emerging economies. By now they have some assets and secure incomes, but they’re beginning to feel nervous because a lot of them work in the public sector and are being squeezed by globalization and technology. There are another 2.0 billion who have just recently moved to cities and they have virtually no assets and pretty insecure incomes, and you see them sitting by the roads selling stuff. And there are 2.5 billion who are the rural poor, living as subsistence farmers and on the edges of forests, who have not joined the global economy at all. If the climate changes, some migrate and the rest die.

If we cannot meet the expectations of the 1.5 and the 2.0—who are primarily in the cities in a hyperconnected world, where they can see everything they are missing, added Burke—they will destabilize the middle classes in all these countries.

A significant number of those participating in the Arab Awakening starting in late 2010 emerged from the newly urbanized 1.5 and 2.0.

we are now many, and the many are becoming many more and each of the many more is much more impactful and consuming much more than ever before.

We’ve gone from being a small world on a big planet to a big world on a small planet. Now Earth is responding with environmental shocks to the global economy. This is a great turning point.”

“What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine the future—not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”

If horses could have voted there never would have been cars. But the disruptions do seem to be coming faster these days, as technological advances keep building on themselves, taking us from one platform to another and touching a wider and wider swath of the labor market.

A year later, in 1979, UPI sent me off to Beirut as their number-two correspondent, in the middle of the civil war there.

“the car has no blind spots. Almost all the accidents are drivers rear-ending us because they were not paying attention.”

“How do you tell it where to go?” I asked Brin. “You will just program it on your cell phone,” he answered, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

To enhance stability in rapids it’s important to move as fast or faster than the current. Every time you rudder or drag your paddle in the water to steer you lose momentum and that makes you more vulnerable to flipping over.

The only way to steer is to paddle as fast as or faster than the rate of change in technology, globalization, and the environment. The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—that bike-riding trick that Astro Teller talked about.

It’s innovation in everything other than technology. It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids.

social technologies make new physical technologies possible—Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the smartphone without a global supply chain.

Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower.