Chapter 2 reviews the mounting scientific evidence of the growing “fragility” of the Earth system and its implications for the planet. It traces the long history of how humans have exploited nature to create wealth, starting with the Agricultural Transition 10,000 years ago up to the Fossil Fuel Age and its global consequences. The chapter then focuses on the four threats created by current human impacts on the biosphere: climate change, land use and biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity and deteriorating marine and coastal habitats. Each of these global challenges will be examined in more detail in later chapters (see Chapters 4–7).

Agriculture was a major transition in human social evolution. After its adoption, the size of human communities increased from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands. Societies became organized around surplus food production with an extremely complex division of labor. Human society became ultrasocial. It began to resemble a superorganism – an autonomous, highly integrated network of technologies, institutions, and belief systems dedicated to the production of economic surplus. Agriculture and the institutions that supported it gave us two problems that now threaten our very existence as a species: destabilizing inequality and potentially catastrophic environmental degradation. With agriculture, world views arose to justify and reinforce the subjugation of most individuals to the new hierarchical socioeconomic system. In early state societies, divine right, caste systems, patriarchy, and state religions supported the exploitation of human labor and the domination of nature. Today’s beliefs include the inevitability of progress, selfish individualism, and the sanctity of the market economy.

The long series for the Polity P-index, 1800–2016, confirms equivalence. The great majority of traditional systems were based on three pillars: (i) a king from a royal house, (ii) a feudal aristocracy, and (iii) a national Church. The Grand Transition undermines two of these pillars: The Agricultural Transition reduces the agricultural sector dramatically. The Religious Transition substantially reduces religiosity and the economic power of the Church. Without the two pillars, the political system must change, and in addition, development creates a large middle class, which is the main recipient of the large increase in human capital. The consequence is very likely to be democracy. This is the strong but fuzzy relation behind the transition curve. The chapter also analyzes the spells of constant systems and explains why political systems consolidate into status quo equilibria that need triggering events to be broken.