Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1⁰C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020.’ These words are from the Summary for Policy Makers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report. It is the aim of this book to help you understand exactly how, and why, the collective body of scientists has come to these, and many other, conclusions. Addressing this aim requires that you understand two facets of the nature of our planet. Firstly, you need to understand how our planet ’behaves’ under what we might choose to call ’normal conditions’. Secondly, you need to understand how human activity has moved us away from that normal. The following chapters will take you through both of these in the necessary detail. In this chapter we present a quick overview, as well as introducing you to the IPCC.

The production of hazardous pollutants is part of everyday life for most every human; the problem is that the degree of production per person today is greater than it has ever been – and only getting worse. We all participate in this process, but not equally. We are currently in a moment of geologic history where something living is now the single largest driver of planetary change: humans. In the process of creating this change we are also creating substantial and unnecessary human health hazards, what I call environmental violence. Environmental violence (EV) encompasses many activities and processes – but certainly not everything – that humans do, particularly processes of consumption and production that exceed well past meeting basic needs. In this chapter I work through the theoretical threads that underpin the concept of EV and work to situate EV in human evolutionary and geologic history. I also chart out the rest of the book, providing a roadmap of where we are going and the materials, evidence, case studies, and methods that I will employ along the journey.

This piece takes the reader on a virtual trip through the Earth System, using visualisations as a key tool to understand our home planet and our evolving knowledge about it. It begins and ends with trips between the Earth’s surface and space, experiencing the Earth System from above. In between, however, we take an historical tour of the planet, tracking the evolution of humanity’s growing understanding of the Earth and how it functions as a system. The tour wanders through the evolving scientific landscape, beginning with the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image of Earth taken by the Apollo 11spacecraft in 1972, continuing with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and John Schellnhuber’s second Copernican revolution, and finishing with Paul Crutzen’s confronting assertion that the Earth System is now in the Anthropocene, leaving humanity’s comfort zone of the Holocene as a receding memory.

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).

The need to curb human activities threatening critical Earth system processes, resources and sinks is an important starting point for thinking how best to manage our planet in an efficient, sustainable and inclusive manner. Chapter 3 explains how this can form the basis for an “economics for a fragile planet.” This perspective began with Kenneth Boulding in the 1960s, who argued that the Earth is ultimately finite, and thus, transition to a “spaceship economy” that respects such limits is unavoidable. The implications are that the exploitation of Earth’s sources of natural resources and sinks for pollution is not limitless, and that it is essential to end the underpricing of nature that currently ignores the rising costs associated with ecological scarcity and environmental degradation. This requires in turn rethinking the markets, institutions and governance needed for a green and inclusive economic transformation. The overall objective should be to manage an economy’s overall stock of physical, human and natural capital to sustain per capita human welfare while limiting global environmental risks.

The final chapter brings all the book’s threads together. It explores the similarities and differences between the Anthropocene defaunation and the ancient mass extinctions. It investigates how much time we have before we reach the extinction levels of the Big Five mass extinctions. It has been suggested that we should just let the defaunation run its course; but the consequences of that course of action appear dire. But all Is not lost. The fossil record shows that the Earth System is resilient, and if we quickly act to remove the climatic forcings we are creating, we have time to turn the situation around and avoid sliding into another full-blown mass extinction.

The continuation of life on Earth relies on the Earth System maintaining planetary conditions in an equilibrium suitable for its continuation. But the Earth System did not just spring into existence – it developed slowly as complex life evolved and modern-style ecosystems appeared. In this chapter I review the history of early life, beginning with the oldest Snowball Earth event (about 700 million years ago) through to the Cambrian Explosion (about 480 million years ago). A field trip down Brachina Creek in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia that start in the early Cambrian and ends at the boundary of the Cryogenian and Ediacaran Periods sets the scene for the discussion. Intimately associated with the evolution of complex organisms and the appearance of the Earth System is the story of oxygen. This history of this important gas and its role in the evolution of life is briefly reviewed.

The first chapter introduces a new geological period – the Anthropocene – and explains its origins its timing and importance in emphasizing the current biotic crisis. The current idea that we are in the sixth extinction is criticized because (1) the current level of extinction isn’t high enough to justify it and (2) it limits today’s biotic crisis to just those species that have gone extinct and does not include those under threat. The term defaunation is used in preference because it provides a clearer picture of the situation we find ourselves in. It does this by including both species that have gone extinct and those under threat of extinction. The important concept of the Earth System is outlined and its role in maintaining planetary conditions explained. The link between sudden shifts in Earth System due to climatic forcings and mass extinctions is explained.

Atmosphere is both a literal aspect of the Earth system and a formal property of literary texts. This chapter takes up that double-meaning of the term. Taking the description of atmospheric phenomena in literature seriously helps illustrate the expansive entanglement between climate and human history, revealing changing attitudes to climate across time. At the same time, attending to formal atmosphere helps illustrate literature’s capacity to mediate, and symptomatise, climatic history and its impacts upon culture in ways that extend beyond description to include character formation, book production, and textual studies, while also elevating the importance of setting as both physical location and formal property. The chapter also expands our consideration of setting to include sites of reading along with those of composition or narration. Utilising Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a case study, the chapter advocates a mode of reading that situates literary history within the history Earth system, which is to say the study of the planet as a single, interconnected whole.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.