Radiation from nuclear detonations. Genetically modified organisms. Synthetic biological compounds. Microplastics in clouds, rain, and bodies. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mess with how amphibians and other animals – including humans – develop and reproduce. These are some of what the planetary boundaries framework characterizes as novel entities, a category ‘restricted to include only entities that, in the absence of the anthroposphere, are not present in the Earth system’ (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Steffen and Lucht2023: 3). This planetary boundary, perhaps more than any other, has expanded considerably with respect to definition and measurement. Its concern with different kinds of entities also raises deeper ethical questions, from those regarding what is truly new when it comes to how anthropogenic forces affect planetary evolution, to the variety of risks, uncertainties, and moral challenges that arise when different materials and technologies are grouped together as novel entities.
Novel entities weren’t in the 2009 planetary boundaries framework. Instead, ‘chemical pollution’ held this space. At that time, however, there was not yet sufficient information to suggest a boundary (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Steffen and Noone2009). In the 2015 update, ‘novel entities’ were introduced, with ozone depletion acting as an example that was closely related to what the new category sought to capture (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Richardson and Rockström2015). Critically, the 2015 update established criteria for how a growing multitude of chemicals might be understood for their effects on the Earth system. These criteria drew on Persson et al. (Reference Persson, Breitholtz and Cousins2013: 12620, original emphasis), who explored approaches to ‘unknown planetary boundary issues [that] likely exist’. The tens of thousands of chemicals introduced into the environment with very little known about their aggregate individual effects, or the ways they might combine, presented exactly the kind of ‘known unknowns’ that could not be ignored. Their proposals, adopted in the 2015 framework, had three main points of consideration for determining a planetary boundary: the chemical must have a disruptive effect on vital Earth-system processes, not be discovered until it ‘is a problem at the global scale’, and, finally, have an effect that is not readily reversible (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Richardson and Rockström2015: 7).
As chemical pollution morphed into ‘novel entities’, researchers examined how this planetary boundary turned on the capacity of Earth processes to assimilate chemical pollutants (Diamond et al. Reference Diamond, De Wit and Molander2015). Reducing pollution was an obvious goal, and when Persson et al. (Reference Persson, Carney Almroth and Collins2022a) published a new global assessment they found Earth was exceeding the planetary boundary for novel entities even when that boundary was restricted only to chemicals. Still, as they acknowledged, their assessment had not really shown ‘where the boundary for novel entities is’ (Persson et al. Reference Persson, Carney Almroth and Collins2022b: 6788, original emphasis). And this is for good reason: novel entities are multidimensional owing to how they might impact biological, biogeochemical, or geophysical aspects of the Earth system. Measuring thousands of interactions individually, let alone in concert, presents a near-intractable challenge. In this way, Persson and colleagues were very much faced with the kinds of issues identified at the outset of this book: a boundary is a normative idea that does not necessarily rely on full knowledge of where a quantifiable threshold might be. Boundaries are normative. So, they can countenance some ignorance while still retaining a commitment to gathering more information and revising as necessary in future. When the planetary boundaries framework was updated in 2023, novel entities were expanded beyond chemicals with a ‘control variable’ determined by ‘the percentage of chemicals released to the environment without adequate safety testing’ (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Steffen and Lucht2023: 6). Unlike other boundaries that have quantified values, this is as far as this boundary’s measurement goes – to a ratio of chemicals released to the environment to their testing. Because in the Holocene no such entities existed, and since hundreds of thousands of such chemicals now circulate globally, the only safe boundary was determined to be zero. Zero would remain the boundary unless those chemicals are fully tested and determined to be harmless – a standard derived by taking the Montreal Protocol for ozone as an example for thinking about novel entities.
Not everybody agrees on zero for a safe planetary boundary on chemicals, and neither is there always agreement on what counts as novel or why. Several feminist scholars, for instance, hesitate over normative claims that chemicals are wholly bad since many can provide socially valued goods too, such as pharmaceuticals that have health benefits (Murphy Reference Murphy2017; Balayannis & Garnett Reference Balayannis and Garnett2020). Likewise, the chapters in this part offer different assessments of how claims about novelty do not operate free from broader considerations about human interactions with the planet. These two chapters do this in very different ways. The first, by Andreas Bachmann and Ariane Willemsen, looks at the ethics of novel entities from the perspective of ethics within public administration. In these contexts, decisions on definitions and descriptors matter critically for assessing moral matters. Fuzziness will not do. In their chapter, they offer a carefully considered critical engagement of how the planetary boundaries framework treats ‘novel entities’ and what is at stake if different interpretations of that boundary are followed through to their ethical conclusions. The second chapter also takes a critical approach to planetary boundaries but is also a different format to previous chapters. In this case, the chapter is an interview transcript with Erle Ellis, a scientist who examines human-Earth interactions at a range of spatial and temporal scales. For Ellis, questions of novelty must be set within broader considerations regarding for whom planetary crises are really a crisis. They must also be set within a broader appreciation of how human and non-human ecologies interact at a range of scales and over time. For Ellis, framing problems at the ‘planetary’ scale often do not sufficiently identify those responsible for forcing the Earth system into a novel state, such as through anthropogenic climate change, and so thinking through the ethics of the planetary boundaries framework requires situating it amid a broader set of concerns crisscrossing science and society.
27.1 Introduction
The perspective of this chapter is that of institutionalized ethics consulting within public administration. The task of this kind of ethics consulting is to draw the attention of the legislator and the implementing authorities to the ethical aspects of the pertinent legal regulations that need to be taken into account. As far as ethical expertise is concerned, ethics is understood and applied as a science.Footnote 1 In this respect, ethics consulting within the administration is no different from academic ethics. Where it differs is in the specific perspective: advice is given under the conditions of the specific needs of the administration.
The following considerations are based on the experience of working for the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the ethics unit of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). Both the ECNH and the FOEN’s internal ethics unit were established in the 1990s in the same context, namely in view of the emerging moral issues in dealing with the then new biotechnology and gene technology and the concretization of the Swiss constitutional mandate to take account of the dignity of living beings. While the ECNH addresses ethical questions of non-human biotechnology based on its legal mandate and advises all Federal offices affected by the mandate, the FOEN’s internal ethics unit deals with moral aspects of the office’s broad range of tasks.
More specifically, the ECNH is particularly concerned with the ethical aspects of various technological approaches and products in the field of non-human biotechnology. These include, among others, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and gene drives. For example, the Committee assesses the ethical acceptability of the idea of combining living organisms or biologically active material with non-living material (chemicals) or of creating life purely from chemical components and DNA blueprints (ECNH 2010). It is working intensively on GMOs, in particular the new genetic engineering methods, with a view to crops and livestock (ECNH 2016, 2018, 2022). Recently, genetically modified microbes have also become an issue, which are to be used to improve soil quality and plant growth, as well as to produce pesticides as a substitute for chemicals. Another example are genetically modified or synthetic gene drives that can be used to introduce additional genetic information for new traits into a population or to remove essential DNA sequences, thereby creating a lethal factor that causes the offspring to die during development, for example, in the fight against malaria. Genetically modified organisms are also relevant for the FOEN’s ethics unit, in particular the question of how new genomic techniques can be regulated appropriately based on the Swiss Constitution for the area of plant breeding and the commercial handling of GMOs. The question of the responsible use of chemicals and plastics also plays a role.
The planetary boundary ‘Novel Entities’ (NE) forms one of the nine planetary boundaries within the PB approach. In order to be able to assess this planetary boundary, the first step is to outline the approach in general. This includes a brief explanation of why some aspects of this approach are problematic from an ethical perspective. We will then take a look at the NE, in particular chemicals, plastics, and GMOs. While in our view the PB approach is generally to be welcomed, even if it currently plays a marginal role in Switzerland’s national environmental regulation, we consider the specific planetary boundary ‘Novel Entities’ to be problematic from an ethical perspective. Our impression is that it does not fit into the overall approach and runs the risk of initiating substitute discussions that distract from the actual problems.Footnote 2
27.2 Ethical Challenges for the Planetary Boundaries Framework
The planetary boundary approach (PB) attempts to determine the negative effects of human activities on the stability and resilience of planetary biophysical and biochemical processes and to show where boundaries are transgressed creating an unacceptable risk to this stability and resilience. While environmental protection is still primarily a national task, it is evident – as climate change, biodiversity loss, or plastic pollution show – that many processes have taken on a global scale that also requires an appropriate global response. With regard to the development of global management approaches, a lot has happened in recent years.Footnote 3 But they are not enough to overcome the challenges we face. In this context, any approach that helps to provide science-based arguments that can increase the pressure to act and to initiate the necessary measures at planetary level is to be welcomed.
Regarding the scientific and methodological aspects of the PB approach, there are challenges particularly due to a lack of data and because the complex interactions between the nine planetary boundaries, and the cumulative effects that may accompany them, are not yet sufficiently understood. This aspect will not be discussed next, though. Rather, it is assumed that the PB framework is a scientifically sound approach that can provide policymakers with important points of reference on the basis of which international regulations can be developed, but which can also be downscaled to a sub-global (national or regional) level.
However, the PB approach is not a purely natural scientific concept. It also contains evaluative and normative aspects, but these are either not disclosed or have no plausible justification, at least not from the point of view of ethics or political philosophy. The advocates of the PB framework should give more weight to these normative aspects and work together with the relevant specialists for their detailed elaboration. Two examples serve as illustration: on the one hand, the concept of ‘justice’ and, on the other, the relationship between the precautionary principle, the harm principle, and risk assessment. The second example is also relevant for the assessment of Novel Entities in particular.
27.2.1 PB, ‘Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries’Footnote 4 and the ‘Planetary Commons’Footnote 5
In two recently published articles, Rockström et al. have attempted to integrate normative concepts such as harm or justice into the PB approach and to expand it to include international law and regulatory aspects. However, the proposals made are not convincing. For instance, harm is an evaluative or normative notion. They define it as
negative impacts on humans, communities and countries from Earth system change in addition to background rates.
This definition raises two questions:
First, is ‘negative impact’ to be understood as ‘is actually negative’ or ‘is considered to be negative’? This distinction is normatively relevant. The same applies regarding the concept of justice, where a distinction must be made between ‘considering something to be just’ and ‘actually being just’. The following applies to both concepts: if they are used as genuinely normative – and not as socio-political – concepts, the question must be: ‘what is harm or what is just’? And not: ‘what is considered to be harmful or just’? What is considered just can be determined empirically, for example, through surveys. The normative question, however, is whether what is considered just is actually justified. It is not permissible to draw direct conclusions about what is actually just from what is considered just.
Second, how does harm to people as individuals, on the one hand, and to countries and communities as collectives, on the other, relate to each other? Here, too, the same question must be asked with regard to the concept of justice.
Reading the definition of ‘significant harm’, one might think that, at least with regard to the first question, it is clear that Rockström et al. understand harm as what is negative, not what is considered to be negative.
[W]e define significant harm as widespread severe existential or irreversible negative impacts on countries, communities and individuals from Earth system change, such as loss of lives, livelihoods or incomes; displacement; loss of food, water or nutritional security; and chronic disease, injury or malnutrition.
However, one would then have to at least begin to sketch out a theory of objective harm that goes beyond intuitive examples. Instead, there is a back and forth between normative and non-normative (that is, socio-political) statements. This is not a satisfactory normative argument. For that kind of argument, one would have to clearly separate these aspects and show why what is considered just is actually just.
The second question about the relation of harm to individuals, on the one hand, versus countries and communities as collectives, on the other, remains unanswered. This is also a problem regarding a plausible normative argument. For what can be a significant harm for a person from the point of view of individual rights – in the sense of justified moral claims – is not necessarily so from the collective perspective of countries or communities. But what ‘just’ Earth System Boundaries (ESB) are depends crucially on this normative perspective.
The definition of ‘just’ proposed by Rockström et al. does not help in this respect. For them ‘just’ refers to a state in which ‘human exposure to significant harm (no significant harm (NSH)) from Earth system change’ is minimized (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Gupta and Qin2023: 103). Again, it remains indistinct whether ‘minimization’ is to be understood individually or collectively with regard to significant harm (even if many passages in their text point in the direction of a collective reading). The further explanations do not clarify this central point either:
The just (NSH) boundaries described here are necessary but not sufficient conditions for Earth system justice, which must also enable access to resources for all and distributional and procedural fairness. A foundation that enables minimum access to water, food, energy and infrastructure for all humans alongside a safe and just (NSH) ESB ceiling of maximum allowed human pressure on biophysical domains could constitute a safe and just ‘corridor’ over time.
At first sight this seems plausible, but the devil is in the detail. For example, what is meant by ‘minimum access to water, food, energy and infrastructure for all humans’? If this applies to all people as individuals, then an individualistic perspective is being adopted here in normative terms. That would mean: every human individual has a corresponding right. If it is withheld from only one individual, this would be a ‘significant harm’. As long as these normative questions have not been answered, it seems hopeless to quantify the ESB with a view to ‘justice’ – which is an explicit goal of Rockström et al. What is not tenable, at least from an ethical perspective, is an additive definition of justice (or harm for that matter) in which it is simply stated that justice encompasses both aspects: individual and collective. But this is exactly what they do. Intragenerational justice, for instance, is understood as ‘justice between countries, communities and individuals’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Gupta and Qin2023: 103). This is explained as follows:
Intragenerational justice includes relationships between present individuals, between states (international), among people of different states (global) and between community members or citizens (communitarian or nationalist .… Achieving intragenerational justice means minimizing significant harm caused by one country to another, one community to another and one individual to another.
Apart from the fact that it is unclear why minimizing significant harm should be a criterion of justice, this ‘definition’ simply lines up the collective and individual aspects without saying how they relate to each other.Footnote 6
The arbitrary results this leads to can be seen at the ‘just’ ESB for climate change. In this respect, they are of the opinion that the boundary is an average global temperature rise of 1.0°C. The reasoning is as follows:
Assessment of significant harm from climate change suggests the need for a stricter just (NSH) boundary [than 1.5°C]. At 1.0°C global warming, tens of millions of people were exposed to wet bulb temperature extremes …, raising concerns of inter- and intragenerational justice. At 1.5°C warming, more than 200 million people, disproportionately those already vulnerable, poor and marginalized (intragenerational injustice), could be exposed to unprecedented mean annual temperatures, and more than 500 million could be exposed to long-term sea-level rise …. These numbers of people harmed vastly exceed the widely accepted ‘leave no one behind’ principle and undermine most of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The problem is that, regarding the tens of millions of people who were exposed to wet bulb temperature extremes, it is not explained what justice concerns this raises. That would be important in order to assess the relevance of the number of people affected. But even then, the question remains: Why is this number relevant at all? If only one or 100,000 or 1 million were affected, why should this matter? If the relevant arguments are not explained in detail, these judgmental statements are arbitrary.
This critique also applies to the explanations as to why 1.5°C of warming is too high from the point of view of justice. The thesis would have to be: the harm to the aforementioned affected parties could be so great that its actual occurrence must be avoided at all costs. But, again, why should the number of people affected be relevant? What if only 100 or 1,000 or a million were affected? Would the justice consideration then no longer apply? Would the harm, if it occurred, not be ‘significant harm’? Of course, such a threshold can be defined politically. But that does not change the fact that it is arbitrary, even if one has a collective understanding of justice.
The critique remains the same if another widely accepted (political) principle is invoked as justification, namely the principle of leaving no one behind, and it is argued that the number of those affected far exceeds the number of those permitted. The same questions arise with regard to this principle, at least from an ethical perspective. It shows how problematic it is to transfer ethical concepts such as justice into the political or legal sphere. These concepts retain their core moral content, and the questions associated with them cannot be neutralized by adapting them to what is politically and legally feasible.
Questions of global justice are complex. The answers are controversial within political philosophy. If one wants to discuss questions of justice plausibly in this context, one has to engage with them. One has to work out and justify one’s point of view and then show what follows from it. To be able to do this and to avoid arbitrary conclusions, expert knowledge is needed. What should not be done is to adopt common patterns of argumentation and simply string them together, such as ‘Intragenerational justice combines justice between countries, communities and individuals through an intersectional lens’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Gupta and Qin2023: 113). One should also avoid mixing psychological and normative arguments: one cannot draw conclusions about what is actually just or unjust from the way people perceive justice and injustice, because here, too, what is right is one thing; what is considered right may be something else. Furthermore, a mixture of political, legal, and ethical aspects should be avoided. These methodological rules and distinctions are not sufficiently taken into account in the arguments of Rockström et al., and, as a result, the statements regarding the ‘just’ Earth system boundaries cannot serve as the foundation of a tenable argument.
In Rockström et al. (Reference Rockström, Kotzé and Milutinović2024) a proposal is made as to how the Earth’s biophysical systems, on which humanity collectively depends, can be ‘governed’ in such a way that their stability and resilience can be guaranteed in the long term. The aim is to secure the critical functions of the Earth system regardless of national borders. The idea is to treat these systems as ‘global commons’ and regulate them accordingly.
The planetary commons include, but significantly expand on, the current global commons by embracing all critical biophysical Earth-regulating systems and their functions, irrespective of where they are located, because they are essential to sustain all life across the planet, including the stability of our societies.
The idea is to extend the territories already protected as ‘global commons’, such as the Antarctic or the deep seabed, to systems that are critical for sustaining life and the habitability of the planet, such as boreal permafrost, tropical rainforests, or coral reefs. From an ethical point of view, if there is a duty to achieve the goal, this duty extends to the instruments and measures required to achieve the goal as effectively and efficiently as possible while making the transition phase as fair as possible. There are good reasons to believe that it is indeed a moral duty to protect the stability and resilience of the Earth system and its associated systems and subsystems in the long term. The question is not whether the extended global commons should be protected, but whether this approach is the best possible or at least a promising approach to achieve the goal; or whether there are better alternatives. The main challenge is that this global system would continue to be supported primarily by nation-states. This raises the question of political feasibility, especially because the central motive required is not national self-interest, but the moral idea of ‘planetary stewardship obligations on states and civil society to collectively safeguard Earth system regulatory functions’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Kotzé and Milutinović2024: 6). Yet this inevitably involves restrictions on state sovereignty. This challenge seems enormous, despite the fact that there are (more or less) successful examples of global environmental regulations. A step-by-step approach as before, in which the nation-states continue to play the central role, may seem to be a more realistic alternative, but the question is whether the goal can be achieved in the time available in this way. This depends largely on how urgently the goal needs to be achieved and how much time is left.
27.2.2 Precautionary Principle, Risk Assessment, and Harm Principle
Harm scenarios are of central importance for the ethical assessment of the planetary boundaries since we do not have sufficient causal knowledge of many complex processes affecting the Earth system. This applies to all planetary boundaries, including the NE. For example, we cannot predict with certainty what will happen if the average global temperature rises by more than 1.5 degrees. We can make even less causal predictions about the NE. If we could make reliable predictions, we could determine the extent of the harm and then define the measures required to prevent it from occurring.
The following options remain: either we have enough knowledge to be able to determine and assess the risks, where risk is a function – usually the product – of the likelihood of harm occurring and the extent of harm. In this case, we can decide whether the risks are acceptable or not, and if not, what needs to be done to reduce them sufficiently. Or we know that significant harm can occur, and that the probability is greater than 0, without being able to specify it any further. In this case, we are in a precautionary situation in which the precautionary principle applies. Or we are in a situation in which the potential harm based on scientifically plausible scenarios reaches such an extent that the probability of its occurrence becomes irrelevant: It is simply a matter of preventing it from occurring.
These are the central aspects from which the planetary boundaries, including NE, must be ethically assessed. The ethical questions to be answered are, for example: What criteria should be used to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable risks? When is a potential harm of such an extent that the probability of its occurrence no longer plays a role because, regardless of this, it is only a matter of preventing its occurrence, and the precautionary principle no longer applies either? (This is because this principle assumes that the object to be analysed could be a permissible risk. For this reason, the precautionary principle states that the occurrence of harm must be avoided as far as possible, but at the same time everything necessary must be done to obtain the data needed to determine the probability of its occurrence, allowing the risk to be determined.) And if the harm is so great, what means may be used to prevent it from occurring? What role do normative criteria such as proportionality or respect for fundamental rights play in such situations?
One of the deficits of the PB approach, including the NE, is that its advocates do not adequately apply the precautionary principle and inadmissibly mix it with risk assessments. For example, Richardson et al. write:
A large body of recent research … provides strong evidence supporting the conclusion … that the climate change and biosphere integrity boundaries are in a zone of rapidly increasing and systemically linked risks. This strengthens the rationale for using the precautionary principle to set the planetary boundaries at the lower end of the zone of increasing risk. For example, for the climate change planetary boundary, we retain the boundary of 350 parts per million (ppm) CO2 with the zone of increasing risk ranging from 350 to 450 ppm before reaching high risk.
The distinction between two risk zones only makes sense if we know the risks. In this case, however, the precautionary principle is not required. Rather, it would then be a matter of deciding, whether and if so, why the risks become unacceptable over 350 ppm. In this case, the 350 ppm is a risk threshold. The precautionary principle, on the other hand, is needed if these risks, especially the probabilities, cannot be determined based on the data available, but at the same time we must assume significant potential harm. Since Richardson et al. understand precaution in colloquial terms, they believe that the aim here is to build in a safety margin. This is correct insofar as in precautionary situations measures should be taken to prevent the occurrence of harm as far as possible and at the same time allow the possibility of collecting the data required to determine the risk. This presupposes the assumption that the risk is not unacceptable from the outset. At this point, it becomes evident how decisive the harm potential is. If it is catastrophic, it can be argued on the basis of the harm principle that everything must be done to prevent its occurrence and that, unlike in precautionary and risk situations, the probability is not relevant unless it is zero (because that would mean that the damage cannot possibly occur) or one (because that would mean that the occurrence of the damage cannot possibly be prevented by human means).
27.3 Problems of a Planetary Boundary for New Entities from an Ethical Perspective
The inadequate distinction between the precautionary principle, risk assessment, and harm principle also has negative impacts on the planetary boundary of NE. The criterion for this boundary is determined with reference to the precautionary principle, because ‘quantifying a single boundary for the multitude and diversity of novel entities is an intractable problem’ (Persson et al. Reference Persson, Carney Almroth and Collins2022a: 6788). However, a closer look shows that the relevant principle, if any, is the harm principle and not the precautionary principle. This is because the boundary is introduced based on the idea that NE could pose a threat to the stability and resilience of the Earth system and could therefore cause harm of immense proportions. Nowhere are probabilities of even a qualitative nature mentioned. With regard to chemical pollution, for example, Persson et al. state:
Chemical pollution has the potential to cause severe ecosystem and human health problems at different scales, but also to alter vital Earth system processes on which human life depends.
Even if this thesis is based on a plausible scientific foundation, it is not comprehensible how one can simultaneously claim that ‘the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded’ (Persson et al. Reference Persson, Carney Almroth and Collins2022b: 1510). The justification given for this is not convincing. It is claimed that,
the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring.
Assuming it is empirically correct, the argument nevertheless is not plausible. In view of their claim that ‘quantifying a single boundary for the multitude and diversity of novel entities is an intractable problem’, and in view of the potential extent of harm, their conclusion should be to demand a complete ban on the registration of new NE. Even more so as:
Humanity has repeatedly been surprised by unintended consequences of this release, e.g., with respect to the release of insecticides such as DDT and the effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) on the ozone layer.
With regard to the planetary boundary of NE the question is rather: Even if certain chemicals do have this potential, are there plausible scientific hypotheses regarding the other substances assigned to the NE category that they have a harm potential large enough to directly affect the stability and resilience of the Earth system? This question would have to be answered separately for each substance. The harm could also result from a cumulative effect of several of these substances. Only for those substances for which there are plausible scientific hypotheses that they have a potential for severe harm could it possibly be justified to ban their marketing in accordance with the harm principle. For nuclear waste and for GMOs it seems even more questionable to assume such a direct effect on the Earth system. As long as this direct link between NE and the stability and resilience of the Earth system has not been satisfactorily shown, it is not possible to see how a separate planetary boundary with regard to NE can be justified.
What is not in dispute is that some of the NE can and do have a significant impact on core planetary boundaries such as biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss) or climate change and in this sense pose a global threat. However, this does not require or justify a specific planetary boundary ‘Novel Entities’. This is true all the more for an appropriate approach to GMOs. And it is also true in the case of Gene Drives, where a planetary boundary may seem plausible at first sight. Gene drives are designed to achieve a specific benefit by reducing or eliminating entire populations, for example, to protect the affected population from malaria by controlling malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. In this respect, they can have a considerable influence on entire ecosystems. It is conceivable that this could set in motion dynamics that have a negative impact beyond the boundaries of the ecosystem and are difficult or even impossible to control. However, a direct impact on the stability and resilience of the Earth system seems unlikely. More likely are negative effects on other planetary boundaries such as biodiversity in particular. GMOs must be evaluated from the point of view of the risks associated with them. And globally, they must additionally be assessed from the point of view of climate- and biodiversity-friendly agriculture that produces enough to feed an increasing world population in a way that ensures everyone’s right to adequate food in the long run. What the concept of NE can contribute in this context remains in the dark. Advocates of the PB approach would have to clarify this specifically with regard to GMOs. Without such clarification the NE concept does not seem relevant in normative terms. Rather, it runs the risk of leading to a substitute debate that misses the indisputably existing enormous problems caused by some NE.
In our view, the ethical conclusion would be to dispense with a planetary boundary for NE and instead to consistently apply the precautionary principle to each individual substance and demand appropriate risk assessments when dealing with the very different substances that are summarized under the term NE.
Jeremy J. Schmidt: I’m thankful to have you here, Erle, and to discuss your work and its relationship to planetary boundaries. We were hoping to start with one of the ideas that you’re well known for, which is the idea of anthromes which help to capture the extent to which humans are reshaping patterns of the global biosphere. It’s a novel idea. I remember when it came out. I had just recently left McGill, where Navin Ramankutty was at the time, your co-author, and so I was really interested in the idea. I would like to hear more about why you and Navin thought the idea was needed, how you came up with it, and how you developed it.
Erle Ellis: It literally filled a need that I had to communicate with the ecological science community (see Ellis & Ramankutty Reference Ellis and Ramankutty2008; Ellis et al. Reference Ellis, Klein Goldewijk and Siebert2010). As an ecologist, I was an oddball. In 1990, I started working in China, studying the long-term ecological changes that had occurred in village landscapes during the transition from traditional agriculture to more intensive industrial agriculture. My interest was in the idea that we could understand sustainable agriculture by studying a place where you had this very long, deep history of agriculture. I focused on the nitrogen cycle in villages. I was doing village ecology. It didn’t really fit the same model as was used to incorporate people into ecological science at the time.
I would go to an Ecology of Society of America conference, and there was urban ecology and there was agroecology, and urban ecology was at the scale of urban areas, and agroecology was at the scale of fields. There was also landscape ecology, but it was mostly focused on ‘natural patterns’ or disturbance of the natural patterns – all those models. When I would give a talk, it just didn’t fit anywhere, and it was always this kind of marginal thing. It was so obvious to me from my work in China and in other places, that most of the planet is in fact transformed into different types of ecology shaped by people. Why wasn’t that more broadly recognized in ecology? It was something that bothered me. On my first sabbatical, I had a chance to think about how I could express this. How could I show the ecological community just how important the transformed ecologies were? Not just as a kind of degradation or disturbance of ecology, but as what the ecology is like everywhere.
I basically tried to bring in all the evidence I could get at global scale about human populations and different kinds of land use to just see what patterns I could illustrate from the data. Navin was one of the first people to produce a global crops and pastures data set. We started working together on this. I mostly did the analysis and came up with the results, but then when we were discussing how you present this, I was thinking about it in terms of anthropogenic landscapes – a kind of landscape ecology. Navin had also been working a lot on biomes. In a discussion, it kind of emerged, ‘Maybe these are really biomes.’ They’re anthropogenic biomes. They’re the global ecological patterns shaped by people. Anthropogenic biomes and then anthromes – as a contraction – emerged from that discussion. And from the beginning, it was remarkable how good the uptake was.
It was very interesting. I’ve never had an uptake like that before, or even after, in that it was very grassroots. It wasn’t just a lot of news outlets that were interested in it. It was every blogger. There were just hundreds and hundreds of bloggers who made blogs about it. People liked it. It fitted a lot of people’s thinking.
Jeremy: I think it’s fascinating, and it’s helpful to pick up on that history of the concept, especially given your work in Anthropocene Working Group that you were part of for a time but have now resigned from. Obviously, there are disagreements, significant ones around how to interpret human relationships to the planet and the impacts that people are having on how the planet functions and how to mark those functional changes. I wonder if you could speak about your approach to the Anthropocene more broadly: are humans doing something new to the planet or is this something that’s quantitatively different but qualitatively not something totally novel?
Erle: I think you’re asking that partly because I’ve written thoroughly on the deep roots of the Anthropocene. That’s my view. And I think it’s in many ways very healthy that there are many different viewpoints about this. I don’t think there’s ever going to be one viewpoint about human relations with the planet, or about human relations with nature. That’s just the way people are. There are a lot of diverse ways of thinking about things, and that’s not a problem. That’s kind of a solution in a way.
In terms of this relationship, when did people cross the line between just interacting with the ecology of the planet in the way that every other species does? No species can exist without altering the planet. It’s not possible.
What is different about our relationship with the planet is that it can just about continually scale up. That kind of scaling relationship, where people go from being a lot like a lot of other mega omnivores (which is our biological niche) to having a social niche. Which is also not so unusual. There are a lot of social insects that have a social niche – but becoming an open-ended social niche. So, how big can a human society be? There’s no answer to that. If you look at the other social species, they all have a limit to how big their societies get, and that limit is genetically determined. The behaviors of sociality in most species are genetically determined, like how big a wasp’s nest is going to be. Know what species it is, and you can know approximately how big that nest is going to be. That’s true of all social species except people. People have evolved the capacity through cultural evolution to have relationships with each other that are cultural – learned socially – and that means they can evolve very quickly.
Culture evolves much quicker than genetics, and it’s much more open-ended. Again, how big can a human society be? We don’t know. We’re discovering this all the time, but the scaling of human societies began a long time ago. You could argue it began around the time of agriculture. But that’s very debatable because there are hunter-gatherer societies that also scaled up pretty large – that resemble much the early agricultural large-scale societies. It’s not useful to put a simple date on it, but it’s that process of being able to scale that really matters. Of course, we do a lot of things to enable that scaling that are not unique, just unique in their scale. The most dramatic one is the use of energy from the nonbiological world. That’s exceptional.
That’s what’s happening right now in the transition to going beyond using the biosphere for energy, which all other species do except for plants. Remember, plants changed the entire planet – or rather ‘photosynthesis’, at first by cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic organisms that changed the whole planet forever. By harvesting energy from the sun – a kind of abiotic energy – that process scaled up the entire biosphere. The biosphere could be much bigger when it is powered by solar energy, and that’s potentially true of human societies. There are also nuclear and other forms of abiotic energy. The scale of what’s possible energetically keeps increasing. From burning wood to cook food to coal to solar, I see this as part of a long process of becoming a planetary force. But arguably the most transformative process that really changes the relations between people and the planet is this kind of scalable sociality, this ability to scale up operations in a sense, including our metabolism, and all these other capabilities.
Jeremy: I think that’s fascinating: the focus on the scalability of the social. In the context of this book, the scalability of the social and how people cooperate, and the means to which they cooperate, become really important. In the past you have introduced these ideas using the idea of the electrical night – Earth’s night sky lit by human activity. The analogy was wonderful because this lit-up planet is an unintended consequence, as you put it, of one way that we’ve organized ourselves.
One of the things that you have also done is to contrast competing narratives of crisis versus a couple of different phrases of cooperation, innovation and so on. I wonder if we could have a bit of a conversation around your ideas about why crisis has limits on it or has certain kinds of connotations to it versus thinking about planetary boundaries themselves in other ways as well. The planetary boundaries concept kind of builds in a bit of crisis, but it puts risk at the heart of the framework.
Erle: It’s intended to form a crisis narrative. There are different ways to look at a crisis narrative. Crisis narratives obviously have utility. It’s not like you should never use a crisis narrative. The question is, does it fit the solution space? Is the declaration of a crisis and the use of a crisis narrative going to further the solution to the challenges that are raised in the crisis? If you have a crisis like a dam that is leaking, the idea of declaring a crisis is that everyone needs to respond. I think that’s fundamental to every crisis idea. People need to respond urgently to a crisis. That’s the whole point of it. To the extent that it encourages people to do this, to cooperate with each other to solve the problem, then that crisis narrative is serving a useful purpose.
If a crisis is declared over and over again, and even worse, if the crisis is not equally everybody’s crisis, it can become a very divisive thing: people who agree that there’s a crisis and people who have other things to deal with. Simply put, climate change isn’t the very biggest problem for people who don’t have clean water and people who have incomes below the global poverty line. They have a lot of problems to deal with. Their number one concern isn’t that the richest people in the world are emitting so much carbon into the atmosphere that the climate is changing. They’re not causing that problem. They can’t solve that problem because they’re not creating it and the idea of declaring that as a crisis of the planet – a crisis of humanity – is not actually a correct narrative. This is just a crisis for the people in power.
I wish it was more of a crisis for the people who are most responsible for causing this problem. In fact, the main aspect of the narrative is this idea that it’s a planetary crisis that humanity needs to deal with, when in fact it’s really just the failures of the elites of the world to solve their own problems. Instead, they’re making it out as if it’s this kind of broader planetary problem. The problem is they’re not taking responsibility.
It’s not a surprise that there’s a lot of division in discussions about things like climate change. The 1.5° narrative is intentionally developed as a planetary crisis narrative. At the time it was agreed upon by the different countries of the world, it was already known by just about every expert in climate change that it would be nearly impossible, if not actually impossible, to achieve a 1.5° planet. We were going to go past that. That was already known. So, you’ve got this set out as the boundary between safety and disaster and then you’re going to cross it. That’s a way of creating this kind of narrative of crisis.
Is it now leading to global cooperation to deal with it? Actually, what you’re seeing more and more of at these conferences is a clear dividing line between the developing world that needs more energy to just maintain very low levels of development versus the wealthiest countries in the world that are continuing to burn fossil fuels at pretty much the same rates, even as at the same time, they’re declaring a mandatory end to this. It just creates division not cooperation. The narrative of cooperation is not really there anymore. Of course, when we’re past 1.5° for the next 25 years, which will almost certainly be the case, it’s not going to seem like a climate crisis anymore. It’s going to just seem like a giant failure of society because that’s what it will represent.
Jeremy: One of the other normative ideas that has come out of discussions around the Anthropocene and around planetary boundaries has contrasted with the crisis narratives, the idea that we should be pursuing the recognition that we’re kind of entangled with this situation. There’s no escape route from the fact that we’re with the planet and we live with the planet. The goal is not to either leave in the physical sense unless you’re a billionaire or to restore it to some pre-human state. There are opportunities to make things better and to have a future that is a good Anthropocene, as many, including you and Elena Bennett, have called it (see Bennett et al. Reference Bennett, Solan and Biggs2016).
Erle: That’s been true for a long time. The only question is, what are we going to make of this? That can involve things like ambitions to have a large conservation area, a large amount of the planet that is managed just to restore or allow ecologies to exist that are not human related, that are dedicated to the other species there. That’s a model for a better Anthropocene for the rest of life. There’s not going to be a planet that’s not shaped by people. The question is just how we shape it and what kind of agency are we going to have in doing this. Most of the changes that we’ve made at planetary scale have occurred as unintended consequences. They have not been intentional. We’ve changed a lot of things intentionally, but the unintended consequences are most of the things that we discuss when we talk about the Anthropocene. Climate change is nobody’s project.
Jeremy: I wonder if we could push on this further. One thing that crisis narratives try to do is to connect these unintended consequences back to those who are responsible in different ways.
Erle: Let’s be clear here. You’re correct that crisis narratives can target the causes. Some of them can, but environmental limits-based narratives do not do this. They say that there’s something wrong, in a sense, with the relationship between people and the planet in this very basic way, without assigning any responsibility beyond humans in general. That’s the wrong model. Climate change is not caused by humans. Humans are involved in causing climate change, but not all people are creating it equally. The real problem here is not the biology of humans. Humans don’t emit carbon dioxide biologically at levels that are a problem. The problem is the burning of fossil fuels.
The problem is not that there are not enough trees taking up the carbon. That’s not the problem either. The problem is that fossil fuel combustion needs to end and the countries that are most responsible for emitting most of the carbon from fossil fuels need to invest in energy that does not produce this carbon pollution. That’s not part of the planetary boundaries narrative at all. It doesn’t assign responsibility. It only sets this kind of planetary level narrative. Let’s be clear, most people don’t even think about the planet as relevant to them at all. The planet is only seen as relevant by certain people, mostly people like me and you, who study global change, maybe some policymakers, but for the most part, the planet is not really what is actionable. You need narratives that are actionable.
You could talk about ozone depletion as a planetary problem. But that’s an example of where the problem – and its resolution – was not actually ever about the ozone layer. The problem was not even the ozone-destroying chlorine from CFCs in the atmosphere. The problem was the production of CFCs. The way that problem was solved is that the producing nations – not all the nations – the producing nations stepped up, took responsibility, and phased them out. Now, there are a lot of reasons why that happened and it’s not happening with fossil fuels. It’s true that fossil fuels themselves are inherently much more difficult as a challenge – because their use is much more widespread. CFCs were a patented product, and to some degree, it was much easier to assign responsibility. The bottom line is about assigning responsibility and going after those involved – and those involved actually taking responsibility and dealing with it. That’s what got the problem solved, not the planetary narrative.
Jeremy: I like the way that you’re framing how to assign or determine responsibility in terms of what is the relationship of producing or burning fossil fuels to the climate or where the production of CFCs is coming from. I wondered about your take on thinking about entanglements and a good Anthropocene. When it comes to this, there’s a certain group of people who have responsibilities or the capacity to address those root causes, and those people in addressing those causes, they’ll have lots of potential ways to do it. There are ways of addressing things that can also have effects on others. One way of addressing climate change, for instance, is not to stop producing fossil fuels, it’s to put a bunch of sulfates up in the atmosphere or something like that, to do some kind of geoengineering. For certain forms of solutions, there are also ethical questions that need to be asked. I just wondered if in your approach to addressing these kinds of root causes you see the considerations of responsibility working in those contexts around the solution spaces.
Erle: Again, that’s a good example of a planetary narrative: the problem is that the planet is too hot. The problem is not that some people are not dealing with their carbon pollution problem. It’s a different definition of the problem. The solution, when you start talking about ‘It’s a planet problem’ means the conditions are somehow not right on the planet – it’s just too hot. We therefore have to change the planet’s conditions. In this narrative, solar radiation management becomes a perfectly legitimate solution because it will solve that particular problem. It doesn’t solve the acidification of the oceans. It doesn’t solve a lot of the other really serious problems that are generated by fossil fuel combustion. This ‘planet is too hot’ narrative only demands a solution to the temperature problem, which is a classic example of dealing only with symptoms but not causes.
I would say that this is exactly the kind of thing that got us here. It’s an example of solving one problem by creating a bigger problem, which is something that human societies are really good at doing. We have solved so many problems by creating bigger problems and kind of pushing out the challenges to some other generation or this sort of thing. Think of it this way, people never had to manage the temperature of the planet before. That just never was something that you had to do. Just like you never had to plant seeds to get the plants that you wanted if you were in an early hunter-gatherer society. When some hunter-gatherer societies did do that, to propagate species that they favored, things began to change. To the extent that you become the ecology that supports you, it becomes more and more your responsibility. In the end, there’s no other way to support yourself than to transform the planet into agriculture, for example. You’re trying to solve this problem of food shortage by manipulating the plants, and ultimately the planet, to produce more and more.
That’s a kind of solution, and that kind of solution has been rolling out indefinitely. With solar radiation management, you’re basically going to do the same kind of thing. Instead of solving the problem of temperature increases by getting at the actual cause, which is the people burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels, you say: ‘Well, we’re just going to manage the temperature of the planet.’ There’s only one problem with that – because it could be successful in the sense, it can be done. There’s almost no question that sulfate aerosols could be manipulated to bring down the temperatures of the planet, and that it might even be okay climate-wise. It might not end up producing huge side effects. But also, it might. We just don’t know. That’s the big wildcard.
Even if it doesn’t produce terrible unwanted side effects like the end of monsoon systems in Asia or some of the other dramatic things that could happen, it does do this: humans will henceforth always be responsible for managing the temperature. If people stop doing it, it’s going to cause this really dramatic leap in temperature if you stop putting up the sulfate aerosols. It commits you to a path where you now have to manage the planet’s climate or face the consequences in the future. It just puts you on this kind of treadmill of endlessly having to solve the planet problem instead of solving the social problem of transitioning to clean energy and ends up getting us into a whole other ball game. That’s a dangerous thing. Plus, you’re not solving these other problems that are going to keep getting worse, like ocean acidification.
Jeremy: I think the clarity that you’re bringing to this distinction between the framing of a planetary problem versus the understanding of a social problem is key and something that I think is not often articulated.
Erle: I’ve heard a similar kind of thing with the Anthropocene. The problem becomes the Anthropocene itself. I’ve heard people say, ‘The Anthropocene is doing this. The Anthropocene is doing that.’ That is just so incorrect. There’s no Anthropocene doing anything. The Anthropocene is a description of a syndrome. It’s a description of a relationship between societies and the planet. When societies change, the planet is going to change as a result. It describes this entanglement of societies with the planet. We can’t operate without changing the planet. The only question is: how are we going to change the planet and in which way? It’s really about our societies. It’s not about the condition. We’ve been in this entangled condition for a very long time (see Ellis Reference Ellis2024). That is the challenge of the Anthropocene. It is how you manage that. It’s very difficult. Entanglement does not imply simple solutions, optimization, and these kinds of strategic options that you just do, and then the problem is solved. It is true that there’s pretty much no solution that is not going to generate some new problems. Just like fossil fuels actually solved a lot of problems. Fossil fuels have really been great for human societies in a lot of ways. They enabled a lot of possibilities that people wanted. Phasing them out is going to cause problems. It’s not going to be painless to do that. That’s one of the reasons why it’s not happening as fast as it needs to deal with climate change. It’s just like that and that’s not going to change as things go on. There are always going to be hard decisions to make between having one consequence and having another.
Then, of course, the unintended things, some of which are not yet known, just pop up. There’s no way to have such a big metabolic force on the planet without changing it. Every change you make to that force is going to change the planet, sometimes in foreseen and intended ways, and for the better as planned. But predictable changes like this are very difficult and rare – and almost always come with unintended things. We kind of have to accept that. That’s not a crisis. That is a condition. It’s a situation. And realizing you’re in that situation and not just treating it as some kind of unforeseen and unforeseeable crisis is pretty important. It makes for much better decisions when you understand the entangled causes and unpredictable effects of this condition – the challenges here – rather than simplifying the problem to just ‘the planet is too hot’ or something like that.
Simon P. Meisch: Could I come back to the question of novelty and anthromes? Would it be fair to say that anthromes have also emerged because humans have always introduced novel substances, such as fertilizers, into ecosystems? When we look at the novel substances that the planetary boundaries framework talks about, is that just a continuation of humans introducing novel entities into ecosystems? Or would you say there’s a difference between novel entities like nuclear waste or antibiotics and plastics?
Erle: First of all, I don’t really think of anthromes as being formed by humans generating and dumping these novel substances. That’s not really included in the definition. It’s obviously happening in those systems to some degree, but it’s not definitional. Think of it this way. The classic biomes – the original concept – describes the global patterns of life. Believe it or not, people learn about this in kindergarten. Even if they don’t call it biomes, you learn about tropical rainforests and deserts at that stage. These are the different patterns of life around the world, and these are shaped and defined mostly by adaptations to climate. It’s this kind of global ecological pattern shaped by climate.
That’s one way we can understand there are different patterns of life around the world. Yet, clearly if you look out of a satellite or aircraft window or whatever, you can see that for most of the planet, the patterns of life are also shaped by human societies in different ways. Agriculture is one of the very biggest ones in terms of extent but there are all sorts of others, including urban infrastructure and mining and all these other things that transform the ecology. If you want to understand the biology of the planet and why it’s not the same everywhere, climate patterns are not enough. You have to understand the patterns of the human world. That’s where it really comes from. Thinking of people not just as a kind of temporary disturbance, but as the shapers of the ecology of this planet, just like climate shapes the ecology of the planet, it’s just a different form. That’s where the idea comes from.
It’s not really from novel substances. The truth is that the novel term was introduced largely out of work on novel ecosystems, which was something that came from Richard Hobbs and his group out of restoration ecology. It was dealing with these kinds of recalcitrant ecosystems that people had altered in this way or that way and could not feasibly be changed back. Species invasions are often a big part of why ecosystems are getting defined as novel ecosystems, the idea that you couldn’t restore them to what came before. There was no real way to do it. That was the novel ecosystem concept.
One thing that happened out of that discussion was that we wrote an article and a book (see Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Higgs and Hall2013). We had a workshop in Pender Island. This was 2010 or something like that. It was a long time ago. That resulted in a book. In one of the chapters, a few of us, Emma Marris was one of the authors, and Joe Mascaro (see Marris et al. Reference Marris, Mascaro, Ellis, Hobbs, Higgs and Hall2013). We just didn’t really think the concept of novel ecosystems needed to be made a permanent concept. It was a bridging concept. It was a way of helping restoration ecologists who had always used a kind of ‘natural baseline’ – the ‘natural ecosystem’ that we can restore in a place. It is essential to have a broader view of the different kinds of ecologies of the current time, with so many you really can’t call a ‘natural ecosystem.’ They’re shaped and sustained by societies. That’s the number one reason.
I don’t use the term ‘novel’ very much anymore. I’ve changed a lot of my narrative to now use the term ‘cultured’ to directly incorporate the idea that it’s the culture of the societies interacting with ecology that shapes different ecologies, not just this kind of ‘novelty,’ whatever that is. There’s nothing new about societies doing that. There are definitely new forms. Nuclear waste is a new thing, no question about it. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): new thing to the planet, never existed before. So, novelty is definitely something that’s been introduced. A lot of the most novel things are new, but even some old things, like ceramics, are somewhat old but still unique – and therefore novel. That’s just one example.
Simon: So, does it make much sense for you to frame the novel entities boundary in the way that the planetary boundaries framework does: under the heading of novel entities, it subsumes the products of social practices and social problems that are actually unrelated?
Erle: A planetary boundary neither defines the problems correctly, nor does it say anything about the solutions at all. Actually, it seems like that issue has become an even more important part of the planetary boundaries narratives. If you read the more recent papers, they are even more careful not to say what needs to be done, but they focus more on measurements relating to these arbitrarily defined numbers – these numbers decided by a small group of scientists. You can’t decide boundaries like this without having some form of social decision-making. This is just how these things are done. For example, when scientists and society deal with the problem of lead pollution, and need to define allowable limits, it’s not just a group of scientists that decide how much lead is allowable in water or food or whatever. This is done as part of society.
Society must decide what it can do and what’s optimal, and this gets decided by a social group. Science is informing that, and it’s extremely important to inform that – not an optional part. But the idea that politicians, NGOs, industries, and other representatives of society are optional parts of deciding what a boundary is, is also not correct.
The 1.5° planetary climate boundary, the only good thing about it, is that it was decided that way. It was a collective decision. Those are very difficult to make. Very hard and involve a lot of negotiation. But that process is the only process we have for building larger scales of agency to deal with these challenges. So, the good thing about 1.5° is that it was produced in that way. It’s not just a small group of scientists making this declaration in a scientific paper. It’s a collective process of important actors at the global scale. I don’t have a problem with deciding that. But I think that choosing to put our focus on the temperature of the planet and a number like 1.5° was probably a mistake. It should have been focused on the amount of carbon emitted per person, or the percentage of energy in a nation that is clean energy. If it had focused on something like that, this would have more directly assigned responsibility to those who are actually emitting the carbon and causing the problem, rather than making it this planetary discussion.
Yes, it probably would have been harder to negotiate a target like that. That might have been one of the reasons why they chose to talk about 1.5°. But it doesn’t really matter. In the end, you can see the product. Yes, they negotiated something, but it’s not leading to the solutions that we need.
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