GILLIAN BURKE

"We lie dangerously close to several planetary boundaries"

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"I LOVE THE NATURAL WORLD tt (obviously) but my work, time and energy have been increasingly drawn to figuring us humans out. Everything we are and everything we do is, after all, an intricate part of the natural world. In just my lifetime, we've blown past six Earth Summits and 26 Conference of the Parties (COPs), and more than a century has passed since the first seminal paper was published on global warming.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere is hotting up and critical carbon sinks like the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic tundra are now carbon sources instead of carbon stores. It's no longer a question of when the tipping points will tip, some already have. We lie dangerously close to, or have even pushed past, several planetary boundaries.