Abstract
It often seems that we are beset by threats and crises: the threat of a possible collapse of the Eurozone or of another fiscal crisis, of a rogue nation acquiring and using nuclear weapons, of diseases like Ebola or an influenza pandemic, of extremist groups and terrorism, and on and on. Yet as serious and worrying as each of these threats is, they all pale into insignificance in comparison to one single threat to humanity and our world, the threat of ecological disaster. With the world’s human population increasing from 1 billion in 1850 to more than 7 billion less than two centuries later (Roser 2015), and with a predicted population of 11 billion by 2100 (Gerland et al. 2014), environmentalists have dubbed our age the “anthropocene” because of the sheer magnitude of the impact on the earth’s ecosystems human activity has had in recent centuries.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by anthropogenic increases in [greenhouse gas] concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together” (IPCC 2014, 48).
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Behrens, K. (2017). The Imperative of Develo** African Eco-philosophy. In: Ukpokolo, I. (eds) Themes, Issues and Problems in African Philosophy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40796-8_13
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