Humans have been changing Earth’s landscapes at globally significant levels for at least 3000 years, and doing so by increasingly productive and efficient means, according to our new research challenging the claim that use of land by industrial civilization is destroying planetary ecology at an accelerating pace.

In the late sixties, India was the poster child of Third World poverty. In 1965, the monsoon rains failed to arrive, food production crashed, and much of the country was on the brink of starving. Asked for help, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have told an aide, "I'm not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems." Johnson came around, but by the end of the decade India was viewed in the West as, at best, a basket case and, at worst, a "population bomb" that threatened the entire planet.

I think the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on an unprecedentedly global scale.

The idea that we are collectively on the brink of overstepping “planetary boundaries” that will render civilization unsustainable has been prominently propounded by a group of scholars around Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. In common with other scientific catastrophists, Rockström et al make much of the claim by Nobel prizewinning chemist, Paul Crutzen (2002) that the earth has entered a new geological period, the Anthropocene “in which human actions have become the main driver of global change” that “could see human activities push the Earth system outside the stable environment state of the Holocene with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world” (Rockström et al 2009:472). A few sentences further on they assert that:

Environmentalism is no longer about saving nature alone: increasingly, it's about saving people given their dependencies on nature (witness the sustainability movement) and since environmental problems are often symptoms of deeper social problems (witness dumping in Dixie). Yet concepts of nature still suffuse the movement—perhaps no longer just wilderness, national parks, and Gaia, but also a spirit of wildness, community gardens, and an optimal 350-ppm-CO2 atmosphere. It is not surprising that manifold notions of nature are found throughout contemporary environmentalism, since that is what environment means to most people.

Writing at the Huffington Post UK, Melissa Leach, director of the STEPS Centre at Sussex University, asks a provocative question:

When the cover of the Economist famously announced 'Welcome to the anthropocene' a couple of years ago, was it welcoming us to a new geological epoch, or a dangerous new world of undisputed scientific authority and anti-democratic politics?

The occasion for raising this question was Leach's participation last month in a United Nations meeting of experts on the development of new sustainable development goals. Leach describes a meeting in which scientific authority was invoked as the basis for closing down debates over policy and asserting the preeminent roles of experts in charting a course for future global development.