Education

The twenty-first-century planetary challenge orbits around three integrated Earth system trends—species extinction and threats to biodiversity, rapidly changing biospheric circulations, and altered biogeochemical cycles. These patterns are the template for the proliferation of natural resource extraction, accelerating consumer demand, and the challenges of global wealth distribution. Meanwhile, the extraordinary synergistic advances of global communications networks, computerization, miniaturization, and instrumentation provide humanity with the daunting prospect of simultaneously exacerbating these challenges while offering the means to solve them.